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[NW_Kohaku]

I did.

The most asked questions are a part of one of the sections in the very front of this thread, and one of them is a section all to itself.

[therahedwig]

Pictures!

Ah, but are you not afraid people are going to run away crying at seeing how it resembles the military screen?

In all seriousness, it looks good, but I think it will have the similar problem of the military screen of people not knowing where to start, without reading this thread.

[NW_Kohaku]

Thank you for looking at the pictures, therahedwig... I was going to cry if I had spent all that time on making them, and nobody even bothered to look.

... Cry and then pick some fights with people in the hopes I could lure them into the thread.

Anyway, I hope that I can avoid the military screen's most major mistake, which I see as (aside from the outright bugs) the desire to compact everything into one screen generating concatonated commands with no help file.

Frankly, I've put quite a bit of thought into doing this right, but I don't know of a way to give a clear picture of the scheduler without it looking at least somewhat like the military screen.

What I've tried to do is split this up into many smaller "tabs", so that information is spread out across multiple menus that are easily flipped through so that you can access one set of data and then go to one of several means of issuing commands to the dwarves.

I'm also curious as to what people think of the design decision to use "qwert" and "asdfg" as a means of tabbing through the tabs, with "zxcv" as the actual command buttons.  It would mean control is largely "Left hand on the home keys, right hand on the numpad" control style.

I can also switch this around if the "zxcv" part gets too annoying, and make the tabs be "qwertQWERT", with capitals being the "bottom" tabs, so that the action tabs are "asdfzxcv".

Or is spatial reasoning in a control scheme too wonky compared to the rest of DF?

[therahedwig]

I think before we wonder whether that would be too wonky in comparison with the rest of DF, we need to first realise that DF is in dire need of having a interation-design specialist looking at it. Hell, we should consider making a donation pool especially for that or something.
I'm doing a bachelor's in gamedesign, and when I had interface design it was used as a prime example of what not to do with your game.(On the other hand, while I missed the class, I have the feeling that the teacher might've been so stupid to critisize the ascii art, mostly because she was a stupid cow /offtopic)

Personally, I have to admit I prefer the keys to be linked to the words they represent. But I think I could get used to this as well.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, spatial reasoning makes by far the most sense to me, and is what I can get used to down to the point of reflexively remembering my custom keymaps to games I haven't played in years, even including things like the special extra keys from OBSE put into Oblivion.  ("b" is for summoning the crocodile monster to take hits for me. "n" is for summoning the creature I backstab for soul traps.  "h" is for healing myself...)

I also tend to use "wesd" as a movement keymapping instead of "wasd", since e and d can be moving forward and back, while w and s can be right and left (respectively), and that puts all movement onto just two fingers, which don't have to move into any side areas, putting those fingers which can move to touch other keys the least on the keys I don't want to move my fingers off of the least.  I can't understand how people play with "e" as a use key, it makes no sense, you have to take your finger off the "right" key to press it.

So basically, this is a roundabout way of saying "It makes perfect sense to me to base things off of keeping all the controls in one localized area, and making it spatially logical, but then, I realize I'm weird, so I don't know if this will make sense to everyone else."

[NW_Kohaku]

Hmm... looking at it, I thought of a few changes I should make to the "Improvements" tab, just looking at it, as I should probably segregate out "fertilizers" involving minerals and more serious "make this entire farm plot into a raised bed with gravel underneath" types of major renovations to the soil.

I also wonder if I should just have a "use all" type of fertilizer use in the permissibles.

I should probably rewrite the scheduler section a little more to be clear about every piece of functionality.

Anything else that anyone sees that looks missing?

[blizzerd]

ive read the most important articles and i think that this would be an interesting idea as long as the current "herbalism" skills do not make the entire complex farming thing you described obsolete UNLESS you want to work underground

[NW_Kohaku]

ive read the most important articles and i think that this would be an interesting idea as long as the current "herbalism" skills do not make the entire complex farming thing you described obsolete UNLESS you want to work underground

I think that herbalism could be a more serious alternative to farming than it is now, actually.

I mentioned before that I think herbalism could become "elven farming" - you don't really plow rows of soil, but you can do things to encourage your favored herbs to grow.

The thing about herbalism is that, thanks to its "just let it grow wild" approach, it's fairly low in labor, while its major downside should be that it's just plain not capable of supporting the same number of dwarves in the same amount of land.

