Dwarf Fortress > DF Suggestions

Few suggestions (building walls, templates?)

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Andir:
Hello everyone, and I can't say how sad I am that I once downloaded this, and bypassed it as some cheap game! (sorry)...Anyway.  I built up my new fort.  It's not much to look at cause I wasn't planning on living.  Anyway.  I have no issues building underground and thank the stars I have a G15 for macro-ing build commands, but my issue comes when you get outside.  This is one layer: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-2212-oiledsqueezed   (level 15)Sorry, for the crappy quality, I had to fit a bunch of screens together, and I wasn't about to pretty it up for this suggestion.Anyway:
1.  Would it be possible to (and I don't know your code) create a generic class for drawing out build queues?  Think of it like this.  Draw out walls (and floors... man my hand hurts after two days of sequenced button presses.  I'll get into this more) just like you do with digging.  Straight lines or boxes.  Maybe even extend it into 3D digging, so that if you z change your dig, it will open up the floors as well.***  (You'd also have to AI the dwarfs to dig from top down.)*** This would have been real nice with a flag to turn off floor destruction when I built by underground resource towers to hold all the stone.  Yes, there's more stone UNDER all that.  Eight levels worth.  (well, not entirely, but I built resource "silos" under the workshop rooms.  You can see one of my shop rooms for processing metals on the bottom left.  6 shops, and under that is 5+ levels of metal ore.)  It would have also been nice to save custom piles.2.  Create "material" templates.  When I was building the walls, one by one... I couldn't macro it because the material selection would change as I worked along the wall.  I'm guessing it picks the closest material?  It would have been nice to say: "Build all [shops, construction, etc.] with ____ ore."  Or even better, offer an option to "hide" certain ores?  Maybe the draw construction would alleviate some of the tedium and it might not be needed. /shrug3.  Oh, for Heaven's sake... pick a key pair to use for paging.  The build pages use one set, the market uses another...  much of this would be alleviated by dropping the "character like" interface, but I have a feeling I'm going to get flamed for that suggestion.4.  Fill orders.  I don't mean like filling a list of orders, but say, you draw an outline of dig orders.  You select an internal block and say, "Dig fill 2D" and it automatically changes all the blocks up to the current order type.  like a paint bucket.  Of course, you would want an "undo" feature in case you messed up royally.  I don't think that's a terrible suggestion (undo) but again, I don't know your code and how your algorithms work.5.  Snake orders.  To work with the above or even better.  "Start ___" / "Stop ___".  I target a point.  Hit "d", "d", "s" (for snake/start/stop) and draw out my order.  This of course would also work with walls, floors, piles... and it would all work the same.  (Though, I'd imagine your code is pretty gnarly right about now and I'm asking for some total rewrites of sections.  Generics are a spectacular thing, IMO.)6.  Min flags.  Say my stock of alcohol gets too low.  Pause, alert, act.  Again, same thing here... this should work with any pile.7.  I love the search filter option in the market... but I wish it was available on the unit screen, and the overview tabs for filtering resources.  This may not be needed of course, if you had...8.  Interface stacked resources.  While it would be nice to find a way to stack all that ore efficiently in the map without having to block it all or turn it into goods, it would just be nice to be able to compress the screens to stack all the resources when you don't care how far away they are.  Maybe even have it prompt for a count, defaulting to the closest resource, shift to invert(?)I'm sure I'm missing something... but that should be good for now.
(edit: Thanks for the upload link!  that would have been a hell of a lot easier the first time!)[ March 02, 2008: Message edited by: Andir ]

PTTG??:
For future reference, try using the export feature on the <esc> menu and put it on the DFMA (Dwarf Fortress Map Archive) That will make posting these sorts of images a lot easier.1: That is a popular request- mass building requests will show up sometime.2: Yep. that too.3: Well, the keys are for both single steps and ten-steps.4: I'd say undo would be great too.5: Snake orders? What's that?6-8: The interface is a relatively low priority. Rest assured, these will, probably, maybe, might eventually get into Dwarf Fortress

Andir:
Phew... thanks for that link   :p  wish I would have known soonerSnake orders.  Think of it like Tron or Boa from the old days.  You hit start and wherever you move your target, the game queues up another order of the same type of order in the new spot you move to.  Like you want to dig a curvy line you can start, move up, left, up, up, right, up, up, left, stop and it would queue dig jobs for each spot your target "walked" through.  It would be a lot easier than drawing 3 separate lines for each upward traversal.If you look at level 16, you'll see what I was talking about with floors.  I had to set each one of those tiles by hand.  It's not finished yet, but man, what a tedius job.  Makes me want to stay underground.[ March 02, 2008: Message edited by: Andir ]

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