This is all critical information for the player to know when we get these more complex systems, and there is currently almost no way for the player to actually know any of these things, barring obsessive checking of every single dwarf's details page right now.
Question is, will player want this information at all?
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This is a good point, but it's only seeing half the picture.
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Right now, I care about what my dwarves have in their "Helpfulness" personality trait when I am assigning doctors because the game forces me to care. If I assign a doctor with low helpfulness, then the doctor will let the patients die without caring for them. If I want my hospitals to work at all, I have to get a doctor with high helpfulness. That makes that information something I want.
Yes, this takes some careful thought about how you are designing the game to balance correctly, but the fact that you can do it badly, and force too much information on the player doesn't mean that the player still doesn't need the information that is relevant.
This is why i want "workforce manager".
Idea is that i ask which dwarf would be most suitable for job that has - for example - all medical jobs - enabled and game would present me with list of dwarves ordered by their suitability to job, taking everything relevant into account (likes, personality, skills, attributes ...).
I do not really want to know WHY is he going to be set for job - maybe it is extensive experience with surturing, maybe it is maxed helpfulness, maybe he just likes to work with cloth and thread.
DF already does this when you are appointing nobles, but only skills are taken into account.
This is one potential way to handle the problem - basically, to automate it. You'd want to give the player the ability to look for additional information, or customize how to weight dissimilar traits against one another, however, as the player may not necessarily agree with everything that the hardcoded algorithm will say is most important. (I don't care too much about the skill level of most jobs - if I assign them to a job, they'll gain experience eventually, anyway.)
However, I am also concerned with the many ways that the game can evolve in the long term.
Right now, there is a reason why everything is either a physical resource or trying to kill you - those are the only things the game can display.
Right now, you can ignore the consequences of a conversation or a feud, but what if Toady wants to actually make you care about those sorts of things, and actually base a good portion of the game around it?
Take a look at what Toady says about Taverns...
Capntastic: So how do you feel the interface will be for setting these places up and keeping them supplied with cool stuff?
Toady: I think the hub of the inn and tavern ... whatever you want to set up, because we want it to be open-ended and have some options there ... The hub is the meeting hall/dining room, I don't know if they're going to all become one type of building now, just a place for people to meet up that may or may not have tables and chairs and ...
Rainseeker: Counters! We must have counters.
Toady: ... counters, that's right, and whatever other furniture decides to come up. So that's going to be the hub of it, and then even if it's just a little counter where someone goes in to check into their inn, like if you wanted to set up something that was more like just a hotel type inn rather than having a big hall with tables and games and booze ... So you'd have this hub where you'd set up your services and link up rooms, it would probably just use regular bedrooms, so we don't have to change it that much for your inn rooms, and link them up to the main meeting all, and at the meeting hall you'd also be able to set up your prices and specifically what things you want going on at your inn, and perhaps you'd also - like with the workshop profiles - be able to attach the particular people you want to hang out there. So basically we wanted to set up the hub in those buildings and not deviate too much from what we've got now. There's obviously going to have to be a new kind of screen or options menu for the new stuff but it should all come right off of that screen. When you get into this economic stuff there's also this desire to jump into, 'I want my guest list with their winnings tab and how many drinks they've bought' and if for some reason you set up two inns you could have charts saying how well they're doing. I don't know how much we want to jump into Theme Park type of stuff, but it's reasonable ... Like, if you decide to start your fortress and you just set up this giant gambling hall and you attach some stockpiles filled with all kinds of stuff that's brought in and it becomes a big part of your fortress and basically booze is your main export straight to people into their stomachs and then they export it out of their bodies when they walk off the map or whatever, and that's your main source of income, then it would be reasonable to have tracking information for that kind of thing. But if it's just a small little place you use to make your diplomats and merchants more happy and more likely to have good trade agreements and that kind of thing then it doesn't need to be something that's in your face all the time. We're certainly not planning to have it at the end of the year pop up your earnings; that's not what we're going for, I don't want to scare people into thinking we're doing something completely off base and stupid with the game.
