Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Lightman on December 12, 2022, 12:17:56 am

There are a lot of changes. Is "b, p, r, <click>" better than "b, d, enter, enter"? Probably not but it doesn't seem worse.

Only if you have three hands. Otherwise you need to move one between the mouse and keyboard.

Yeah, I agree. If you cut out the mouse entirely then it's very hard to argue that literally any hotkey on the keyboard is not at worst a small hand movement away. Especially when you consider that the amount of times you use it is basically compensating for how difficult it is to remember. Need to use a hotkey a hundred times? Even if it's something like shift + random hotkey you're going to pick up on that and have it memorised quickly. If it isn't an important hotkey you're not going to have to use it very often so looking it up doesn't seem to be as much of an issue (looking things up in DF is not hard).

Having to re-settle your hand to the mouse, locate the cursor and move the cursor where you want is a non-trivial thing to do (and re-settle back to the keyboard, I suppose, but I don't really count that). Certainly more than enter twice, something everyone knows how to do without even looking. It's not especially difficult to switch to the mouse like that in the sense that it's something anyone can do by shaking the mouse (especially if you've got that "shake to illuminate" windows feature enabled) but I find arguments that the new UI is anything but strictly worse than the old UI for people who took the time to learn what the UI wanted you to do somewhat unconvincing. It's not like you were learning something bad that wasn't any faster than a mouse, either. You were learning something that was somewhat opaque but had *a lot* of resources *and* once you learned it you could do things much faster than with a mouse and clicking everything.

The problem with a mouse and keyboard is you need to make a decision when you're doing computer input: you either use a mouse and keyboad and you lock out the entire right half of the keyboard away from a WASD user as a reasonable hotkey but in exchange you get access to a mouse (and all the advantages and disadvantages that entails) or you ditch the mouse and gain basically every key press on the keyboad (but you lose a mouse). DF clearly made the decision (I honestly have no idea why he did it but it wasn't a bad idea by any metric) to open up that hotkey territory at the expense of the mouse, and for the life of me I cannot actually think of any way that the practical use of the mouse wasn't fixed by dfhack. I mean, if you're going to try and compensate specifically for this lack of a mouse, dfhack seems to do everything you'd want while still emphasising keyboard controls. You don't get clicky buttons anywhere, but the design philosophy of hotkeys doesn't need the mouse for clicky buttons. The only places where I'd say it's measurably better to use a mouse is for designating things, and possibly for a hitherto undesigned military UI rework (I mean, not knowing about the steam UI at all) and DF hack does that quite neatly in my opinion.

People chose to use the mouse for things like windows and etc. because a clickable GUI really is a good idea for most things, I don't disagree. In fact, I am not really in favour of *not* having a clickable UI, I just think that there's good and reasonable justification for wanting and asking for keyboard only support, legacy style.

[ The same way you genuinely cannot fathom why people would prefer mouse, I cannot fathom how people managed to play with the terrible keyboard controls. I say this after having to use them for many years.

They keyboard controls weren't terrible though, they were at best unintuitive (all hotkeys are unintuitive, who on earth would think ctrl + v is a good idea for paste if it was not already standard) but there's not really any argument that they weren't quick once you got going. For me at least, I can touch-type DF, and that means it's going to be pretty quick to do things.

Sure, it took a long time to work out how it all works, but that's just how touch typing works, you have to get used to it. I don't know, maybe I'm misunderstanding why people think the mouse is better than the keyboard but I don't think most of DF interface was actually bad (excluding labours and the military screen, but even the military screen is not that bad) and for a nested-menu game like DF knowing the hotkeys means I barely even notice menus. People want to use the mouse because it often offers some great advantage over the keyboard (because it's a mouse) but even using dfhack I did not find myself using the mouse that often. I had to take my hands away from the keyboard to click on things, and that meant giving up access to camera control on the arrow keys and half the hotkeys. Really didn't feel like a great value proposition, even for just designating things. Best use was massive designation projects or building huge hollow boxes of walls, which didn't happen that often, but I can see why some people would want it.

I guess I just expected Tarn would build mouse support on top of the old UI rather than excising it altogether, but I suppose after nearly three years a lot can change.

genuinely cannot fathom why anyone - least of all the adams brothers, for whom playing the game is essentially a job - would prefer such an inaccurate and slow input method when what we had already was almost perfect.

Dwarf Fortress is a complex game, and part of the complexity of the game is learning the hotkeys. A lot of the parts of DF were difficult and opaque on first glance, but it is hard to argue that with sufficient knowledge they were not largely usable. Things seem to have been changed not because of any particular advantage (the advantage has to be large to overcome 10+ years of inertia) but just because it was possible to change them.

I would like to hear from the Adams' brothers about this before I pass too much judgement, honestly - but I really feel like the old system had a lot of strengths for the people who could navigate it by instinct, and while those people clearly aren't the people you should be trying to sell the game to in the steam update, it's hard to argue that those people don't have at least some value. They're the people that kept DF alive all these years, after all. Maybe everyone except me hated the interface and was donating in the hope that they would change it, but I certainly didn't feel like the interface was necessarily bad at all, really. Even military, the part of the game I feel like I understood the least (or hospitals) weren't something I felt like it was *impossible* to understand, just that clearly there was a lot going on, and that to really understand all the things I could do was a lot. After one playthrough where I made serious attempts to understand something in the game, I felt like I understood it enough to get real use out of it, from simple things like an underground cistern all the way up to relatively complex wind-powered pump stack mechanisms, and from then on the UI meant you could do it very quickly indeed.