Dwarf Fortress Development

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

by dopu • 10 years ago

235 193 10 years ago

bay12games.com

AustinG082• 10 years ago

No offense but trying to read a list with that background burns the eyes

jessaustin2• 10 years ago

This game may not be for you.

Joof4• 10 years ago

Sorry; many are not acquainted with dwarf fortress. This is Tarn's style -- no style and all substance. It's worked for him for a long time because the substance is so substantial.

He's developed a procedural story generator; it doesn't look pretty on the outside, but it's become his life's work and inspired generations of developers.

The visual style of the list may be closer to an academic's webpage (he is a math PhD after all), but for fans of the game, it's a blueprint for a masterpiece.

I personally like the way he designs; write a story then build the game until it could potentially be generated by the game.

prawn• 10 years ago

If he was all substance and no style, wouldn't he have a plain background colour that was about legibility, and inline any necessary images?

This strikes me as a particular, intentional style.

oscilloscope• 10 years ago

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never brewed fine wine out of plump helmets, never carved the history of your race into the stone wall of the great hall, never scrambled after the goblin attack to remove decaying bodies of slain brethren as the last survivor goes mad with grief and purple miasma fills the mine.

cryptoz• 10 years ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I agree. Merely opening that page made my eyes and head hurt immediately so I had to close it. I get that the game isn't for me, or for you, but it's a valid thing to say. I have a minor headache because of this page, and while that's not something I would normally complain about, I think it's a perfectly valid thing to say.

aeontech5• 10 years ago

I think he's being downvoted because the observation does not say anything about the contents of the article linked. If there is nothing substantive to contribute to the discussion, better to say nothing.

AustinG082• 10 years ago

I find the responses to my comment pretty great. I find the comment that "the game is not for me" particularly amusing. This game is right up my alley. I knew I would get downvoted for posting what I posted, but I feel it should be said. Contrary to what the other guy says, I feel it's a valid contribution in itself. I get that the background is the game. I get that it is a brilliant game. I get that it is a cult classic. I don't care if nobody cares. It is a fucking terrible background to read text on.

Kapura• 10 years ago

This game simulates at a granularity that is light-years beyond anything else that exists, so it's only fitting that the dev notes should contain goals which are absolutely impossible to imagine in any other game.

outworlder2• 10 years ago

Indeed. From engravers drawing rats on a noble's bedroom walls because they dislike said noble (who hates rats), to cats getting drunk, because dwarfs moving around would spill their booze, which would get into the cat's pawns, who would subsequently lick them... the level of detail is outstanding.

Natsu2• 10 years ago

It's funny how you can look at a simple item on that list, say, 'randomly generated musical instruments' and suddenly imagine a magma-powered tuba that menaces with spikes of microcline and which has an engraving of a dwarf and dwarves in orthoclase and rat leather relating to the founding of Doomedice on the Forgotten Glaciers of Terror in 1387...

yaur• 10 years ago

Where it falls down is that none of that has any meaning. There is no context to explain why Doomdice or the Forgotten Glaciers of Terror are significant, nor what was going on in 1387 that caused dwarves to settle in such an inhospitable place.

BasDirks• 10 years ago

That's where this magical thing of imagination comes in and takes over. Dwarf Fortress is the gaps in the world that it presents.

cjpa• 10 years ago

If you go read the Legend Mode, you'll find mentions of Doomdice and you can look up quickly what happened in 1387. Everything you find on artwork, is either related to the preferences of the dwarf who created the item, or to some of their known history.

grenoire• 10 years ago

It all has meaning. It's not just a RNG picking off words from a list and putting them together. All created masterpieces refer to an actual event in the history. All worlds have full histories with wars, civilisations rising and collapsing, megabeasts destroying pregenerated fortresses etc.

Natsu2• 10 years ago

Well, usually the player would know why they settled in a haunted glacier, but masochism and insanity are two popular reasons for doing such a thing. Usually the player's imagination helps create the story at that point.

You can find a fort almost exactly like that in Roomcarnage:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=139393.0

volak• 10 years ago

I love the game and have played it many times over the last 5 or so years... But does anyone else feel kind of betrayed/insulted that the project is not open source? The team is mostly just supporting 1 or 2 core devs who take years to release new features - and for a while now tools like dfhack are basically required to play the game.

The game has a huge community of fans but no one can contribute in any meaningful way. I dunno I find it mildly frustrating.

jessaustin2• 10 years ago

I suspect this is the sort of project that would die from design-by-committee injuries, if it were exposed to them.

