Complete UI Overhaul - Githubissues

DFHack / dfhack

Memory hacking library for Dwarf Fortress and a set of tools that use it

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Complete UI Overhaul #880

Open expwnent opened 8 years ago

expwnent commented 8 years ago

The main complaint of people who quit Dwarf Fortress early is that the user interface is too hard to learn. We have the ability to completely rewrite it from scratch using vmethod interposing. Technically we can do opengl calls to do virtually anything but it would be best to make the graphics ncurses style at least at first. In particular we should overhaul the military viewscreen, because this confuses people. We should consider expanding manipulator to include more features from Dwarf Therapist.

The limiting factor is not technical limitations, it's the design. I don't know how to design a better user interface. We should consider recruiting some people from the forums to help with the design.

warmist commented 8 years ago

What about having some sort of infrastructure that allows to easily customize UI? E.g. we have a plugin or script that get/sets the relevant data and then another one that draws it. Then it would be very easy to choose the second one and have many different interfaces.

expwnent commented 8 years ago

That would help but we'd still need good defaults.

ar-qun commented 8 years ago

How about making an API instead and then make a "reference" UI for it? If you make an API you will open and opportunity for other people to create their own GUI, including web interfaces, multi user interfaces, etc.

Possibilities are limitless in this case. If this API can be then referenced by different languages it would be even greater.

warmist commented 8 years ago

In a sense mifki has an api for most of df (though for last major df version) because of df remote he did. Maybe we can learn something from that?

expwnent commented 8 years ago

I think making it good has to happen before making it customizable.

ar-qun commented 8 years ago

The idea of making an api is as follows:

you only need to provide an exemplary implementation the fan base well do the rest.
it is easy to make it asynchronous and you do not have to do that yourself
so people playing df online through web interface will soon become reality
there is nothing more permanent then temporary.

expwnent commented 8 years ago

Collaboration is not magic. DF doesn't have enough players that we can just throw a tool at the fanbase and expect them to make something great out of it.