Bay 12 Games Forum

Something along the lines of:

+Aa
+Bb
+Cc
A
B
C

where the "+" denotes that there is a submenu hidden for Aa, Bb, Cc respectively? Along the lines of windows explorer, where folders usually come on top? I can fulheartedly agree!

It's not unexpected that people agree on the UI being clunky

Military:
What I meant: You go with (m) screen for assignments, that's fine. You have to change their name/profession with v and station them with x. That's three menus to get one thing done.

"I can play it fine"
I know of people who don't use a debugger when they write code. It's doable, but it's 10 times more tedious and leads to subpar results. One of the main reasons WoW is so successful is the UI. It's extremly simple, easy to learn and very powerful, even before addons.

Open-Source
If Toady does not want to opensource his stuff, that is fine, I can understand that. But spending hundreds of hours on wound mechanics which a vast majority of people will likely completely ignore (either the dwarf works or he stays in bed, but I cannot make a meaningful choice depending on what wound he has) and neglecting even the simplest UI concerns is a bad investment of time, even for a single person. Effort should be made where the least time spent results in the biggest improvement, economically speaking. Spending 10 minutes to make the menus in alphabetical order, or having ESC/F9/Space behave the same everywhere would be such a thing. Producing pretty buttons for everything on the other hand takes a long time and is not much better than plain text.

That is what I meant.

And the rewards for learning this slightly messy interface are great.

Yes, that is why I even bother. If DF wasn't as awesome as it is, I would never look twice. Still, there is so much space to improve the UI, one doesn't know where to begin.

After lurking for a long while, I came to the conclusion that Toady belongs to that rare species which will never ever give in to writing a UI. Just like the linux geeks who think that entering twenty lines of commands is a user-friendly approach to using software. Luckily, they are the minority. If dwarf fortress had a decent interface, I'm sure it would be ten times as popular, just look at how popular rogue-likes are, and their UI is not great either. But it's a lot better.

Is the current mess workable? Yes. Any interface is workable. Technically, you could play a game by entering mathematical chat commands. Would it be less fun? Certainly.

And the problem is not the current UI's inexistance, it's its inconsistency.
- Four buttons to look at stuff, none showing all information.
- Different buttons for the same thing (leaving menus, area designation)
- Multiple buttons and menus to assign military options.
- Incredibly complex "look at dwarf" menu with Wounds, Pref, General, History, Labor, and you can only access some places through some means, and not from anywhere.
- The game is virtually unplayable without Dwarf Manager, after you get past 7 dwarves. That alone should ring a bell.
- Menu entries in random order. It would take all of ten minutes to rearrange the menu entries in alphabetical order, and would reduce the time spent searching for rarely used things such as (b) "siege" greatly. This is my major gripe. I can see why reworking the UI is a lengthy, tedious task, but this would simplify things greatly without a lot of programming.
- Messages don't tell you where stuff happened. Starcraft did this right: If you get a "Base under attack" you may press (Space) and your view will center on that hotspot.

Pretty sad actually to have such a great game with the most horrible interface ever written. If this was open source, I'd commit a tweaked UI this week. It makes me stop playing after a couple hours, because I just can't stand it. I hope someone else writes a similar game to DF, with UI included. Then everyone will just stop playing DF in favour of that other game, leaving Toady no choice but to improve this mess.