Raticide• 10 years ago

I don't think he even uses source control, so I imagine the code is not the cleanest.

snerbles• 10 years ago

I wonder how many self-conscious developers are out there, that don't release their source code for fear it having glaring flaws that will bring the wrath of their peers upon them.

yoklov• 10 years ago

This is likely accurate. If you look online you can find the original source to LCS[0], one of his older games.

It's basically a single 37kloc file.

Now, ... I'm not really one to say that you should keep all your to one function/class/whatever, i can appreciate the times when splitting things up does more harm than good, and I'm totally comfortable managing a 3-5kloc file.

But goddamn, 37kloc in one file is pushing it.

[0] http://www.bay12games.com/lcs/ (check 3.05, not sure if the later ones got cleaned up, i remember there was some effort by a couple devs to do so but... i don't know how far they got)

oh_sigh• 10 years ago

The problem, I think, is that these two guys have a vision, and their cultural or technological decisions are all driven solely towards achieving that vision, and nothing else(as I see it). There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, you might argue that it is only through their unrelenting march towards their vision that they were able to not only create such a game as DF, but attract such a devoted following.

zhemao2• 10 years ago

Open source doesn't really preclude that. They would still have control over committer rights. There are plenty of open source projects in which the majority of code and decisions are made by a handful of core contributors.

newobj• 10 years ago

Yeah, really upset that they won't put my ideas in the next Star Wars movie too.

AlexeyBrin2• 10 years ago

But does anyone else feel kind of betrayed/insulted that the project is not open source?

Honestly, I find it hard to comprehend how much entitlement your comment suggests. A game is a work of art for his creator(s) and it is their own prerogative if they release the source code or not.

I can understand someone that wishes a game to be open source for study or moding purposes. But insulted by a game that doesn't align with my political agenda/view is a bit too much.

aeontech5• 10 years ago

I know they don't want to open source it, but I wonder if they would be amenable to having a volunteer who would help organize and push the code into a version control system hosted on their private server.

In an interview I read, Tarn said something to the effect of that "he was not interested in learning about version control and it would just be a distraction that would take away time from the important work, since the way he works has worked for him for many years".

I can't help but think that first, it's a bit dangerous way to work, all "past, current and future" state of the project is only in his head and if he happens to become indisposed, the project is very very likely to die (though I suppose there would be hardcore fans willing to reverse engineer it)...

Second, it's a loss of historical record... imagine in fifty years historians wanting to analyze the project's history, it would be so much more useful to have a granular history instead of just a blob of files scattered across thousands of directories...

Just look at Unix History repository here for example: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo - I think there's immense long term value in preserving this kind of archival history.

kiba• 10 years ago

You aren't going to convince an idiosyncratic developer to release the source code and do all the other things that make a good developer a good developer.

I see it as a double edged sword. It's good we get DF, but at the same time, DF itself is a huge mess.

vacri3• 10 years ago

Thomas Biskup of ADoM said that he'd not publicly release the ADoM code for two reasons. First, people would trawl it for the secrets (discovery is a big part of the ADoM experience). Secondly, he was embarrassed about the state of his code and didn't want to let people see...

He did do a re-release recently that I funded on $kickstarter_analogue, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet (and it's been a while...)

aeontech5• 10 years ago

Yeah, I understand they wouldn't be convinced to release the source, but that's why I am thinking about a middle ground, to have someone volunteer to help organize it, while still keeping the code private.

Though I guess there's the question of trust... would have to be someone they knew very well.

TillE• 10 years ago

Dwarf Fortress desperately needs multithreading and optimization for data locality. Without that it is permanently limited in scope.

But it will never ever happen. Forget it. Anyone dreaming about open source DF should go make their own game. And I mean that sincerely: Dwarf Fortress is very good, but there are even greater things that will come. Build those things!

RangerScience5• 10 years ago

This has somewhat happened a lot. To an extent, the entire crafting genre owes itself to DF, which inspired Minecraft, and between the two of them, a genre was born...

However, as yet, no-one's come close to the epicness of the generated world and story, even if they've made progress on the core gameplay.

dave_sullivan• 10 years ago

Throwing it out there, but if anyone is interested in building an open source DF, email me. It's been a side project of mine (more specifically, the story/history generation components) but I haven't pursued it as much as I'd like.

simbalion3• 10 years ago

There are already games that are better than DF available today. Several of them, some 3D, some 2D, all of them are superior games.

