On the graphics note, roguelikes do perfectly fine with only text graphics, and thus is really a non-issue and a basic fact of the game. It's in ascii, period (except for those with tilesets).
On the UI note, Toady has stated that a intuitive UI would be unintuitive to develop for. The features and actual mechanics are ever changing, and he can't/won't spend a large chunk of his time to keep the interface good because he wants to focus on the actual game first.
The problem with that line of thinking is that a bad enough interface
occludes good gameplay.
Say, tell me, right off the top of your head what the stats of some of your dwarves are. What about how many wood cutters you have in your fort? How about how many of those wood cutters have some other job enabled?
If you don't know all those things in advance because you set up your fort along very strict guidelines, how long is it going to take you to go through the z-detailed stats of every dwarf in your fort to figure things like this out?
There's Dwarf Therapist and now,
Dwarf Guidance Counselor is taking a crack at trying to format the information on dwarven stats in a manner that actually matches stats to the jobs and skills that a dwarf can do, because collating all the data, and turning it into
information is essentially impossible to do without creating your own spreadsheet and working for half an hour.
And when I say "half an hour", I mean I tend to spend twenty minutes just reading through my starting seven, and figuring out how I want to build those guys. That's not even a hundred-dwarf fort where I have to figure out how to somehow manage stocks screens with hundreds of individual items, dozens of workshops, a hundred dwarves, and hundreds of pages of data on all sorts of bizarre random aspects of my fortress.
When you include gameplay mechanics like personality traits and stats, you need to give the player an ability to see what impact those mechanics actually have on the game so that they can make intelligent decisions based upon that information.
The game right now, however, just generates reams and reams of data, and doesn't care the least bit for making it actually readable by the player, so the player just ignores most of it, and all that data is doing nothing but wasting space on your hard drive, if not making your fortress run worse because the doctor hates healing people, so he/she refuses to do it, and just lets your dwarves die instead of treating them.
Author
Topic: What would Dwarf Fortress look like 10 years from now? (Read 13127 times)