Bay 12 Games Forum

Two simple improvements can be made:

1. Choose a designation to mine out based on path distance, instead of the algorithm right now which seems semirandom.
2. Choose a location to mine from based on path distance, instead of a hard-coded mining direction priority.

These two improvements would greatly increase the speed of mining, and the speed of finishing any particular room - because parts of a single room are generally closer together than they are to other rooms, whole rooms are more likely to be mined out in a single chunk.  This also makes it so designation cycles are larger and less common, because you can designate and not have to worry about your dwarves leaving lots of rooms unfinished.

How is this different from the ability in

• [m] to create bulk orders, which already exists?

The depot access mode, as is, currently has two problems:

1. the flashing is too fast and strong (a bit faster than 2 Hz and from black/grey to bright green/red) for full-screen application, placing it within the headache range for me and probably the seizure range for others; slowing or removing the flashing and reducing the contrast between the two phases would be a good idea.

2. locations in midair are considered; since I don't think we have flying wagons yet, I don't really see why I would care that a midair location is inaccessible, and it does not help when trying to figure out where there is blockage.  I suggest making locations without a floor not have their accessibility checked/displayed, much like solid walls.

In addition, it is difficult to select large swaths of terrain for 'gather plants' and 'chop down trees' over rough terrain, because you have to do similar selections on multiple levels - in my current game, my timber source is spread across seven z levels.  I suggest a mode where you see only the topmost things in each z column - effectively, a bird's eye view instead of the usual cross section - and are able to designate stuff.

There is at least one long process - embarkation - that does not empty the system event queue after completion.  Combined with a lack of progress bars, this makes possible a specific type of failure: I can hit enter to embark, not know whether my keypress has gone through, and hit enter several more times before it loads, and have those keypresses act as confirmation for things like "just embark, no customization".  ...which is, obviously, bad.

The solution is to, after doing any probably time-consuming task (generating a world or region, saving, leaving the fortress, and probably others), clear the system event queue entirely, so that keypresses do not spill over into as-yet-unseen dialogs.

Vorn