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[jseah]

Ok, I've read your interface section.  I understand how it will work, I think. 

Then again, I don't get confused by these things easily, having worked out DF's interface with nothing but the "help" portion of DF.  Including the military screen. 

It does seem more organized than DF's standard, so there's that. 
I'm concerned about how it would look if we played with a bigger area?  I use 75% of my 1024x768 screen when playing DF.  How should your interfaces stretch?

The other thing about the auto-calculating interface, I would like the option to have a manual version as well.  Just so I can check if my crop cycle really does match up or not. 

[NW_Kohaku]

I made all of the screens to the same 80x25 grid that the game always runs.  There shouldn't be any difference between this and whatever setup you already have.

What do you mean by "manual", though?  Do you mean you want to see the absolute values of what is in the soil?

[jseah]

Well, because I find crunching numbers for a game fun provided they don't involve calculus. 
I remember making graphs of the sensor detection ranges of Aurora's ships in autograph.  That was a fun half an hour. 

[NW_Kohaku]

mmmmm... I kind of want to try to conform to Toady's general "don't show numbers on things you can't literally pick up and count" style of representation, though, as I find it more likely to be adopted, and I want to also try to assuage people's fears that this won't force them to actually do that.  In fact, that's sort of why I wanted to go out of the way to give them tools to not have to do that.

What I can say, however, is that the raws will still be there, still giving hard numbers.  It just won't be in-game.  You could use spreadsheets or the like, punch in the numbers of how each plant alters the soil, and find the patterns for the most efficient crop rotation cycles if you really wanted to go the "manual" route, and then punch in those crop rotations into the game itself. 

It won't, however, be a required method for farming, and you could just try the "trial-and-error" method of punching in how much fertilizer you need to add until you find a working system.

[NW_Kohaku]

Ugggh... Sometimes I can't believe the things I forget when I write some of these long posts.

OK, so I didn't put the soil indicators in the scheduler (d'oh, I left that spot blank for a reason, why didn't I remember to fill it?!).  I needed to include an "infinity" marker.  I need to extrapolate on the "exceptions" like orchards.  I need to put in that improvements to the soil bed button.  Biomass/humus difference. Maybe a few others...

I'm sort of writing this as my own to-do list, but I think that it also gives people who want to help look for flaws in the current mockup get an idea of what sort of things to look for, as well...

"Can you find some function you would want to perform that this interface does not display a means to do?"

Also, what symbols (I.E. characters from the tileset) would you guys think are most logical/appropriate for each of water, the soil nutrients, soil consistancy, humus depth, biomass, etc.?


Oh, and which do you guys find more helpful, a color-coded set of icons for soil nutrients with a foreground color representing "with the fertilizers and other permissable actions you are telling your dwarves to do" and a background color representing "if you did nothing", or would you rather the icon itself always have one color (so a ≈ symbol always means water), and the background represents "with the permissables", with no indication of what it would be without those permissables?

In other words, that water symbol on the scheduler would look like ≈ with a dark red background in the first method to represent that if your dwarves give that plot all the water you are telling them to give the plot, then it will have enough water, but if they don't bother, it will have too little water.

In the second method, where water is always a blue ≈ symbol, the icon represents only how well the soil will be treated if the dwarves have the time to do all the labor you are asking of them.  (Which would be a (dark) green background.)

[NW_Kohaku]

Right, so, upon reflection, the reason nobody caught a mistake like what I made must be because nobody understands what I am doing or trying to do anymore.

This means I must be playing this game 25 steps ahead in my own mind and I've only stopped and explained the past 15 of those steps, again, which means it's time to write another comprehensive "why this needs to happen" piece before I can go on explaining "how to make it happen".

This means I'm going to need to go back a few steps and explain the reason the Interface has to look like this, rather than just explain what it should look like. 

[AngleWyrm]

A significant problem with the screens is that one screen shows only current soil acceptability relative to some unnamed current crop, and a separate scheduling screen offers no feedback on the future of the soil. There's no way to see the impact of switching through the various crops and upgrades, because the data is hidden.

Since there is not data available to the player, even after heaps and gobs of talking about all kinds of new variables, the result is going to the wiki and looking up what sequence of crops is the best and planting that.

