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[DJ]

Pretty much everything about the interface bothers me. It's clunky and unintuitive, information is hard to get to and there is nowhere near enough mouse support. There is also no way to get nice summaries of various aspects of your fortress. Something like Tropico's Almanac would go a long way to make fortress management easier.

I think it's time for a complete interface overhaul, and I suggest something like this:

I think it's all pretty self-explanatory, but if there's any confusion just ask what I meant with a particular item.

This, of course, is merely a rough sketch and is meant to portray the general style of the interface only. Specifics like what tabs will be used and what will be put in which tab should be given a lot of thought to make everything as intuitive as possible.

[Mr Tk]

So let us summarize some of the points which have been brought up shall we? I'll also try to include a point/counter point for some of them. Warning this maybe a big post.

1) Tuts. This by far seems to be the most common problem for all the new players coming into the game. What do I do, how do I do this, why isn't this working, WHAT I AM DOING WRONG/RIGHT?

I agree that tuts are important. While I've know about DF for ages, and have roamed the forums for over a year, it wasn't until TinyPirate's tuts come out when I finally was able to get in and start playing (TinyPirate's are worth checking out along with Captnduck's videos).

However the problem with getting Toady to put in actual tuts into the game is that the more time he spends doing these the less time there is dedicated to actual programming of the game itself. Then when the next major change comes out they may all have to change. Even with minor releases a lot may change in the tut.

Solution: As some people have pointed out, having links on the title page, or on the help pages would be a good place to start. Us as the community can help Toady with documentation while he works on the actual game. Another option (if anybody in the forum is willing to work on it) would be an document which has a index of all the commands in the game (See the index for the Java API to get a rough idea of what I mean). As much as I like the DF wiki you don't see a single list of all the different commands in one place. E.g. if you looked at the entry for Dig it would show what menus and keys presses you would need to get to it and what it would do. You would then bundle this help file in with the DF zip or place it as a alternative download.


2) Ascii, and tilesets. There seems to be split ideas about this. Some like ascii, some don't, and some just don't care. Ignoring the aesthetics of the ascii art it gets reduced down to these ideas:

Some people don't know they can change it.
Some will never be able get used to the ascii characters. For some people it's not that they dislike the look, its just that they can't comprehend all the information in that form. But how many people would give up because they take one look and simply go "ugh".

The problem for these people is that don't know they can change it. Some people who get told about DF will never visit this site, they'll never know. Again if there was some sort of first time screen which told you about the tiles it may change some peoples ideas. Having just a link to Bay12 games on the title screen isn't enough to make people come and research.

It's hard to change.
Its not always easy to install a new tileset. Even more so when things start going wrong like the tiles not tiling correctly, or it displaying the wrong tile. Worse you often copy across init/graphics files and lets face it, most people don't take the time, remember or even know to back a copy of DF just in case anything goes wrong.

There should be at least another one included by default.
There are two ways would could do this. First would be to include a fairly complete tileset with instructions on how to switch between the two. Second would be to program DF to be able to recognise different tile sets in the DF folder.


3) UI. Ah the user interface. Where to begin?

Layout
I would like to point that I too play DF on a laptop and that its different from the default layout. This also happens to include international keyboards (and different keyboard layouts such as DVORAK.) Having the ability to change swap between a full keyboard layout and a laptop layout without having to remap the keys (which again involves the editing of raw text files) would be extremely useful. I do know that included with the OpenGL versions Baughn and others are currently working on trying to get input working constantly across all types of keyboards.

Consistency
This is something I've struck and I'll fight through it but having keys which navigate through some menus one way and then another way in another menu is very frustrating. I've been put off not just games, but programs because menus were not consistent in the way they acted and responded.

In fact I cannot stress this point enough. The average player isn't go to stick around if they get frustrated by menus. Just having to over come the ascii and figuring out what to do is hard enough as it is. The Angry Video Game Nerd as a small section in his Metal Gear video which sums up frustrations with inconsistencies.

Lists
Some people have pointed out that it is incredibly hard to pin point things sometimes, and that you have to go scrolling through lists and lists and lists.

Solution: Filters which sort list after selecting all criteria. Custom lists which you can define yourself. The ability to re-order lists (by alphabet, by distance, by quantity, etc.)

Buried by sub-meuns
Where is that command that I want? Damn that's not it. I don't remember.

