Bay 12 Games Forum

By the way, I made a granite floor hatch.

It's completely black. (no racist innuendos intended)

A common problem with almost any tileset. Granite hatches have black foreground and white background. To make them show you need a part of the tile to be transparent. I use the same base tile as Ironhand but I've deleted the 1px line around the hatch (the "space" between the hatch and the frame).

EDIT: But seeing as hatches use "reversed" colors the same way as doors - ie. foreground is either white or black and the colors like red, blue, etc. are background, perhaps the tile could use a redesign.

I suggest using just a single stone with a bit of a floor texture for the mined rock tile.

Also, when doing the water/sand, please try not to make it look to similar to walls. Compare the white sand with the limestone (?) wall on the previous screenshot. They look almost the same.

Wouldn't it be easier to simply draw an L first and then a line?

I would enjoy ambient sounds but I'd enjoy interface more. 

On a more serious note - I'd probably use ambients and turn music off, but the ambients would have to be cleverly designed as not to become a grinding, repetitive sound. The real question is where to get quality sounds... but if you are a hidden composer, Solifuge, I say by all means, go for it! 

This was all considering I could actually run Stonesense and DF at the same time which I can't. Right now Stonesense is just my way of obtaining pretty screenshots.

Pretty cool demonstration of what DF's interface could look like.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner here!

On more serious note: the mouse support is brilliant, the click and drag is brilliant. I wouldn't personally hide all the menus under a right click because I still feel things like building menus and military controls should have "buttons" somewhere in the interface where there are instantly visible. Things I would personally move under the right click are selecting units/buildings/items etc. See this post.

Also I agree with Deathworks here (for the first time I think ). Hotkeys are crucial. While there's no reason why the Goblin Camp UI couldn't support hotkeys but there's no place where to display them.  So if nothing else, you need some sort of visible menu that allows to to:
1) Present an organized list of the most important functions
2) Show hotkeys

But still, I'm mesmerized.

Edit: Basically, Jiri's most recent concept is absolutely the most visually pleasing, simple, and excellently organized I've seen so far.

Oh you make me blush. 

Reporting a minor bug: stockpiles are switched with zones in the .ini file. When I set it to show zones, it shows stockpiles and the other way around.

Deathworks, I'm not astonished that someone would prefer command line. I know there are people like this, I know plenty of people like command lines and I expect them to. What I'm astonished about is if people think that command line would be the best approach for the game in general. That it would benefit the majority. Which is as misleading as it can be. What I'm astonished about is that people actually honestly believe that Dwarf Fortress' interface is a good one and doesn't need an improval. And if it does, it would be something along the lines of a text string filter or a command line. What I'm astonished about is when people can't understand that Bay12 forums are populated by a bunch of IT nerds with a lot of free time (myself included) who are perfectly comfortable with obtuse interfaces (otherwise they wouldn't be here in the first place) but who are in fact a minority of the potential customer base.

And it's just an honest astonishment, and I don't mean it as an insult to anybody.

I am perfectly able to accept that everyone likes something else. You like text interfaces, no problem here, Deathworks. But we're not talking subjectivity here. If we want to talk about interface improvement, we have to try to find some objective measures here. And I've actually spend a lot of time thinking about the interface, thinking about how it could benefit as many people as possible, thinking how to make it user friendly. But when I come here, I'm told that the game doesn't need better organisation or reworking or whatever, instead it needs a command line.

This drives me mad. When I've read this thread for the first time, I laughed at Impaler and thought how stupid he was. But now I'm actually starting to understand his frustrations and have a strong urge to go and work on a interface for him (if only I could program a thing, yeah). What's stopping me are two things: 1) I still believe Impaler's project is wrong, and 2) I'm not arguing with Toady himself and there's still hope left that he might have a bit more acceptable (for myself) point of view.

EDIT: And yeah, I don't mind having a command line as a completely optional thing. I just felt someone was really proposing it over a "proper interface".

It's just as baffling in the other direction. Suppose a new player notices dwarves sleeping on the ground. "Oh, I should make them some beds." Check the menu; I need to build some beds, so 'b: Building" looks good, and hey, Bed is listed right there! (Presses B) ... "wait, 'Bed ... Needs bed'? What the hell does that mean?? I know they need beds, that's why I'm trying to build them!"

Along similar lines... and this is very important...

Notice that Bedrooms are nowhere to be found in the game menu. Nor are barracks nor dining rooms. All of these are vital gameplay elements and yet the player isn't told they exist... unless he tries to randomly build furniture and then click Q on said furniture (but why would he do that?) and then notice there's a new option there. And even if he notices this, he has no way to know what other kinds of furnire-rooms there are. There's no list! The player actually has to place every one of the insane number of furniture types and look for hidden options. It took me ages to notice I can build jails! Or zoos!

These buildings are very well hidden - which is so very, very wrong! Considering how important they are, they should be easily visible in a very prominent menu or submenu. And there's no way to do that unless you say goodbye to the "flowing-out-of-furniture" approach.