[NW_Kohaku]

A significant problem with the screens is that one screen shows soil values relative to some unnamed current crop, and a separate scheduling screen offers no feedback on the future of the soil.

Since there is not data, even after heaps and gobs of talking about all kinds of new variables, the result is going to the wiki and looking up what sequence of crops is the best and planting that.

Yes, that's the set of symbols I was just talking about how I forgot to put in the scheduler (which I am putting in now).  The fact that nobody noticed until now means that people weren't following me up to the point where they would notice the mistake, which means I need to go back and explain the interface's individual functions a little more.

EDIT: Oh, and the "unnamed crop" is what is shown in another sub-window.  The point of the first "viewer" tab is to show you all the data on the farm plot.  The first "z" sub-menu shows "plants", which indicates what is growing there, and how far along they are towards harvest, plus maybe the most pressing problem that plant is facing.  In the second "x" sub-menu, you see "nutrients", which gives you the snapshot of the soil nutrient levels, and I chose to show that sub-window rather than the initial "z" plants menu because it would be more illustrative in showing how minerals can be displayed.

The fact that I have to explain all this, again, means I need to do a better job explaining why each tab is there and what it does for the player, instead of just saying what data it displays, and assuming everyone has caught up with me.

EDIT AGAIN:
OK, here are the symbols I'm tentatively putting in as color-coded markers in the scheduling screen:

≈ is water
τ is nitrogen
╢ is phosphorous
⌐ is potassium
♠ is biomass
¥ are pests
▄ is humus depth/CEC/drainage
¡ is soil acidity
² is toxicity and salinity
☼ represents if this plant is going to live in an energy field capable of supporting it

Color coding:
Cyan = way too much (doesn't grow)
Blue = too much (grows poorly)
Green = just right
Yellow = not enough to grow well, but will grow poorly
Red = not enough to grow at all
Gray = not even close

I'm going to post an updated version of the scheduling screen in a little bit, but you need to be able to pretty much be told what all those symbols stand for to get them.

For archival purposes:

Spoiler: Scheduler Window (v1) (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Scheduler Window (v2) (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Improvements Window (v1) (click to show/hide)

The green thingy is a glass irrigation pump.  The brass irrigation plumbing has been built, and the dwarf is smiling about it, I guess.

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, just in case I haven't scared everyone off by now, I'm going to try to interpret what almost amounts to my just talking to myself because I've gone insane...

On the scheduling screen, the objective you have as a player is to provide the plants you want to grow with the nutrients they need to grow.  These are the first five symbols (plus the last one, which represents you can grow that thing there at all).  You want these symbols all green.  If these symbols are not green you can add permissible actions to the permissibles list, which give dwarves permission to use resources. 

Basically, if you want to grow that crop right now badly enough, you can just keep ramping up the permissable fertilizer to use on the soil and just solve your problem by just throwing resources at the problem.

The next symbol represents pests.  Pests would actually be a bit hard to predict, but whatever. You don't want pests, so it's not actually color-coded to say "you have sufficient pests", it's an inverse scale.  Green means you have no or few pests of a kind that are particularly bad for your crops.  Yellow means there are some dangers, but you have means of keeping pest populations under control.  Red means unchecked pest problems.

The next three symbols represent land degredation factors.  You can't control these as easily, but they shouldn't go down most of the time, either.  They only go down when you're doing something like burning the soil with fertilizers or eroding the soil or accumulating toxins in the soil or acidifying the soil or raising the salinity of the soil or any sort of "bad stuff" you want to avoid doing.

When you give dwarves permission to use those resources, they determine on their own whether or not to use them.  You can give them permission to use infinite resources (or rather, as many as they can use), but you'll just run out of labor and resources if you try to just throw resources at every one of your problems.

Does this seem like a simple enough system?

