Thanks so much for posting these. I did the first one last night and I’m looking forward to working my way though some more this week!
Yikes.
Well, forget the graphics (there’s actually something kinda cute about the little ASCII-like tiles, though better graphics and smooth zooming would be much better).
It’s the interface. There’s no reason at all that literally every bit of detail couldn’t remain with a far superior interface. You want to track teeth? Fine! Right-click a dwarf, select “examine” from the menu, and you get a menu on the side with buttons, tabs, whatever the hell modern interface analogy you want to use to examine physical attributes, religion, clan history, whatever.
In fact, a really good modern mouse-driven interface and deeply integrated context sensitivity would expose more of the neat features and details of Dwarf Fortress.
But Dwarf Fortress is like an AS/400 terminal - Once you get a handle on the controls it’s much more effecient than using a mouse.
No, it isn’t. It’s not even close. Clicking a half dozen keys or more to select a dwarf, pick jobs, scroll to the list, click to select a new job, etc, is way, way, way, WAAAY less effecient than context click cascading menu where you could simply deselect/select a job.
Command line controls are great when you can boil things to one or two key strokes. Keyboard interfaces suck for even remotely sophisticated GUIs, particularly where you want to see information rather than give commands (quick keys are great for commands).
My thoughts exactly.
That’s the thing - I rarely have to scroll the list of commands. I’m basically hamming the commands as fast as the game can present them to me. I mean, half a dozen keys at typing speed is way faster than using a mouse to select six options from a menu, if you know the commands. If you have to stop and scroll and browse, yes, obviously that’s going to take longer. And there are so many commands and menus in DF that it can take awhile to get a hang of, but it sounds like you’re assuming that if these guys build a mouse-based interface it’d be amazingly streamlined. I think it’d be just as chaotic and deep, but now you’re moving slower.
I’m not saying it’s not a huge barrier to entry, it took me forever to get into Dwarf Fortress, but once you get the hang of the interface and the commands it’s brilliant. The game is so insane and deep and throws so much information and so many tasks and options at you that playing with a mouse at the tail of a game would be quite difficult, I think.
It is the same argument in WoW or RTS games.
Hotkeys are the key to speed, not clicking.
LOL. Good one. :)
Too true unfortunately…
And yet, nobody would ever argue that an RTS should be made to ONLY be playable with hotkeys. At least, nobody sane.
Yep, keys are great for giving commands, hence the reason hot keys live in every GUI. Keys suck for seeing information. I want to see what a dwarfs jobs are, you can’t get that easily with keys. The job list alone scrolls longer than the visible space allowed, so you have to scroll up and down. I want to see a dwarf’s health, more keys. I want to see what’s in a box, a bunch of keys. Whereas I should just be able to hover over the square with the box and see what’s in the box or hover over a dwarf and see his stats or context click a dwarf to assign a new job. Or hover over a workshop to see what’s in the queue.
There are so many GUI ways to convey information that key driving GUIs don’t do well and with DF being a simulation, much of the game is about synthesizing information to figure out what commands to give. Keys also rule for the 20% of things you do frequently, but suck for the other 80% of things you do rarely and can’t remember the keystrokes for.
Seeing and assigning dwarf jobs, which I ended up doing frequently to get people working on priority items, is a royal pain with keys. You have to scroll down, hit space I think it was to select/deselect, over the dozens of jobs. There are no quick key strokes for that. Pain in the freaking ass. Same for assigning things into workshop queues.
I grew up on Unix, I played nethack, conquest, all sorts of ascii based key-driven games many of the names I can’t even remember. MUDs, Mucks too. I also program software for a living on products that have both scripting and GUI versions. Keys are great for some things, but suck for others.
In your browser, you can use the tab key to navigate through the hyperlinks on the screen. Do you do that or do you move the mouse and click? I don’t care how fast you can hit TAB, the mouse is the superior way to do that action.
Most sites I visit have a different content layout every ten minutes. If I knew I always wanted the fifth link, I probably would hit tab.
Regarding the workshop queues - I haven’t played DF in awhile but I thought you could just key what you wanted…I don’t remember having to select with space.
This argument has been going on for awhile, though. The ASCII vs. graphics one, too. The interface is atrocious, it really is. Even with a key-only system it could be done much better. That said, if these guys build a mouse menu system, I think it’s actually be worse.
I’d have no problem playing a 2D RTS game that had a simple tile system with just the keyboard.
There’s really nothing in DF that makes me long for a mouse. I do wish the keyboard UI was more streamlined, but my number one complaint is that the UI doesn’t contain any good way to manage large numbers of dwarves. Dwarf Manager is a great patch on this, but I do most of my playing on a Mac, so that doesn’t help me much.
There’s a feature request out there to put guilds back into the game, and hang Dwarf Manager-style functionality off of them. I like that idea.
While I understand the argument for key commands having the potential to be faster than nested mouseover elements, I don’t think the key commands are all that logical to begin with because they don’t seem consistent. I think the whole interface GUI pretty much needs to be restructured into something more logical, and I do find it tedious to not be able to use the mouse to scroll around the world screen, but instead have to tap arrow keys to get to the square I want.
I’d love that, but I think most people would stay away.
Calistas your tutorial has gotten me to spend more time with Dwarf Fortress today than in all previous attempts to get into this game combined. My hat is off to you, sir.
One question - I misplaced a bed where I meant to put a door. Is there a way to remove (or just move) the bed? I’m sure there is, but I’m afraid to try to find it myself. :)
You can already do all of that in a good 1-3 seconds, more if you have to run around searching for a dwarf but a mouse wouldn’t help there.
Want to see what a dwarfs jobs are? v-p-l, he just needs to make the lists increase with the view screen size. If you prefer a mouse based system you can use Dwarf Manager which lets you see the labors for large masses of dwarves which is really the part I care about. None of that additional functionality is dependent upon the mouse.
Want to see his health? v-w, takes me less than a second
Want to see whats in a square? k-hover over square
Want to see whats in a construction? t
Want to see whats queued up in a workshop? q
Want to queue an item? a-item shortcut for example a-a, a-b, a-G
Want to queue up lots of an item? a-a-r
Scrolling around for me takes almost no time as well - shift+directional arrow
q, cursor over bed, x
You may have to assign someone after that to place the bed somewhere else, though.
Do the above and wait, the bed will get returnedto a furniture stockpile and then later you can re-specify where put it :)