There is no easy around this but DF has a lot of menus. And a lot of sub-menus. This is a spin of having a complex game and there is no easy fix for this.

SOLUTION FOR ALL: Mock-ups. I know this sounds weird but make mock-ups. Show us how you would want the menu to be laid out. Tree diagrams, pictures, description, mock-ups are a cheap and easy way to refine a menu or interface system WITHOUT having to re-program the game. Best of all it allows two things to be done at once because you don't have to do the extra programming and it gives you a head start on the UI arc.

Also peoples of the community mock-ups you make are an easy way for you to help Toady. You think that you could do a better UI. Draw us a picture, don't hesitate to incorporate other people's ideas. Every refinement is a step towards a better UI.

Example:

I think it's time for a complete interface overhaul, and I suggest something like this:

I think it's all pretty self-explanatory, but if there's any confusion just ask what I meant with a particular item.

This, of course, is merely a rough sketch and is meant to portray the general style of the interface only. Specifics like what tabs will be used and what will be put in which tab should be given a lot of thought to make everything as intuitive as possible.

The easier the UI the more people will play.

Final Point - Observations
From this list I can see a few place to start with helping new players.
1) A first time users screen. Links to tuts and some about tile sets, or again something point to information about tile sets.
2) I don't believe that the UI will be changed anytime soon. I think the best bet would be a manual. Something different from the wiki format, and without tuts or story or anything like that. Just list menus, commands, buildings, professions etc.
3) A printable quick command sheet! Something they can plonk on their desk or however they would want to do it.


I haven't covered everything, but these three things stuck out as the main points.

There are other issues which have been rasied in this thread. Framerate (some of these are being address by Baughn with the OpenGL), the toughness of later years, the very direction which Toady is working on. In regards to these it's an alpha release. You shouldn't except anything to work correctly, and you shouldn't except bugs to be fixed quickly.

The main point everybody seems to agree on in this regards is screw save compatibility and bring on shorter releases.

Just remember for the most part it's one man working on his. He only has so much time to work on everything, but he does have a plan. Lets trust in that plan.

[Shurikane]

Performance issues do it for me.

It's been hammered before, it's annoying, I'm repeating what a ton of people spammed the suggestion forum with - well, here it is again: DF needs multithreading and optimised pathfinding.

I have no clue just how good or bad the current pathing code is.  Though if any improvements to it can be made, it'll be most welcome.  For multicore support, despite the difficulty of it, I suggest it anyway.  DF is simply too CPU-intensive not to consider this eventually, and I feel that the sooner it's done, the better.

Most of my larger-scaled projects take several weeks of play, mostly consisting of leaving the computer idle and coming in to unpause every now and then.  My average FPS count is between 0 and 4 - that is without a siege in progress or traders going to the depot (or worse, both at once!).  Saving my game with roughly 250,000 units of loose stone on the map takes upwards of thirty minutes.  It's really too bad, because I enjoy dealing with fairly large populations, sieges, nobility, big projects and all that jazz... but the average computer simply cannot take that load.  So if I want a quicker FPS, I need to take down the pop, which means I can no longer enjoy "endgame" elements.

UI, I don't care.  I got used to it.  It's got its flaws here and there but the look and feel is currently the least of my worries.  It gets the job done okay.  Not great, but it's not a plague on the face of the earth, so I'm cool with that (although I wish I could tell if a map was windy without having to build a dummy windmill...)

So yeah.  Performance performance performance. 

[Lippy]

I joined just so I could throw in my two cents, since I believe the more people who discuss this, the better it will be for the game. 

As background, I tried Dwarf Fortress for the first time last September.  I played Adventure mode for about 15 minutes before quitting.  I knew I didn't have enough time to devote to learning the UI, and then learning the game's nuances as well.  It wasn't the graphics, since I happily played Nethack and Rouge on unix systems back in the day.  It was the UI that turned me off. 

I picked it up again about a month and a half ago determined to learn.  I played through a few times in Adventure mode until I got accustomed to the controls and look of the game and went on to Dwarf Fortress when I realized there really wasn't all that much to do.