The only thing DF has going for it is the depth of detail. That is a significant feature, but some day one of these superior games is going to have that too.

I am a huge DF fan, I wish they'd hire an art developer or something. It's just ridiculous.

cothalesr• 10 years ago

It seems that the project is now dead, sadly. But you could easily pick up where they left off since it's open source.

http://www.goblincamp.com/

em3rgent0rdr2• 10 years ago

Second that mulithreading and optimization. My computer is 8-core, but each core is only maxes at 1.8 Ghz, which prevents me from playing on large maps, which basically caused me to give up on the game. There are tons of smart people out there who would gladly volunteer time to improve the code if it was open source.

intended2• 10 years ago

Dwarf fortress is the Bloomberg of gaming - used by a niche set of users, uglier than sin, non trivial entry barriers, and a focus on depth and breadth of services which are unmatched.

And in the same way, they are honey traps for young coders who don't get the sheer amount of different games which are working together here. (With the commensurate gripes about interfaces as well)

stefs2• 10 years ago

i think the type of programmer who fusses over data locality and multi threading isn't the same one who happily implements sand in the eye making the creature blind (until it's washed out by rain or splashing fluids).

zygomega• 10 years ago

It might start off with version control, but it would then end with us gulping plump helmet slurpees watching the latest cgi DF-Marvel tie in at the local megaplex. Leave the brothers be, and let future historians earn their pay.

dandelany• 10 years ago

Version control and "mainstreamness" seem pretty orthogonal to me.

zhemao2• 10 years ago

Wow，I've heard slippery slope arguments before, but this definitely takes the cake.

Joof4• 10 years ago

I'm sure he keeps regular backups. There's also his brother. If Tarn dies, his brother will probably release the code or have fans help recover it.

db48x8• 10 years ago

Actually, he's done that in the past. He let some folks from the DF forums have part of the source code, specifically the part which uses OpenGL to draw the graphics. They were able to improve it so that it was much more efficient, and so that it could use TrueType fonts. The results were quite successful, in that the graphics now take up much less of the game's time, and TrueType fonts can make the game much more approachable.

On the other hand, Tarn has said that he now no longer understands this part of the code. If he ever needs to modify it he'll either have to learn how it works from scratch, or farm the work out to the community again. Since he has no desire to become a project manager, he's unlikely to do the latter.

Also, the game isn't completely closed-source; it uses SDL, libpng, zlib, etc.

Interestingly enough, this hasn't really stopped people from improving on DF after the fact. Just take a look at the dfhack and Text will be Text projects, for instance.

aeontech5• 10 years ago

  On the other hand, Tarn has said that he now no longer understands this part of the code. If he ever needs to modify it he'll either have to learn how it works from scratch, or farm the work out to the community again.

Reasonable, but that's when, surprise, revision history is pretty useful in figuring out what the changes are and why they were made :)

PhasmaFelis2• 10 years ago

In an interview I read, Tarn said something to the effect of that "he was not interested in learning about version control and it would just be a distraction that would take away time from the important work, since the way he works has worked for him for many years".

I want you all to imagine having to work with this person.

squimmy• 10 years ago

Why? He has stated on many occasions that he has no intention of working with anyone else.

toomanybeersies• 10 years ago

I seem to remember at some point that Tarn said that if he ever stops working on DF for whatever reason, he would open source it.

shultays2• 10 years ago

I don't remember the exact words but if he is killed for this reason, it won't be.

I mean I love dwarf fortress but I probably wouldn't kill toady for it

ywecur• 10 years ago

Why not open source it? He would still be in control of the vision of the project.

MrMember• 10 years ago

He has stated in interviews that he doesn't want to turn into a project manager. He's said he's happy with how development on the game currently works and as long as the project brings in enough money to support him and his brother it's unlikely to change.

pavel_lishin• 10 years ago

How plausible would it be to take the generated executables, and get actual, readable code out of them?

Waterluvian• 10 years ago

Usually considerably slower than just writing it all again.

fzzzy4• 10 years ago

Plausible, although your definition of the word readable may vary. In fact, I believe this is how the minecraft modding community operates (or operated), although they are starting with java bytecode which is much higher level so probably have an easier time of it.

Decompilers of varying quality have existed for a long time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompiler

khedoros2• 10 years ago

It depends how much you like reading a whole ton of X86 assembly language, with all the variable names replaced with numbers.

Something that looks like the UI code has its source included with the game, so there's some info to be gleaned there. Also, any interfaces to external libraries would be fairly easy to trace.

