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[Askot Bokbondeler]

i'm not so sure it depends on how hard it is to make a proper command line versus a proper GUI

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Zwei: I care for the game, for Toady One, and for the community, and being a certified neurotic, I may be a bit over-protective at times. I will try to lighten up.

In that spirit:

It's also the extreme opposite of user-friendliness. On the list of priorities, the command line should be way below proper GUI. (Yeah, I'm using the term  :P)

:) :) :) :)
Have you not read the discussion? Command line opens options for automated testing. Automated testing speeds up testing. Testing is required for bug fixing. Bug fixing is fundamental for making the nifty features playable (even the most beautiful icons will do you no good if your military will never equip anything but their training weapons due to a bug in their behavior). Thus, the command line is a TOP PRIORITY and should be implemented right away :) :) :)

:) :) :)

Deathworks

[Jiri Petru]

I could use the same logic to prove the necessity of a "proper" interface. Like: "An user-friendly interface makes the game accessible for more player. More players = more testers = faster bug fixing. Bug fixing is fundamental for making the nifty features playable. Thus, a good, user-friendly interface is a TOP PRIORITY and should be implemented right away "

See, Deathworks? 

EDIT:

Joking aside. Command line would make the controls faster for experienced user - and experienced users are not those who need help with the interface. So why bother and not instead put the effort into making the game accessible for novice users or people who can't play it now? It's not only a question of time investment. It's a cost/benefit issue.

[forsaken1111]

I could use the same logic to prove the necessity of a "proper" interface. Like: "An user-friendly interface makes the game accessible for more player. More players = more testers = faster bug fixing. Bug fixing is fundamental for making the nifty features playable. Thus, a good, user-friendly interface is a TOP PRIORITY and should be implemented right away "

See, Deathworks? 

Except a more user-friendly user interface attracts players, not testers.

And that doesn't speed up testing or bug fixing.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

As I said, I don't want to get seriously involved in the command line debate as I frankly don't have the experience in that field to make good comments.

And as for the cost/benefit issue, I think having health care and military system work reliably and consistently will do much more to attract players than military failing horribly in pretty colors under nifty menues that keep you up to date about the nonsense the dwarves are doing instead of adhering to their orders (^_^;; But that is just my personal opinion and I don't want to quarrel.

Deathworks

EDIT: Corrected medical system => military system

[Kogan Loloklam]

Hi!

As I said, I don't want to get seriously involved in the command line debate as I frankly don't have the experience in that field to make good comments.

And as for the cost/benefit issue, I think having health care and medical system work reliably and consistently will do much more to attract players than military failing horribly in pretty colors under nifty menues that keep you up to date about the nonsense the dwarves are doing instead of adhering to their orders (^_^;; But that is just my personal opinion and I don't want to quarrel.

Deathworks

Woah, American Health Care debate flashback!

[Askot Bokbondeler]

good catch

[riffraffselbow]

Heh, I renamed a dwarf Impaler and killed him with spawned magma using dfhack, which originated from working on Impaler's visualizer. I love irony.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effigy

[kcwong]

i'm not so sure it depends on how hard it is to make a proper command line versus a proper GUI

If there's API to DF, then it's about the same level of difficulty. Making the command line user-friendly would require a lot more effort though.

[Black]

Making a command line interface over the current one would be too much work. The current interface options are rigid and inflexible, which is the opposite goal of a command line, which enhances flexibility by reducing commands to strings of smaller logical units. There are few small logical units in the current interface and many large, monolithic commands. The interface has to be reorganized to be more combinatorial, based on more general queries, and more regular for a command line to work. Also, you want the rudiments of a scripting language in order to fully leverage the expressive power of a shell interface.

However once such an interface is established, a GUI would be very easy to build on top of it. You would simply associate widgets with scripts. This decouples the interface from the actual command logic, which makes it easier to manage overall.

I have thought about this before. I've played around with a few prototypical models of a command line for issuing job orders, something to replace the current pathetic manager screen I didn't know there was so much positive sentiment about such a tool.

[troodon]

One thing that has been said on this forum before but not in this thread: the people who post here are a very biased sample of computer gamers.  Most gamers would find Dwarf Fortress literally unplayable.  Many of you might be fine with the current interface, but that's because you wouldn't be here unless you were one of the few people who find it at all usable.  Heck, I program using emacs in a terminal and I had a very hard time getting into this game.

It shouldn't even need to be said: Toady One doesn't owe me anything.  He's certainly free to take Dwarf Fortress in whatever direction he chooses.  However, that direction looks to me like a dead end, one where improving gameplay and fixing bugs is not as important is introducing new, buggy levels of simulation that would be completely invisible and irrelevant if they were working correctly.  That's too bad, because I think the sort of gameplay pioneered in Dwarf Fortress has a lot of potential.  So much potential, in fact, that even I've tinkered with my own implementation of certain Dwarf Fortress features; after all, if Toady One isn't planning to make this game the game I want it to be (again, a choice he has every right to make) then that becomes up to me and like-minded people.

I don't like the attitude that Impaler has shown, but I think his ideas about game development are the right ones.  Chances are he won't go through with creating a fully functional game, since that's very hard, but I've offered him what code I have (an implementation of fluid dynamics).  Ban me if you will...

[MrWiggles]

I think its unfair to say that taody isn't for improving gameplay. The new military system, sans it unavoidable bugs and health care are huge improvements over the older system that were in place, along with the verbose combat log showing what the fuck is going on.

There were a lot of under the hood improvements. They are in place for further new game play and improvement of other gameplay mechanics.

I think its kinda of unfair to judge the direction that the game is going through the first major release in a bit. If you ever read the backlog of the dev, it shows a mix of new gameplay, gameplay improvement and bug fixes. It doesn't follow any kind of a predictable sense. It seems like toady meanders.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

Ban me if you will...

that was terribly unfair and distasteful.

[Josephus]

Ban me if you will...

that was terribly unfair and distasteful.

But it allows him to set himself and others like him as martyrs! It's the perfect ploy!

[troodon]

I think its unfair to say that taody isn't for improving gameplay. The new military system, sans it unavoidable bugs and health care are huge improvements over the older system that were in place, along with the verbose combat log showing what the fuck is going on.

There were a lot of under the hood improvements. They are in place for further new game play and improvement of other gameplay mechanics.

I think its kinda of unfair to judge the direction that the game is going through the first major release in a bit. If you ever read the backlog of the dev, it shows a mix of new gameplay, gameplay improvement and bug fixes. It doesn't follow any kind of a predictable sense. It seems like toady meanders.

I want to say it again: I think that Dwarf Fortress is an amazing game.  Toady has great ideas, it's just that his priorities for what to code aren't the same as my (and, I expect, many other people's) priorities for what to play.

But it allows him to set himself and others like him as martyrs! It's the perfect ploy!

Not so.  No one has the obligation to listen to me talk, so while I think that banning is generally a rather heavy-handed approach that reduces the quality of a forum, it would be right and reasonable for Toady to ban me if he doesn't enjoy my presence here, just as I could unilaterally choose to leave if I didn't like it here.  Whether or not Toady wants to have criticism of the sort that I posted (as well as my confession to being willing to collaborate with someone he is not on good terms with) on this forum is unclear, so I wanted to explicitly say that I know I might get banned for it and it will not be as if Toady is banning random innocents.