It has been said before, and everyone knows it, but it does bear repeating until we don't have to repeat it anymore.  The UI is atrocious.  It's not a subjective thing, it's objectively bad.  I've learned the keypresses to get to most of the necessary menus, but everything is so disconnected, that I spend a lot of my time menu surfing.  Some screens use /,* to page up and down, others use 9,3.  Some use enter to turn on and off options, others use -,+.  It's too unintuitive. 

Consolidate as best as you can.  Combine and link menus and objects.  I should be able to click (mouse or keyboard click) on a dwarf or object and have access to everything about it right there.  Clicking on an object/creature brings up the look information, which also gives the option to change to that object/creatures q or v menu, and the q or v menus gives you the options to go back to the k menu, etc. 

So the UI was the biggest turnoff as a newbie.  I know that people learn to deal with it, and it's bearable and they don't have much of a problem anymore, but I think they just need something better to make them look at the current iteration and vomit.

My second problem is that it's been about 6 weeks since I stared playing Dwarf Fortress and I'm pretty much done with it.   I've made two fortresses and got them into the economy stage.  On the frist one, once the framerate dropped to 10, I stopped and started another one and got it up and running faster, and had a bit more fun since I knew what to plan for, but had to stop again when the framerate became unbearable.  It became too much of a waiting game.   I tried starting a few more times, but just got bored with it.  I did have fun, but I was easily turned off by the drop in playability towards the end. 

I see the potential, but I can see how long I'll have to wait for these problems to be tackled.  I'll probably wait for the next few versions to be released before jumping back in, not wanting to become accustomed to the way the game is, and then waiting for several months/years for fixes.    A lot of the reasons 90% of the people run away are because the game is still in Alpha and does have a long way to go with optimization, gameplay, tweaks, bugfixes,  etc.   When the game is finally where Toady wants it to be and the only changes will be to simple gameplay tweaks, balancing, and bugfixes, I think I'll come back to give it another go.  But I do have a strange feeling that is going to be quite a long way off. 

[Sowelu]

Fiddling with the init files is a turn-off, even if it's just having to increase the resolution/gridsize to the point where it's usable.

Having no real sense of how well I'm doing is kind of a turn-off.  It would be nice to have more to measure against.

The ease and arbitracity (is that a word?) of food gathering and fortress design is starting to turn into a turnoff; it's too hard if you don't have water and don't know how to irrigate, but it's ridiculously simple if you have soil.  It was Fun in 2d, and worth figuring out, but it seems a lot less interesting now.  Figuring out how to survive the first winter used to be a major part of the early game, but now there's no big first 'push' to make where you can say "Oh I get it now".

The lack of any real drive like there was in 2d is also disheartening.  No push to go deeper for better metals.  Heck, no guarantees you'll have any metals worth finding at all.  I think it would REALLY help to bring back the 'ideal site' list from 2d...a list of places that have good metals, or at least good layers for them.  Give the player a list of 20 sites that have at least four different metals, some form of water, and some form of magma.  Tell the player what they can expect in each of those sites (IE "This site has copper and iron, and you can find a river underground on the north side").  That would REALLY help.

It seems like there's no big challenges that are involuntarily foisted upon you.  That might be a good thing but I'm not sure.  Invasions through wells and stuff...chasm invasions...River flooding was annoying but I kind of miss it...Having to bridge the chasm, having to build a road instead of just doing a little smoothing...And always having to go deeper to get better stuff!  Those drove the player, and they don't anymore.  So I kind of have this general malaise that's stuck around since the start of 3d.  I can build megaconstructions now, but that's almost the only thing I feel like I can do!

[Guilliman]

I play DF every few months due to the way it has the ability to totally piss me off and be a huge timewaist. (The game idea is pretty damn amazing and I love the depth of it though)

Going to format this in small bullet points, I think everyone will know what I mean by each point.

-Construction sites, if only that could be done like designating. Huge pain to build a multilevel wall /tower /castle.
-Constructed walls/buildings- corners. Oh god the time waist.
-Dinning hall considered Legendary way to easy
-Tantrum/depression spiral, once it start it wont stop. /abandon fortress and loose weeks of gametime because some dwarf decided it would be fun to fish in magma (not really, you get the idea)
-Traps
-Boring wildlife
-Boring invasions (orc mod added fun again, traps ruin it tho )


There's two things I want above all others

-Multi-thread all path finding code. The biggest drops in fps for me are stairs, corners and high z levels (so the more fun the map, the more it is slowed down)

-Ability to assign a unique graphic to every single item. With this I mean, every dwarf profession and sex can be assigned a unique art, as well as animals and items. So Swords look like sword, spears like spears etc. Providing we make the art our selfs. People can even make "newbie" friendly art pack then. Ascii is fun, it's part of the game, but It would be nice if we had the full choice

[MrWiggles]

As a veteran Dwarf Fortress player, the most distressing thing about DF is the dearth of late-game content or challenge.  An entire fortress can survive on two 5x5 plots of plump helmets, and goblins show up once in a blue moon to damage your framerate much more than your dwarves or fortress.