Rainseeker: I think the neat thing about what you're choosing to do here is that you're allowing it to be more grey, because there were enemies and then there were friends, but now there are people that are customers or are visiting that might be annoying that you want to kick out but are not per se trying to kill you.
Capntastic: I think that the important thing will be to keep the mechanics in line with what's already there, instead of making it like it's its own minigame within a game within a game.
Toady: It's all going in with ... There's going to be nothing wrong with having your tavern meeting hall, your dwarves decide to throw a party there, there happens to be a merchant there; that's actually part of the idea, to have your dwarves around those people so that one of your dwarves could challenge a visiting merchant to a Tacticus game or something and that was one of the main things we were planning to explore with that, these interrelationships and also just the games themselves. We were thinking, well, if you've got a dwarf and an outsider playing a game you should be able to pop in and control the dwarf and just pop up a little game screen and play with some games. The starting point for that was adventure mode, because of course going in a tavern and just rolling dice or playing a little game of some kind is a perfectly reasonable thing for an adventurer to do. The problem with adventure mode mechanics sometimes is that they don't make it into dwarf mode until way later, like with the combat reports where that kind of fighting was going on but you couldn't read the text of what actually happened until recently. The idea this time is to get the dice games and card games and board games - or whatever we end up adding first - into both modes at the same time, so that you'd be able to control your dwarves playing against the outsiders, and perhaps if your dwarves are playing with each other you'd be able to pick one of them to jump into. I'm not quite as certain about that but it might be required just to give you the opportunity to do this very much. If two people are playing a game at a table in a meeting hall then they're going to be playing that game for a certain amount of time, like several days in dwarf mode the way it works, or at least a couple of days ...
Rainseeker: A very addictive game.
Toady: So it'll probably just pop up a little notification in the top left corner, one of those little letters or something, just letting you know that you can jump into something if you want, and then you'd be able to pop in and play the game in frozen time, so no time passes while you're resolving it, and then when you leave the game would either adjourn or they'd continue sitting at that table for the same amount of time they would have, so that it doesn't feel like there's any meta-gaming going on that way. I mean jumping into someone's head and playing a game for them is already kind of meta-gaming, so it's not that big a deal. You could, if one of your gambling addict dwarves decides to gamble away your anvil or something, then maybe you can jump in there and win the game for him.
Rainseeker: Oh please, oh please let that be real.
Toady: It's one of the things we wrote down where we were like 'Do we want to do this? Is that too painful?' and well, you know, it might be too fun to avoid. But you don't want to totally annoy the player into quitting your game, but to some extent that stuff's funny.
Capntastic: Losing is fun!
OK, so now we have a game where you will have your dwarves losing critical pieces of equipment that could doom your fortress in poker games for no reason just because you weren't paying attention to something you didn't think was important, and which the game gives you no visual clues about.
Because losing for no reason about something you didn't notice is fun, right?
Remember how in 31.01, you could have "acid" rain that melted dwarves because there was a huge problem with the temperature system, but Toady and nobody else could figure out why or what it was for a while? It's all because there was no interface that told people something was catastrophically broken with the temperature system.
There is this temperature system inside DF that is complex, and takes up huge amounts of processor power, and actually lags the game to a fair degree (the recent speed improvements came almost purely from working on the temperature code) but whose actual effect on the game is so esoteric that not even TOADY knows when it's going horribly wrong.
I love this game, and I have respect for Toady, but quite simply, that is a failure to properly program.
If he can't even tell when something that takes up that much processor power and coding time is going right or wrong, there is a critical flaw in how the game is being designed.
And this all comes back to Toady's unwillingness to do what it takes to make a proper interface.
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Topic: The Most Imporant Thing Toady Could Do Right Now..... (Read 5066 times)