Still: Very difficult, due to the size of the binary (21MB), and the level of painstaking attention to detail that's necessary to reverse-engineer a program from its binary. Automatic decompilers exist, but they're fairly limited, and you'd still have the issues of meaningless variable names, even in the best case.

rtpg• 10 years ago

Emscriptem has a "loop detection" feature, I wonder if you could apply that to the binary...

Sabinus• 10 years ago

This game is the masterpiece life's work of one eccentric math PHD developer, and if you have any interest in fantasy or poetry in your soul I suggest you give the game a try. The learning curve is deathly steep, so I suggest starting with the lazy noob pack: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Utility:Lazy_Newb_Pac... Strike the earth!

fzzzy4• 10 years ago

The learning curve is deathly steep, so I suggest starting with watching hundreds of hours of other people playing on youtube. Then getting the lazy noob pack.

vacri3• 10 years ago

The joy of DF is learning all the ways you can fail. Once you know how to set up a fort that can handle itself, the fun largely dissipates.

zbuttram• 10 years ago

True enough, and if you're into watching interesting people play games on video there's a lot of content to be had and DF is usually a fairly interesting watch since it can be relatively unpredictable at a certain point. There was one excellent guy I had bookmarked a long time ago, but I lost that set of bookmarks a while back.

bschwindHN2• 10 years ago

Off topic: Using `background-attachment: fixed` for your background image will cause high CPU usage as the user scrolls.

http://fourkitchens.com/blog/article/fix-scrolling-performan...

MBCook2• 10 years ago

That talks about Chrome, which is known to use a lot of resources in general (see: battery life tests).

Is it also an issue on IE/Edge or Firefox? What about Safari/Mobile Safari?

tgb• 10 years ago

This line from the article makes me think it affects Mobile Safari (or did in the past).

The performance for this feature is so bad that iOS simply ignores this property.

db48x8• 10 years ago

Nah, modern browsers simply offload this to your GPU. They send the background layer to the GPU once, update the foreground as you scroll, and let the GPU composite them for display. Since this is a screen-space effect, and the fill-rate of a modern GPU is immense, this is pretty cheap overall.

bschwindHN2• 10 years ago

Well a lot of people use Chrome and I immediately noticed a problem with the site when using Chrome, so maybe it's still something to keep in mind until it's improved.

alanfalcon• 10 years ago

This article was my introduction to DF when it was originally posted on HN: http://nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwa...

tomc198514• 10 years ago

For all their advancement in storytelling and worldbuilding, it is still so frustrating to try and play DF today. I did not grow up with Roguelikes and ASCII characters or backwards-ass vim-style key-memorization GUI patterns, and the nostalgia that surrounds these things is simply annoying. The noob pack helps but what it really needs is for that isometric graphics mod to become a full UI layer. Mid-90s WinForms would be an improvement over what DF's got.

It is painful to see people so smart pooh-pooh something so obvious as a useable UI (I won't say "decent", because "decent" nowadays is this brightly-colored material-design garbage) that isn't super painful for people who like to come and go.

VonGuard4• 10 years ago

Anything worth doing takes a lot of work, and Dwarf Fortress is no different. It really is a matter of putting in the hours. But thanks to dozens of radical tools, you, too, can turn your fortress into a 3D, moving world.

Treat the experience more like playing with some sort of odd micro-kernel in a VM, with tools for poking and probing it. Approach it like a software development tool, or a Linux server and it becomes a little less daunting, especially as all the letters are on the screen for quick reference, rather than in a man page.

Still, the beauty of Dwarf Fortress IS that it doesn't care about the UI. It's not for you. It's not for anyone other than it's creators. It's for Zach and Tarn. Yes, it's also for the game's fans, but the brothers have always been building the game THEY wanted to play, and doing exactly what they wanted to do. They're not beholden to a schedule, or some massive revamp required in order to make the game more accessible. They're true to their own desires and souls.

They're artists. This is their art. Yes, it is truly impenetrable, but as with almost all art, taking the time to delve deeper is uniquely and spiritually rewarding. Yes, spiritually.

tomc198514• 10 years ago

I tried the newb pack not too long ago... the experience was too clunky for me. The graphics packs are nice but they always feel incomplete... and even when I had this nice visualization (in a separate window...) it would frequently crashed and I really wished taht I could interact with the game with it.

