Thanks! I looked over DwarfMockup's feature list (the source code seems to have disappeared). I definitely see some things I like: ghost images of other blueprints for alignment, easy shape drawing, and, of course, tileset previews. I'm a little reticent to start *another* large project at this point, especially one that needs its own GUI, cross-platform build pipeline, test infrastructure, and release process. It also occurs to me that a game map itself could serve as a blueprint design, we have some of the required functionality implemented in DFHack already (though not in as usable a form):
- tiletypes can dig
- buildingplan can place furniture and buildings
- blueprint can record your creation in .csv files that can later be replayed by DFHack quickfort
How could we possibly augment the tools that we have to make in-game blueprint design efficient (and maybe even enjoyable)? I have a few pending tasks for the blueprint plugin in my
backlog, but they're just a start. I'm sure we can come up with more ideas here. One idea is to designate digging in the standard way in-game and have a script that converts the designated tiles into "dug" tiles. Copy/paste would be very nice -- essentially something that combines blueprint and quickfort in a user-friendly way.
In your opinion, what were the most useful parts of DwarfMockup and how do you think they might be implemented with DFHack tools in a way that you'd actually want to use?