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[Lord Shonus]

What i'd like is a purely visual designation that lets you draw on the screen, so that it's easier to plan things out ahead of time.

[Zalminen]

Yes, this would be very helpful.

Currently I have to make sure all of my preplanned diggings are disconnected from the existing areas to make sure the more critical areas are dug out first.
Sure, doing it like that does work, but it's often very annoying...

Even better would be to have a separate 'plan mode' so that you could first plan all the rooms and stairs and stuff and they'd be placed in 'Planned' status.
Then you could later toggle the planned areas to 'Ready to dig' status and watch the miners get to work. 

[SixOfSpades]

This is too good NOT to necro, especially as this is the first time I've seen anything like it.

As it is, mining is easy--you just "paint" in two "colors", it's dead-easy to go modular by leaving "walls" to steer the miners away from halls & rooms you don't want emptied (yet), and you can even do it with the mouse. Having a Planning Mode would give us this convenience for nearly every single other aspect of fort design. Just arrange a toggle to go from the dwarf-reality Existing Mode to the Planning Mode. Planning Mode would be most useful for aboveground constructions, as you could "paint" with tiles of whatever you want: Click & drag over a swath of tiles to turn them all into Diorite Block Wall--the mouse will continue to be Diorite Block Wall until you set it to something else; Marble Block Floor, Microcline Up/Down Staircase, Magma, Open Space, what have you. There are no restrictions: You can "build" with material you don't have yet, and even designate walls & towers hanging in space if you want (though naturally that will cause problems, when it comes time to actually build the thing). Sure beats having to designate things no more than 10 tiles at a time, choosing materials at every step! Underground, the Planning Mode would work much the same as regular Mining does now: You can still be surprised by obstacles like aquifers, magma, and caverns. I'm unsure about allowing the user to place things like furniture and workshops in Planning Mode, above ground, at least ("Can I put a birch wood Bed on this tile that currently has no floor? And if I do put a floor there later, will that click overwrite the Bed?"), but I *do* know that I want the player to be able to designate stockpiles, especially stone stockpiles, in rooms that don't exist yet. It would be SO NICE for a Miner to dig out a stone and just have it fall, right there, without generating any Hauling job at all.

This would enable the player to design the entire fort, and more importantly check that design, right from Day 1. No more having to tear down part of your grand tower because you just found out that the site's ceiling is too low for the peaked roof you wanted to put up. And the best part is, to make your dream a reality, all you have to do is toggle back into Planning Mode and flag which tiles will be part of your next phase of actual construction.

[Putnam]

(N)otes?
Also, Six, that's... an entirely different topic that could probably go into its own thread.

[SixOfSpades]

. . . that's... an entirely different topic that could probably go into its own thread.

Um . . . what I said was clearly built right on top of "a purely visual designation that lets you draw on the screen" and "a separate 'plan mode' so that you could first plan all the rooms and stairs and stuff". So I'm wondering just how that got interpreted as being a completely different subject. I'll even use an emoticon. 

Per your suggestion, I just fiddled around with the (N)otes screen for the first time in years, and found it remarkably unwieldy, even by DF standards. But yes, that's basically what I'm asking for . . . except instead of using the ↑↓→←+-*/ keys to 'p' things like light blue exclamation points, I'd like to use the mouse (and arrow keys, why not) to click things like Gabbro Fortifications. If the Plan / Notes screen could hold actual tiles that could really be dug and/or built, and also carry an array of whether or not the dwarves had permission to try to dig / build those particular tiles, then planning a fort would be nearly foolproof, and designating it would be a breeze. Just draw your castle in the sky in Plan / Notes mode, switch back to Play mode & work as normal (or, as normal as dwarves get) and, as life progresses, just keep popping back into Plan / Notes mode and authorizing which parts of the design you want the dwarves to build next. You could still designate constructions in regular Play mode if you wanted to, this change would take nothing away from the game.

[Putnam]

The "separate plan mode" was itself an off-topic remark.

[Adrian]

Doesn't DFHack already have something like this?

[Dwarf4Explosives]

Personally, I'd like some sort of planning mode as well. That would make projects so much easier. You could just map out what you wanted to do in the planning mode (dig/channel) and once you've got the time/resources/dwarves/etc. you could perhaps use another kind of designation to tell the game to transfer the designation map in planning mode to actual designations.

[SixOfSpades]

The "separate plan mode" was itself an off-topic remark.

The "separate plan mode" remark was a perfectly viable refinement to the original poster's idea, and was therefore not off-topic. It was also made over 4 years ago. By someone other than me.

Doesn't DFHack already have something like this?

By golly, yes it does! Almost exactly! Falconne's UI Improvement Plugins thread
I've never used that version of DFHack, but I guess the existence of these plugins (Building Planner & Construction Helper) pretty much explains why I've never seen any requests for this capacity to be added to the game. I don't know just how Toady feels about players regarding 3rd-party programs like DFHack as being "necessary" peripherals to his game, but I doubt it's a "warm, fuzzy" feeling.
Still, if DFHack does it, there's little need for DF itself to add it . . . at least not until Toady gets around to the User Interface arc, which presumably will be close to last.

. . . you could perhaps use another kind of designation to tell the game to transfer the designation map in planning mode to actual designations.

Yeah, just like I said in my earlier 2 posts. That's the main thing I that didn't notice in (my admittedly brief perusal of) the descriptions of the DFHack plugins: A way to design new constructions, but still keep some of them "On Hold" until you're ready for the dwarves to start actually building them. It would suck not being able to make furniture for the dining room because your dwarves kept stealing all the materials for the really cool--but also completely useless--megaproject that you'd designed.

[Putnam]

Hey, look at the devlog, Toady's adding a marker designation next version.