Bay 12 Games Forum

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Ideally, webkit could be used to render text squares.

I suspect they wouldn't go for that, because of the huge bloat/distraction factor, but yes, it would be a technically complete solution  .

The minimal suggestion (my first post in this thread) is one that includes a basic DOM structure, with minimal mark-up. A custom rendering engine is then relatively simple, perhaps using pre-rendered bitmaps (platform-independent, or even platform-specific dynamic cache rendering) to paint the text characters. The map displays would remain as-is, and I foresee a general movement away from the restricted CodePage character sets.

Also, this method would do away with 'text squares', and instead designate areas of the screen that text can flow into.

by text squares i meant text rectangles/areas... anyway:

What you describe is in fact what webkit does naturally with added features, there is no reason to reinvent wheel really.

Quote from: Itnetlolor on March 03, 2010, 11:44:35 pm

Slightly off-topic, I don't like how the media portrays religion at all. It's all mockery; I mean, we are actually pretty awesome if you actually take the time to understand us.

Slightly offtopic too but most media that mocks Christians comes from people that are pissed that parts of said christians try to convert people rather actively and in a very unpleasent way. Same goes by the way too for Muslims Jews and many other religions [edit: including atheists - i know soe dawkins fundies that are quiet annoying] Religion shouldnt be advertised and it should keep its nose out of politics where its possible.

Problems are really only caused because directly-or-not average organized religion tells people how to think and what to do (that is, is inherently political organization rather than faith).

People having faith and beliefs is not really issue. Issue begins when person abuses them to gain power.

Well, even beliefs and faith are problematic, mostly when it crosses line and starts to hurt people of faith and others. But again, it is mostly just fault of person that makes up "god told me to do it" shit and does whatever sick thing he wants to do.

Guardian Angels? *shrugs* why not as long we can have "Soul animals" "Familiars" etc. too for other "religion" types.

Guardian angels is not that far bad concept, if you want to criticize something, you should poke fun at comparing angels to gods of various pantheons.

Internet and informatiks: Isidor

note to self: name my next server after him.

Eh. I just doubletap enter. It's not too hard, and I don't think it would be worth the time to add this.

Also it would probably be more annoying than the current system.

Generally, people do not want to end up with technicolor walls, not to mention shortcoming of making your construction from rare flux/fuel/metals/wood or using rough materials instead of blocks.

Anyway, it would be no difference for you - enter-enter would stay exactly same for you....

I've a minimal idea for structures and methods that would allow proportional text to be used in the game. It would achieve the current layouts as a first step, before you go back to optionally refine the layouts of each screen/situation. This would allow the map cells to be square, while maintaining readable text. In branching this way, you needn't lose the 'text-mode only' option if you really need it.

What follows is a programmer's perspective, and to blurt out all of the detail here might seem excessively manic. So here's a nearly-manic summary...

It uses rectangular 'text zone' objects that text content can populate. Each text zone has tabs (for the tables: each has position, minimum width to left, wrap on/off, and auto-size on/off), and of course a reference to its display canvas or equivalent. The content is marked-up for basic colour formatting, and for naming spans. Procedures can insert text, replace spans of text, clear all text, update a span, update after a span, ... - they could all be optimized for minimal drawing. If you want to embellish the object further, you could add a reference to a font resource, line spacing %, default background colour, and so on.

(newbie)

Ideally, webkit could be used to render text squares. This would result in quite interesting api and would possibly add some interesting features for free (styling, pictures, svg graphics, dom api for updating screen, etc...)

Also, it would allows screens to be designed by templates that users could change and/or style.

Some ideas:

 * hotkeys should be grouped by category (navigation (<>,arrows), inspection (k, t, u ...), building (p, i, d, b ...), management (z, q, ...) )

 * Ideally, you will want keyboard clipart where keys are highlighted with lines collecting them to short text description.

 * Flowchart is good idea, but as noted should be restricted to special cases, if only because building/production part of game is quite complex and any detailed info is more likely to confuse rather than help. I think building well is a must and equiping/setting up military would be huge help.

 * I would keep building descriptions bullet-point because they make it easier to look for things. For example:

Wood Burner, b-w-b
* Inputs: wood
* Outputs: charcoal fuel

Masons Workshop, b-w-m
* Inputs: stone
* Outputs: furniture, construction materials.

Maybe even make table out of this.

Similar for materials:

Wood, d-t
* Uses: Furniture, Construction, Fuel
* Exclusive material for: Beds, Barrels, Buckets

Again, a table would be best.

I would not worry about space, I think we can go for four a4 pages (two sheets):

* keyboard/keys page
* material page
* workshop page
* flowchart page

Just a brief write up...
How about the ability to export data aside from the map?
Fortress stats, population list (with skills and assignments), announcement logs, etc.
Besides being able to provide extra information that the game probably has but doesn't show (how many goblets you've made), you could load your population into a spreadsheet and sort people quickly to see who has what skill or labor.
The announcements thing was an idea I had long ago based on some ideas other people had. It would give bored Perl scripters a chance to try and automate a story out of it, even better if the logs were more detailed than the regular announcements (starts of romances, etc.). (Who's going to write up StarRavingMad's Al Swearagin style from Boatmurdered as a filter...)

I think you can do most of that with Dwarf Therapist tool.

I would like to see some imporovements in logs thou.  Like ability to view log messages specific for one dwarf (from his profile screen for example), ability to see profile screen for dead dwarves, ability to see detailed logs for one dwarf.

There are several solutions to make that easier:

What about adding 'u'pgradeable setting to 'q' menu of buildings/rooms?