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« on: August 27, 2018, 12:53:35 am »
So, fellow adventure mode masochists, since adventure mode is just a nice DF bonus, who wants to have a thread about QOL improvements that will never happen? We know they're way below important things like procedurally generated nasal hair colors and fortress mode bugs from 2014 that nobody's gotten around to fixing. But that's okay--adventure mode is the bald-headed stepchild of the dwarf fortress family. We wouldn't want it any other way, because then there'd be more of us and it would be crowded in here. Property values would drop.
Actually, no, I kid. (Actually, no, I very old, but that's another thread.) It would be nice if it were some other way. For instance, how about a "path to this point" command? Like, you put a cursor on a tile, and the game engine draws you a little path back using its byzantine pathfinding voodoo that I probably understand better than I am letting on. I'm sure at least one of you has been in a Dark Fortress with the floor literally covered in goblin bodies, goblin body parts, and small hoary marmot loincloths--and then you forget where the "up" stairs were at. And then you have to go looking for them among all the detritus of the fun you had on the way in (actual fun, not dwarf fun). Since I run DF on a potato, it takes 20 seconds to move one square sometimes, even when moving at a speed of "3." This, I know, is thanks largely to the melee of 200 trolls and beak dogs two levels down, or the 67 goblins discussing their feelings about Towers two floors up. I tell you, I am often tempted to dfhack up a "reveal" and "exterminate beak." I guess I'm not "tempted" so much as "I just do it and pretend that I actually killed all those things because my character literally could not be killed by 200 beak dogs and I've already almost broken my 'a' key killing scut-mobs in this game." I've seriously considered modding in a firebreathing secret type--the combat engine is a joy to use for one-on-one fights, but fighting hordes of trash mobs is a literal keyboard-killing experience. I have probably spent an hour of my life just pressing the keys necessary to kill things in adventure mode, which wouldn't be so bad except that it's mostly six dozen goblin cheesecrafters and I'm just iron two-hander slash->neck->precise over and over and over again.
Anyhow, like I was saying, it can take actual time just to move my character to the correct square, let alone how long it takes for me just to find the darn things. It's frustrating. After all, you have already seen the stairs. Your character remembers where they are. They are actually right there, right on the map! Somewhere! They're somewhere in a fog of little ASCII characters, blinking between the < or > and a beak dog's left testicle. You're lucky if they're blinking, because then they're easier to find.
I guess maybe the real answer is to carry more beak dog gonads to drop on the stairs. But I want the game engine to do some of the work, too.
Okay, maybe I'm just old and have bad eyes. But the game already has a pathfinding algorithm, it just needs to be gotten up off of its lazy behind and put to work in the less-beloved game mode. Now, I'm not asking for the moon: a modern rogue-like feature like autoexplore would be totally uncalled for in the self-abasement milieu of DF. That cat would not jump, and I'm not asking it to jump because you can't even talk to a cat. Don't be silly. I could, however, stomach an option that would path me back to the stairs, because although my time is not very valuable, taking an hour to find my way back to the entrance of a Dark Fortress gets tiresome very quickly, which does not help explain why I did it three times in the last week. Stone Soup has a "go to the stairs" command, and it's almost silly in that game since you've got a minimap that shows where the stairs are with colors and everything.
If that's too much, how about a command to temporarily hide everything on the ground? Sometimes I lose doors, too, honestly.
Yeah, some intrepid programmer could probably write a dfhack plugin to do either of these things, but my last programming language was fortran 77, and I haven't tried my hands at THAT in a literal decade. I'm not that intrepid programmer, but I figure I can at least be that likable rogue the complainer-on-the-forums. Surely someone out there shares my pain.
Anyhow, I know there was at least one other thing that I wanted to complain about, but hopefully someone else will post in the thread and remind me what it was. I think it was the sorting of the "I" menu.
Oh, wait, I remember. I wanted a command to summarize the items in my character's view range, and maybe even search or sort the result. I don't care about all those goblin-sized left beaverskin mittens of varying levels of quality and damage. They can just sit there on the floor. I am actually very glad that DF is the kind of game that wants to track every left beaverskin mitten in the world, and to know which are of slightly superior quality and which are covered in a named goblin's spittle. The fact that Gurist Portchuffer the Glazing of Sonnets sweated his nasty goblin sweat onto this one left beaverskin mitten in the year 149 is crucial to absolutely nothing about the game experience, but my deeply flawed soul is gratified to know that the game cares enough about its own internal consistency to track it. I really do value that about the game, because there is literally nothing out there like it. But I don't necessarily want to wade through all that information just because I want that one -iron great ax- that's buried in the room somewhere. Information sorting and parsing is one of DF's biggest failures, which is very sad given the sheer depth of information that the game lovingly simulates. But let the computer do things that computers are good at, because nobody cares if the computer is having fun.
Anyhow, it's past my bedtime.
