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[numerobis]

I quite clearly remember that the first time I ever saw the squiggles I wondered why there was water indicated there.  However, I'm not sure it would have helped me to see "aquifer"; what that would have done is make me wonder why there was "aquifer" indicated there.  So my claim is that it's not the ideogram that's the problem.

The embark screen is very busy as it is; really the only way to make any sense of it as a newbie is to hit up the wiki.  There is a page for the embark screen, and you're right, it isn't perfect.  If you see a better way to explain it, please fix it.  Maybe the ideal is a screenshot with little red boxes calling out the various parts of the screen like there are in major commercial products' manuals, or maybe someone has a better idea?

[Kilo24]

It's a minor point, but still a valid one.

It's be better if it said ~Aquifer~ in blue, rather than ~~~~.  Not much better, but the OP's minor hiccup could be easily prevented through that with no drawbacks.

True. OTOH isn't a half-of-the-screen warning message that pops up upon embarking on an aquifer enough?

Apparently not in at least a small set of cases, since we've got a thread about it.  You'd need to isolate what part the aquifer is represented by, and, given DF's UI, I'd myself wouldn't be sure that the game would actually tell you where the aquifer was if I didn't know better.   The fix would be simple with no drawbacks and would make the game less confusing to at least a few people, so I think it's a good decision.

Kohaku - just realize that this type of problem is caused by an unintuitive interface, which is within Toady's power to easily correct and would make for a better game.  Having a few of these problems aren't a big deal (and it happens in quite a few games), but DF's major problem is in having so many of these unintuitive bits in a tight cluster.  At this point, the UI's confusion has achieved a critical mass that keeps lots of players away.

You can claim it's just laziness on the parts of the players, but the more time people spend struggling with the interface, the less fun the game holds for them (and the more things they need to look up, the more likely they to hit their threshold of annoyance and to just completely drop the game.)

As an example:
I don't know how much faith you place in Valve's design team, but their game environments are carefully picked through to make sure they don't cause confusion in their players to a rather obscene extent (you can see this if you look at the developer commentaries in Portal.)  I myself would call it a bit excessive, but I still do think it's a huge reason that their games are so dominant - by making it as easy as possible to know what the game's environment and UI allow you to do, you can put the focus on enjoying more important things.  It disrupts the flow of the game to have to look up stuff in a wiki or in a manual, and screws with another kind of flow that's really useful to games too.  Any game - *especially* Dwarf Fortress, because of its complexity - should minimize interruptions because it disrupts players' enjoyment.

EDIT: Fixing these minor problems will lead to less threads posted about them too, a prospect which will no doubt make you happier, Kohaku.

[NW_Kohaku]

I quite clearly remember that the first time I ever saw the squiggles I wondered why there was water indicated there.  However, I'm not sure it would have helped me to see "aquifer"; what that would have done is make me wonder why there was "aquifer" indicated there.  So my claim is that it's not the ideogram that's the problem.

The embark screen is very busy as it is; really the only way to make any sense of it as a newbie is to hit up the wiki.  There is a page for the embark screen, and you're right, it isn't perfect.  If you see a better way to explain it, please fix it.  Maybe the ideal is a screenshot with little red boxes calling out the various parts of the screen like there are in major commercial products' manuals, or maybe someone has a better idea?

Well, wouldn't want anyone thinking I wasn't being helpful, so I took a look at it.  I don't think a set of red boxes would help much, (the map parts are obvious, the "this button does this" part doesn't need pointing out, and the tabbable part on the right is what holds the most data, which is something that is better described than simply labeled with a box) but I am going through to expand on what the wiki says as much as possible on a single page.

Apparently not in at least a small set of cases, since we've got a thread about it.  You'd need to isolate what part the aquifer is represented by, and, given DF's UI, I'd myself wouldn't be sure that the game would actually tell you where the aquifer was if I didn't know better.   The fix would be simple with no drawbacks and would make the game less confusing to at least a few people, so I think it's a good decision.

Kohaku - just realize that this type of problem is caused by an unintuitive interface, which is within Toady's power to easily correct and would make for a better game.  Having a few of these problems aren't a big deal (and it happens in quite a few games), but DF's major problem is in having so many of these unintuitive bits in a tight cluster.  At this point, the UI's confusion has achieved a critical mass that keeps lots of players away.

You can claim it's just laziness on the parts of the players, but the more time people spend struggling with the interface, the less fun the game holds for them (and the more things they need to look up, the more likely they to hit their threshold of annoyance and to just completely drop the game.)