The most frustrating thing is Toady's development process.  Slaves to Armok II is rapidly becoming the new Slaves to Armok I, in which feature bloat is given priority over core gameplay ideas.  Consider this before tracking individual dwarf genealogy and beard hairs:  Is the game fun to play?  Is there a point to continue playing?  Is the player ever challenged?

The thing that irritates me most is that all of the advances made to DF ever since it went 3D have been primarily focused around making a big mess of Mad Libs that you'll never pay any attention to.  Dwarf religions, preferences, personalities, none of these influence gameplay.  Now we are being treated to a six-month dev arc about making the already complicated wound system even more complicated.  It does not make good sense to add all this fluff while the game itself is so boring compared to what it was in 2D.

How many threads are there about 'seeing the dwarfs make, or do odd things?' A decent slice of the fun seem to be watching the dwarfs do odd stuff. And this odd stuff throws a monkey wrench into the whole of the operation.

[G-Flex]

I've said it before and I'm saying it again now: Anyone who doesn't think that civilization entity definitions, dwarven personality, religion, etc. have anything to do with the development of the actual gameplay has absolutely no idea where the game is going in the first place.

[Sowelu]

Saving my game with roughly 250,000 units of loose stone on the map takes upwards of thirty minutes.

I just gotta say.  250,000 units of loose stone?  You could only get that much if you mined out seven WHOLE z-levels in their entirety on a 4x4 map.  Not saying you shouldn't do that, but, geez.  If it's just the endgame stuff you want, you are still Doing It Wrong because you do not need to mine that much stone to get there!  Let the game get optimized, yes, but seriously...

[jaked122]

I like the graphics, the complexity, but I'm pissed as it keeps on crashing on my fortresses

[Rysith]

Repeating what has already been said, I'd have to say it's the end-game. The lack of challenge, coupled with the slow rate of progress in general, makes larger forts much less attractive than small, struggling, fast fortresses. The late-game introductions (nobles and the economy, since I've already got sieges starting at 7 dwarves) don't do much to increase challenge, and when a dozen soldiers can kill a mounted 80-orc siege without casualties in melee, the sieges aren't much of a challenge either. Some suggestions:

Multithread, multithread, multithread. It's going to be a pain, I know. Even if you can only do it for the most processing-intensive tasks (flows? pathfinding? Both of those should be fairly easy to multithread, since it's a lot of independant things figuring out where to go), you'd see a huge performance boost. More performance means less time between interesting events, and less time waiting as the 30,000th masterwork limestone idol is produced.

More siege options. The siege AI is really mind-numbingly dumb, and (particularly late-game) consists mostly of throwing untrained opponents with inferior equipment into a finely-honed killing machine.
 - Having sieges of more than 80 + mounts would be great.
 - Having the quality of sieges go up, rather than down, with time, would be great. When I hit 200 dwarves, having the average sieger be proficient with weapon/shield/wrestling would make it much harder to just mow through them with champions. Given the training times that dwarves exhibit, it doesn't seem that unreasonable for the goblins to spend a bit of time making sure that their army knows more than just which end of a sword to hold.
 - Having the squads gather and attack en mass, or even just all spawn in the same place, would be great. Having them wander in one squad at a time isn't great, and it makes the largest challenge of fending them off timing the slaughter so that half the squads don't just flee before I can get dwarves to them.
 - Having goblins able to deal with walls, bridges, moats, and traps would be great, even if it was by chopping down available trees to build floors/ramps/whatever. Bonus points if they could recognize the single-tile twisting paths of death and avoid them somehow.

All of that said, I love the amount of detail that is present, and I can (mostly) solve my issues with end-game by starting a new fortress.

