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[tengil]

The building menu could use some sub-menus to reduce the clutter, and remove the need for pointless scrolling.

For instance, all items classed as furniture could be placed in their own sub-menu. The same could be done with traps (including the animal trap), justice items (cages, restraints) and other constructions (bridges, supports, wells etc).
This would also allow for more logical hotkey combinations, like T>traps etc.  

Keep up the good work!

[ September 19, 2006: Message edited by: tengil ]

[Aquillion]

I can understand the reasoning here, but I don't think most of the suggested categores would work...

The reason the animal 'trap' isn't listed with other traps is because it doesn't really behave like them at all.  At the moment, all the traps in the trap menu:

* Cost a mechanism to produce,
* Use the mechanics skill to install,
* Are intended to stop dangerous enemies,
and go off automatically if an applicable opponent steps on them.

Animal traps meet none of these requirements.  They technically have the word 'trap' in their name, yes, but that's all.  Lumping them in with the genuine traps wouldn't help the player, and would actually make things more confusing in many cases (since new players would be lead to expect that animal traps work like, say, cage or stone-fall traps, when they don't at all.)

The existing traps and mechanisms category really ought have a hotkey available for it, though. Can you define one with key configurations?  I forget.

'Justice items' covers exactly two things, as far as I can tell.  It isn't worth having a submenu for that unless more will be produced.

'Other constructions' is too vague, probably wouldn't fit on the sidebar menu, and wouldn't let the player know what's inside.  Hmm, perhaps we could instead have a category for 'masonworks', covering everything (except the workshop) that is built using the masonry skill?

Furniture might work, and would remove a lot of the clutter.  Would doors be classified as furniture, though?  What about floodgates?  Coffins?  Technically even cages and restraints go into the furniture stockpile...

[daveybaby]

Some other possible categories:

Kennels, IMHO, should be under workshops.

Furniture could include chairs, tables, beds, cabinets, and possibly armour and weapon racks.

Possibly group roads, bridges, aqueducts and channels together (since theyre all build the same way).

Or maybe group water elements together, i.e. channels, floodgates, wells, aqueducts.

Maybe add rename 'container' submenu to the more general 'storage', and add cabinets

Or weaponry: armour rack, weapon rack, archery target, siege engines.

Lots of possibilities for tidying things up - there arent really any perfect schemes, but its not like the UI is perfectly consistent as it is.

[tengil]

quote:Originally posted by Aquillion:
<STRONG>words</STRONG>

I never really intended for my suggestions to be actual category names, just an idea of what you could group together in order to defeat the almighty clutter. I'm sure someone else can come up with better category groups and names...

I still think the animal trap could go under   Traps, though.
Sure, it doesnt offer the same functions or even have the same requirements as regular traps, but it's still A trap.  

[ September 20, 2006: Message edited by: tengil ]