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DF Suggestions / Combat Mode - A display specialized for reading combat logs and watching combat
« on: January 13, 2023, 01:26:08 am »
One of the best things about this game is, far and above, the combat logs. They are phenomenally fun to read, and an absolute blast.
Unfortunately, they've become somewhat less accessible with this latest release - although the content is still fantastic, it takes quite a bit of doing to piece it all together after the fact, and you can't gracefully slow down and "watch" the combat play out.
I think it would be super neat if we had a "combat log viewer" that set the FPS to a lower default speed (like maybe 1 or even .5 FPS) and displayed all participants combat logs consolidated as a scrollable window along the bottom third or so of the screen.
Relevant buttons/controls to be accessible in this mode:
"Speed up" - Could be the same binding as the global FPS speed control, but it'd be good to put an actual GUI button on screen for this.
"Slow down/pause" - same as above, pause may not be explicitly necessary
"Frame advance" - same as above, doesn't need a new binding, it should just be a visible button to prompt the user that this is a control they have that they may find useful in this view.
"Jump to latest" - Centers the screen on the most recent entry in the log. The log entries could/should keep their little 'click here to go to the place this happened' button, so that's also always an option, this is just a convenience thing. The use-case this enables is that you could hold down the hotkey to zoom along with an active combat - maybe a way to make this a toggle? It'd get kind of crazy if you had a bunch of stuff happening all over all at once, but the standard case of "8 goblins are at the front gate attacking you" it'd work really well for. Also the hilarity of randomly getting shunted 120 z-levels down into the bowels of your fortress in the middle of a siege to watch Stray Dog bite the Gelder for a frame would probably make up for the occasional strangeness.
This would make combat more viewable than it ever has been before - you could hit pause, crack out some popcorn, go into combat mode and just watch it play out.
Unfortunately, they've become somewhat less accessible with this latest release - although the content is still fantastic, it takes quite a bit of doing to piece it all together after the fact, and you can't gracefully slow down and "watch" the combat play out.
I think it would be super neat if we had a "combat log viewer" that set the FPS to a lower default speed (like maybe 1 or even .5 FPS) and displayed all participants combat logs consolidated as a scrollable window along the bottom third or so of the screen.
Relevant buttons/controls to be accessible in this mode:
"Speed up" - Could be the same binding as the global FPS speed control, but it'd be good to put an actual GUI button on screen for this.
"Slow down/pause" - same as above, pause may not be explicitly necessary
"Frame advance" - same as above, doesn't need a new binding, it should just be a visible button to prompt the user that this is a control they have that they may find useful in this view.
"Jump to latest" - Centers the screen on the most recent entry in the log. The log entries could/should keep their little 'click here to go to the place this happened' button, so that's also always an option, this is just a convenience thing. The use-case this enables is that you could hold down the hotkey to zoom along with an active combat - maybe a way to make this a toggle? It'd get kind of crazy if you had a bunch of stuff happening all over all at once, but the standard case of "8 goblins are at the front gate attacking you" it'd work really well for. Also the hilarity of randomly getting shunted 120 z-levels down into the bowels of your fortress in the middle of a siege to watch Stray Dog bite the Gelder for a frame would probably make up for the occasional strangeness.
This would make combat more viewable than it ever has been before - you could hit pause, crack out some popcorn, go into combat mode and just watch it play out.