...

EDIT: Fixing these minor problems will lead to less threads posted about them too, a prospect which will no doubt make you happier, Kohaku.

The problem with that is what I've been posting before: They wouldn't stop people from finding new ways to try to misinterpret something.  It's like the old Tech Support horror stories: A guy calls up IT, and says "My computer keeps saying it can't find the printer!  I'm even holding it up right in front of the moniter, and it still says it can't find it!"

Which brings me back to the point: There may be many things about DF that are fairly unintuitive and even downright obtuse, and sure, I'd like plenty of UI changes to take place, but this isn't one of them.  Even the original poster has said he recognized it as water when he actually looked at it, the game is internally consistant about the blue double tildes being water, and the game comes out and warns you that it is an aquifer, so that there is no confusion, other than, as numerobis said, possibly the confusion of what an aquifer actually means.  And if you don't know what it means, there's nothing you could put on the interface, other than a full mouse-based hyperlinked in-game encyclopedia (good luck begging Toady for THAT!), that will be more useful to you than going on the wiki.

This really is as simple as it gets.  If you get the internally consistant symbol for water, and cannot figure out it means water, followed by a pop-up that says in clear language that there is an aquifer there without figuring out that it means an aquifer is there... well, maybe you SHOULD just play a different game.

As an example:
I don't know how much faith you place in Valve's design team, but their game environments are carefully picked through to make sure they don't cause confusion in their players to a rather obscene extent (you can see this if you look at the developer commentaries in Portal.)  I myself would call it a bit excessive, but I still do think it's a huge reason that their games are so dominant - by making it as easy as possible to know what the game's environment and UI allow you to do, you can put the focus on enjoying more important things.  It disrupts the flow of the game to have to look up stuff in a wiki or in a manual, and screws with another kind of flow that's really useful to games too.  Any game - *especially* Dwarf Fortress, because of its complexity - should minimize interruptions because it disrupts players' enjoyment.

I wouldn't really know, as I am not much of a FPS player. 

I also do not feel much "flow" at all in DF, as the game is generally played with 95% forethought, reading data from menus, and planning, 4% punching in commands, and 1% just watching the little ants run through the ant farm.

[RCIX]

I am talking about people who, if they do not understand something, think that the solution is to demand that the game change to the thing that they think they would have understood.

I made a suggestion in the Suggestion forum.  I never demanded anything.  Not sure why you are trying to be argumentative.

That's just what he does. I made a couple of mistakes and one or two controversial suggestions, and i got slammed for it. For instance, i suggested that floors behave more consistently when trying to build over them (you can build workshops and stuff but not walls or other similar constructions, at least without manually tearing down the floor). I admit i made the mistake of not looking at the wiki first when i made my original "why can't i build over floors" thread, but from what i can tell Kohaku has a hard time realizing people won't always remember to or want to look at a wiki.

@Kohaku: look, i never touched an ASCII version of the game, and it still took a long time for me to figure out that the water tiles to the right of some stone layer listings were aquifers. The pattern i see from you is that you accept that users don't think, but instead of supporting/improving suggestions like this one (which you claim to try to do), you've become the "no, you're being too stupid; use the wiki" door-greeter for suggestions. I'm going to go mock up a better embark screen.

[Kilo24]

Apparently not in at least a small set of cases, since we've got a thread about it.  You'd need to isolate what part the aquifer is represented by, and, given DF's UI, I'd myself wouldn't be sure that the game would actually tell you where the aquifer was if I didn't know better.   The fix would be simple with no drawbacks and would make the game less confusing to at least a few people, so I think it's a good decision.

Kohaku - just realize that this type of problem is caused by an unintuitive interface, which is within Toady's power to easily correct and would make for a better game.  Having a few of these problems aren't a big deal (and it happens in quite a few games), but DF's major problem is in having so many of these unintuitive bits in a tight cluster.  At this point, the UI's confusion has achieved a critical mass that keeps lots of players away.

You can claim it's just laziness on the parts of the players, but the more time people spend struggling with the interface, the less fun the game holds for them (and the more things they need to look up, the more likely they to hit their threshold of annoyance and to just completely drop the game.)

...

EDIT: Fixing these minor problems will lead to less threads posted about them too, a prospect which will no doubt make you happier, Kohaku.