[zwei]

≈ is water
τ is nitrogen
╢ is phosphorous
⌐ is potassium
♠ is biomass
¥ are pests
▄ is humus depth/CEC/drainage
¡ is soil acidity
² is toxicity and salinity
☼ represents if this plant is going to live in an energy field capable of supporting it

² is better for phosphorus (game bones symbol)
⌐ is better for biomass (game rotten plants symbol)
≡ is better to potassium (potash bar)
# for salinity/toxicity (rock salt tile)

[AngleWyrm]

Also, check out the medical tab; it has many shorthand coded entries, and yet it is still legible. How? Because it has a legend at the bottom of the screen that tells what each symbol means. This screen would be better with the addition of a legend somewhere near the bottom of the screen.

[NW_Kohaku]

Potash isn't the primary source of potassium for farming, though.  Compost should be.

What I was going for was the things they are actually represented by in the "look", since Nitrogen is checked by looking at leaves (so it's a sprout with leaves), Phosphorous is checked by looking at stems (so it looks like a plant stem), and Potassium is supposed to be a leaf edge...  Although I thought about using something like the ♣ to represent a leaf more generally.  I kind of thought "♠" means mushroom, and that's what you up biomass to be able to grow.  I guess ⌐ works, too, although ▬ for logs also works.

I kind of thought of just using "X" for some sort of skull and crossbones to represent poisons in the soil (not just salt, but several different poisons tracked as separate variables in the soil, which I figured it was easier to just lump them together and just give a warning in this screen when any one got too high, and get people to look on the more detailed pages to find out which one was getting out of hand, since land pollution should be a fairly gradual process.) ² is the usual "death" icon, though, so I figured that was the best way to represent "toxic" in general.


As for a set of explanations for what each symbol means, I unfortunately don't think that's viable without taking up too much space in this one window.  (I've actually remembered more buttons that I want to add into this screen, to handle certain odd circumstances.) I think that players will just need to be told from a help window or a different window what these symbols mean.


I'm writing up a "So how would I actually use this menu?" piece to try to get people who read this to be able to get a better sense of how this would work and what they should expect.  Should be done sometime today, although I might add onto it later.

[AngleWyrm]

The mechanism of requiring people to select time blocks in months is needlessly tedious and cryptic. Plants are planted during the four seasons, and that is all the detail that is needed for a time block. Forcing players to select a starting and ending month just adds unnecessary hassle to every time block, forces players to translate the months, opens up opportunities to make mistakes selecting date ranges, and wastes screen real estate.

[The Phoenixian]

Hadn't read this in a while so belated thoughts on the Interface are as follows.

On the idea of using spacial key positioning:

It makes a lot of sense to me when it comes to using tabs like this. I like the idea of having everything clustered together rather than having it spread out all over the keyboard.

On specific key positioning (not much thought and maybe not useful but a bit):

q=view plot
This makes sense given the common use of q

Overall, it looks like the more important pieces to what a fortress will want to do are arranged first and clearly labeled. Seems to be well thought out. (Was some "Okay, What the [insert generic swear] does this mean?" when first looking at it but that seems to be typical of DF in our pre-tutorial era.)


Not too sure about my ability to comment on the symbology thanks to using a graphics pack all the time but thanks to not having seen the color codes before reading what they meant, I do have some comments on that.

Red, Yellow and Green make perfect sense (since they're commonly used for that anyways.)

Blue and gray were a bit confusing for a moment (Both were placed between yellow and green until I learned what they meant.)

After learning what they meant though it made pretty good sense.

[NW_Kohaku]

The mechanism of requiring people to select time blocks in months is needlessly tedious and cryptic. Plants are planted during the four seasons, and that is all the detail that is needed for a time block. Forcing players to select a starting and ending month just adds unnecessary hassle to every time block, forces players to translate the months, opens up opportunities to make mistakes selecting date ranges, and wastes screen real estate.

If I'm changing everything else about farming, why would I have to keep to the notion that plants stick to seasons for their planting times?  Some of these planting seasons are 7 months long, some are only 2 months long, and orchards are just a yearly harvest time.  (Ah, I knew I should have picked longer periods in the example just to ensure confusions like this wouldn't happen...)  Maybe the seasons can be color-coded when you select them, though?  Green spring, red summer, brown autumn, and gray winter should give people a pretty clear idea of which months are in what seasons.

I'll need to remember that for a later mockup, when I get around to making more of them.

Hadn't read this in a while so belated thoughts on the Interface are as follows.

Alright, thank you, and your opinions on this are noted.