Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, I would say judging should be more like:
Brutality: How many dwarves does it kill/how much variety is present in the killing 0-20 points
Aesthetics: How good looking/awesome was the fort before the lever was pulled 0-30 points
Complexity: How cool/original is the mechanism for destruction 0-50 points
Total: 0-100 points

Fairly simple, and avoids situations where a guy who just attracts fucktonnes of immigrants and then locks them in a drowning chamber gets a significant advantage. The fort should be good enough that its destruction is epic.

Yes, sorry I messed the furniture then immediately noticed it and edited the post, you must have been very quick to have seen it.

I've always felt the current workshop system should be replaced with a work-room system as described in Eternal Suggestion #27 as of this post, this could go so far as to essentially merge the room, stockpile and workshop and possibly zones concepts into one entity which would have a great deal of flexibility.  When the players selects and places such a thing their really just selecting a data template to apply to the new entity, which means its no big deal to allow custom templates to be added to their selection list as well.

I am a ninja post spotter

Under my latest idea (which you can see partially I think in the mock-up), the notion of zones is actually the extrapolated out to mean any area where a continuous function occurs. So I would put stockpiles, current zones, tree cutting designation and plant gathering there (and possibly even burrows).

It is actually fairly difficult to break away from traditional thinking about the DF interface because it is hardcoded into my brain. I'm trying to work it so that someone could almost intuitively 'get' it. So if they want to build something they go to the build menu. Furniture should not be 'built' in my view (hence 'placed' in the mockup). Also, though I never mentionned this, I think it is fairly obvious that we should have consistent controls throughout (so the same buttons for scrolling etc). I think it might be better to have 4 tabs at the top, and separate designations and zones from general building construction. What do you guys think?

I don't see anything covering construction (walls, bridges, wells) nor furniture (doors, cabinets Tables).   Also I see no need to do bury workshops under so many categories, just having them all under 'workshops' would be fine.  DF already goes too far in separating furnace from workshops which I see your removing which is good but don't go an replace it for yet more layers.

You are right about the walls bridges etc (I forgot about them), but furniture is there. Good point about reducing the layers (though I think that maybe we could get the best of both worlds if there was an additional option to see buildings filtered by industry - so if you decide "hey, I'm going to set up a glass industry" you can just check that and then it will only show buildings associated with that. Or maybe it could just be a few little icons next to the building to tell you what is associated with what.

Right, well obviously this is not an immediate goal, but I am sure that there will be a time when it is, and having discussed it beforehand I think would help significantly. So I've tried to come up with an initial plan for how this could work. Bear in mind that I have assumed that we'll have mouse support and that all features such as 'k' to view a unit are replaced with 'mouse over' to view a pop-up box with info about what you are mousing over. So, without further ado, here is my idea:

Structure:

Mock up to show the idea of consistent tabs (they would each have different stuff underneath them):
Here
I will add more stuff to this later, but I think it conveys at least some of the idea.

I am going to do a full mock-up in flash, but I wanted to check if I'd missed any key functionality before I did/if there are any major changes. Also note that the major titles (Pause, Resource/Population, Announcements and Planning/Construction) are always on screen, as tabs that you can immediately switch to. Therefore the largest number of clicks to get something done is (by my calculation) 5 (to get to a magma glass smelter from, say, the announcements tab). Some elements appear multiple times, because they are related to multiple things. I designed this to try to reduce the need for reference to the wiki or tutorials.

Give me some constructive criticism please, along with your ideas.

A few of them don't got some.

>_>

Yeah, as the above user said, those are known as women...

Shitty fan art inspired by latest blog post GO!

Quote from: Pie on October 14, 2009, 10:41:37 am

Well I'm not exactly talented, but I am a pixel jockey, and thus I have decided to do these! I'm reasonably happy with them, except for the last two, which I'm not really sure about. I tried to make them all have distinct outlines, though I was thinking of going a little further and colour coding each item. Feel free to use and edit as you wish:
Rest
Build
Dig
Drink
Eat
Idle
Admin
Haul

Hey I like those! Maybe put a "XXX" on the drink barrel? And eat could probably just be a drumstick or something, I don't think they use silverware

I like what you did on hauling, but I worry it may be too small to convey what's going on there.

I'm not sure I could put XXX and still have it readable - by my calculations the very minimum it would need would be 11x3 just for the writing. Also, I went for the silverware for just easily recognisable, universal symbols. Dwarves don't eat poultry that much either... a truly accurate representation would be biscuits made out of horrible purple mushrooms. I can see that the drumstick might have a better aesthetic though, so I may have a go at doing that.

And yeah, I totally agree with you about the hauling stuff, but I don't really know how else to easily convey it. Perhaps a single, large diagonal arrow from A to B?

I have a policy of no savescumming, but I've not played DF for about 2 weeks due to a mega rage-quit involving approximately 9 hours of solid work being lost to computer crash.