The problem with that is what I've been posting before: They wouldn't stop people from finding new ways to try to misinterpret something.  It's like the old Tech Support horror stories: A guy calls up IT, and says "My computer keeps saying it can't find the printer!  I'm even holding it up right in front of the moniter, and it still says it can't find it!"...

This really is as simple as it gets.  If you get the internally consistant symbol for water, and cannot figure out it means water, followed by a pop-up that says in clear language that there is an aquifer there without figuring out that it means an aquifer is there... well, maybe you SHOULD just play a different game.

When underground lakes and rivers are included in the equation, it's not as clear-cut - both you and I learned the game without those, so we never had a chance to stub our toe on that slightly raised cobblestone.  Somebody did also make the point that they confused the layers list as just being a list of available rocks, which isn't a particularly counterintuitive assumption and does lead to confusion as to what the blue double tildes actually mean.

I agree that interface-related confusion will never be prevented completely (and IT professionals must content themselves fantasizing via the BOFH), but you can still reduce the frequency.  Will changing it to "~Aquifer~" do anything for players for even a small amount of experience?  No.  Will it save most new players anything more than a few seconds of logical inference?  No.  It simply makes a slightly ambiguous symbol less ambiguous.  Which, though the issue is an extraordinarily minor matter, improves the game as a quick and easy fix.

As an example:
I don't know how much faith you place in Valve's design team...

I wouldn't really know, as I am not much of a FPS player. 

I also do not feel much "flow" at all in DF, as the game is generally played with 95% forethought, reading data from menus, and planning, 4% punching in commands, and 1% just watching the little ants run through the ant farm.

I'm not much of a FPS player either, actually.  Portal's been the only recent one I've played to any significant amount.  But their games are renowned for excellent design, which the only explanation that I can think of for that is their insane attention to designing the environment to surreptitiously hold their players' hands.

But you don't feel flow while planning?  While laying everything out, figuring out exactly what to do and how you want to do it?  Forethought is the primary focus of the game as you yourself said, therefore you'd expect the onus of the flow experiences to be in that arena if the game is indeed enjoyable enough to keep playing.

(Apologies on harping on flow, but I just did a paper on it last week that used some video-game-based research for it, so it's on my mind.)

[G-Flex]

Regarding the layer listing, I don't know if it would clutter the screen too much to have a "LAYERS:" heading (or similar) above the list. It might help, if there's room.

[RCIX]

Anway, i mocked up a prototype of a better screen here:



That ought to solve most of the clarity issues with that section, and can't take more than 10-20 minutes to put into the game (after all, the text is already colored depending on the type of stone, and there's aquifer info already). But then Kohaku is of the opinion that you must suggest large suggestions, so that Toady has to sift through a bunch of suggestions and only implement some from a list.

[G-Flex]

Your prototype has the stone heading in a different (and smaller) font than the rest, so I don't think I have to say why that wouldn't work. You couldn't actually fit all of that text. You could fit "Stone/soil layers" just fine though, which is okay since "Underground" is a bit odd/redundant there.

[RCIX]

Well yea, it's kind of a crude mockup, so some things might have to be shortened a little.

[Lord Shonus]

Not sure making a note of "flux stone" really helps. While knowing what an aquifer is can be assumed, "flux" is a term most people never encounter, so by the time they know what it means, they won't need the message.

[G-Flex]

It's also a fairly arbitrary distinction. You can't leave it up to the embark screen to tell you what industrial uses all the stone layers have.

[RCIX]

It's also a fairly arbitrary distinction. You can't leave it up to the embark screen to tell you what industrial uses all the stone layers have.

No more arbitrary than the find dialog is

[G-Flex]

That's true, but that's not to say I agree with the design of that either. The only reason it's listed is because it's traditionally the most useful thing to consider, but what about sand? Or layers that may contain certain metals, or minerals like gypsum, or things that might have uses in the future?

[Krash]

Anway, i mocked up a prototype of a better screen here:



That ought to solve most of the clarity issues with that section, and can't take more than 10-20 minutes to put into the game (after all, the text is already colored depending on the type of stone, and there's aquifer info already).

Nice, and very easy to add too.  I like it.

[sweitx]

The difficulty with using the direct name "Aquifer" is that it may not fit the area it needs to name it (for example, when people mod in stones with longer names).
A series of symbol (such as the ≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈) can be shorten arbitrarily to accomodate longer name.

Thou to be honest, when I first played this game, I keep thinking ≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈ means water in river or underground lake form (thou after a few embark, the correlation sets in fairly quickly).