[Jiri Petru]

There's been a lot of suggestions to include wiki in the game or to to link it instead of having your own help. Please don't!

While I agree that link to wiki is much better than nothing (and it would help the game in its present form), I'd prefer to have Toady or Three Toe-written help.

Here's why:

Wiki spoils too much information. Not only on pages labeled with the "spoilers" tag, but everywhele. Take goblins, for example. If I were a new player, this is what I'd need to know:
- goblins are green and evil
- they are known to steal babies and adopt them. Sometimes you can meet a dwarf that shaves (!) and acts like a goblin.
- after a few months, you can expect small goblin ambushes and thieves. When your fortress grows bigger, they will eventually besiege you with an army. Be prepared!
- you can't wear their stuff

Aside of this, the wiki also mentions that:
- there are master thieves who can avoid traps
- goblins can ride beak dogs
- if you start on top of a goblin fort, don't bring an anvil
- is it good to chain dogs at the entrance, they will catch thieves
- (if you clink at some link, you can read that the sieges start once you have population of 80, etc.)

There are all spoilers that ruin the enjoyment of a game. Experiencing these things by yourself is a great thing. Coming with your own strategies to deal with ploblems (the dog&chain thing) is essential. Don't ruin the game by including wiki in it or by preferring it over less specific help.

When I started playing DF, I had to use wiki because I didn't understand a thing. Also, I am the type of player who needs to understand game mechanics. Having some kind of "save to read" help would make my playing experience much more enjoyable.

[tourettedog]

I've said it before and I'm saying it again now: Anyone who doesn't think that civilization entity definitions, dwarven personality, religion, etc. have anything to do with the development of the actual gameplay has absolutely no idea where the game is going in the first place.

They may have something to do with the gameplay, but it's not gameplay at a level of detail that a lot of people here are interested in.  I've got no interest in a game where I have to pick just the cutest little dwarf with the sweetest personality to be the captain of the guard and dressing him up in a lovely *Pig tail dress* that's dyed his very most favorite of all colors because it'll give some tiny bonus to the mood of my fort.  I want a game to play, not a game that half plays itself based on thousands of behind-the-scenes variables and waits for me to catch up with how clever it's being. 

Sending out war parties to sack goblin forts?  Megafauna that I can capture and send along with the war parties?  Actual diplomacy options, like asking the goblins to join up and kick the shit out of the elves?  Being able to embargo a city and have them cave to my demands because they want stone trumpets just that much?  Slave trading and exchanging prisoners of war?  I can get solidly behind every one of those, because they let me interact with the game, as opposed to reading pages of DF mad libs to find the one entry that lets me figure out -- five minutes after the fact -- why some otherwise inexplicable event happened. 

As a side note, if even one of those things popped up in a future release -- assuming I'm still following development by then -- I'll probably kick another $50+ into the kitty. 

Now explain to me why teeth, beard layers and the hyper-detailed physical properties of the haft of the sword of the third '@' from the left are critical to any of those?  Many of these details are probably going to have to turn into init options so that computers don't get choked on all the calculations anyway, why not pick the ones that are headed that way, put in the placeholder code now, add some fun stuff to lure back the people on the non-simulationist side of the fence, and then go back and add the detailed stuff later?

[Sowelu]

Your war parties and stuff DIRECTLY follow from a lot of the combat updates in the upcoming release.  Complain a little less, the stuff you want is coming--it'll be a while yet, but it's not all "simulationist" stuff.

Besides, remember that devs have to have fun too, and that means writing the code THEY want sometimes...

flows? pathfinding? Both of those should be fairly easy to multithread, since it's a lot of independant things figuring out where to go

fairly easy to multithread

*gets out the beating stick*  Not that multithreading isn't necessary, but those words BOTHER me.

[Shurikane]

Saving my game with roughly 250,000 units of loose stone on the map takes upwards of thirty minutes.

I just gotta say.  250,000 units of loose stone?  You could only get that much if you mined out seven WHOLE z-levels in their entirety on a 4x4 map.  Not saying you shouldn't do that, but, geez.  If it's just the endgame stuff you want, you are still Doing It Wrong because you do not need to mine that much stone to get there!  Let the game get optimized, yes, but seriously...

Mountain Audit challenge on a 5x5.

6 levels done.  7 levels to go.

Computer overheated twice since I've begun this crazy quest.