That said, wild herbs would still take from the soil, so it would have to achieve some means of making a crop rotation cycle on its own, just from "weeds" competing on the soil, but if you harvest enough of the crops from the soil, then you can eventually take all the nutrients out of the soil - you'd still probably need to fertilize the soil even if you rely upon herbalism, it just might take more the form of opening up your sewer floodgates so that the water with "impurities" that make for good nutrients would flow out over the soil to refertilize the land.

[NW_Kohaku]

On the subject of the interface:

• Tell me what you think is or would be confusing.
• Tell me what needs extrapolation upon.
• Tell me what you don't like, and why you don't like it.
• If there is anything you do like, go ahead and say that, too.

The top one of those is the most important of the three.  Think about it from the perspective of the people who are coming into this blind, and think if this would be as bad as the military screen was in terms of difficulty to learn, or if this would be something that is a little clunky, but more like the embark screen, or some other screen where the interface is fairly straightforward and easy to understand.

I want most of all for people to be able to grasp what they are supposed to do mostly from just looking at the interface, and leafing through the tabs.

[AngleWyrm]

The navigation controls for the interface should be exactly the same as the rest of the game. They should not be new or improved. The reason to integrate them into the whole and present a consistent interface is so that people can quickly learn how to navigate once, and put it behind them.

Presenting different navigation methods for different parts of the game stalls the ability to walk around the UI, and subverts the learned behaviors picked up from the rest of the game. The confusion would then spread to every part of the game, wondering which set of controls to use for any given screen.

[monk12]

Now, I may have missed it in the wall o' text there, but have you had thoughts on the effects/implementation of floodplains?

[NW_Kohaku]

Now, I may have missed it in the wall o' text there, but have you had thoughts on the effects/implementation of floodplains?

That's sort of part of the water management section.  I might need to go back and talk about that more in detail, but if water has its own nutrient values, and rivers collect silt as they stretch along a continent, then eventually rivers will become extremely silt-laden, and you could use those as easy fertilizers.

"Seasonal Flooding" should probably be described in more depth.  I'll put that in, as well.

The navigation controls for the interface should be exactly the same as the rest of the game.

Okay, dissenting vote on the spatial reasoning layout recorded.

Thing is, I don't think there's anything really learned from the game in general... in some cases, the same type of object has a different letter in different menus.  You just learn that one command to that one specific menu.

For example: designated up/down stairs are "i".  constructed up/down stairs are "x".

Learning what to punch to designate stairs doesn't teach you want to punch to construct stairs... There isn't even something in the "build Construction" menu that uses an "i", either, so there's no necessity that the button be "x".

For that matter, in the military screen, "u" is Supplies.  "s" was taken, but that still means you have to remember "u" means supplies (or more likely, just look for what's highlighted).  Ammunition is even more odd - it's "f".  There isn't even an "f" in the word ammunition, so no idea how that got to be that hotkey.

[Max White]

So I noticed there was some strange [1] symbol at the top of the page... That isn't oftern!
I like it, mostly because it sort of reminds me of the military in a strange way, and since I spent so long learning how the military works, with any luck the skills will carry over, helping to trim the heavy learning curve.

Let's face it, you can survive a year without an army, but you would be hard pressed going without growing food, so if this is similar to the military screens, but slightly simplified, then new players will be more used to this interface by the time war comes around, so even though the learning curve is a little higher, it isn't as steep.

Good interface is good for more then planting!

[NW_Kohaku]

monk12: added onto the water management section.  Floodplains are now discussed directly.

Max White: Well, that's a pretty positive spin on things.

Again, I'm looking for things that you think need further explaination or things that are outright confusing, though, so tell me what parts you think aren't particularly clear, so that I can do what I can to improve them.


Oh, right, and I've been updating the first six posts somewhat quietly for a while now, so several little things are changed.  I put up my "to do list" at the end.  That should give you guys some indicator of some of the other topics I'm going to cover later on.

[Max White]

Max White: Well, that's a pretty positive spin on things.

I know, I'm sorry. I always feel bad about giving positive feedback, as you can't realy improve on something when people are saying it's already perfect. But still, the military screen has found its way into DF and has become an important part of the game, so why not use similar methodology elsewere? It could save toady work and let new players get used to this specific interface faster.