Yes, they're artists and this is their art, but software rarely -- if ever -- exists in isolation, yet DF acts like it does. You've all these nerds with too much time on their hands building all this ridiculously complicated infrastructure just to play the game in a way that is more comfortable, when instead the DF guys could simply allocate X amount of time and then be done with it. And this isn't a demand that the DF guys make the UI better, just a wish that they would put in a minimal amount of effort so that the community could hook in their own GUI code with a minimum of fuss.

Besides, I write code and debug fussy computer shit all day for work. Games shouldn't require that kind of advanced hackery just to play.

And who cares if they're artists? Neither the artist nor his art are immune to criticism (or, wishfully thinking, critique).

tomc198514• 10 years ago

Also, only the fool thinks nearly all art is worth it, or that nearly all art can be "spiritual". Art is 99% crap and 1% gold -- whether music, or the visual arts, or the performing arts, or code -- and DF is one of the few cases in my mind that lands in both categories.

taneq• 10 years ago

Anything worth doing takes a lot of work, and Dwarf Fortress is no different. It really is a matter of putting in the hours.

And this is why, fascinating as it sounds, I'll never play Dwarf Fortress. I already have a job, and I get paid for it not only in satisfaction but also in money. It's awesome that they're able to devote their lives to their artwork, and I like reading about it from time to time, but in the end it's an unappealing value proposition for someone with limited time.

Apofis• 10 years ago

I feel like the only way anything you want is going to happen is in DF2.

db48x8• 10 years ago

Then you should play DF's predecessor Slaves to Armok: God of Blood which has procedural 3D graphics. (see http://www.bay12games.com/armok/screens.html)

The reason he transitioned to Dwarf Fortress (aka Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress) is that developing the graphics and UI took so much time away from gameplay.

tomc198514• 10 years ago

Of course. It doesn't change anything about DF though, and it's DF that made it into NY MoMA [1].

The problem with DF is that the UI runs off in a completely different direction. Playing the game requires untangling a mess of counter-intuitive mental contexts, using controls that seem to make little sense. It is an experience wildly different than the way one expects-slash-wants UI to behave. Artistically, one might say that DF's creators are making a statement against modern UI and its inherent complexity, but then I think that falls flat when you realize that the alternative (as in, what is it right now) requires considerable study to enjoy.

Is it artistic statement, or laziness? Or something else? Software, like all interactive mediums, has a functional component that you can't just ignore. If this were a painting, or a sculpture, or music, and I could only interact with it through perception, then that's fine -- entire art movements are built from challenging prevailing norms. But software is experienced through use, and no artist is immune to the practical considerations of their medium; rules which are best heeded. (Or not, but very veeery carefully and with great discipline.)

DF is a game, and games are meant to be played. This is a fundamental tenet of games. Play happens through approachability, among other things, and approachability is the product of an equation that includes good interface design. A game seemingly opposed to even a modicum of approachable design (something as simple as remapping mouse and keyboard controls to behave intuitively, as one would expect an ncurses-type app to act) runs opposed to very fundamental notions of game design. It is also terribly ironic, I think, and irony really is one of the basest and most-overused cliches in modern art.

Again, even the barest of olive branches extended to the community -- a simple, low-level API to hook into, or better default mapping of controls, or a recanting of their weird ideas of how windows should work -- would satiate this critic, as I really do want to enjoy DF. It is a shame that such brilliance is locked away in such a homely and unapproachable exterior.

[1] http://www.moma.org/collection/works/164920

tomc198514• 10 years ago

And I totally get their feelings against UI. Low level UI is a bitch to write and difficult to get right. I have abandoned ideas when I realized just how much work it would take.

These guys are clearly really smart. I agree with the other posts here in that I have no beef with the gameplay in any way. But god damn it would be nice if they would get off their high horse and learn from some working engineers.

Freaky2• 10 years ago

what it really needs is for that isometric graphics mod to become a full UI layer

Ugh, no. Isometric views are a nightmare for usability. They look nice, but they obscure things and make for particularly error-prone tile selection, which is just poison in a game where that's the main thing you're doing.

I'd look to Prison Architect and RimWorld for UI inspiration, not Stonesense and Gnomoria.

tomc198514• 10 years ago

Alright fine, whatever, minor details. Isometric, fully 3d, 2d, who cares? Nearly anything is better than what it is right now.

PhasmaFelis2• 10 years ago

* I did not grow up with Roguelikes and ASCII characters or backwards-ass vim-style key-memorization GUI patterns*

I did. They were still easier to learn and play than Dwarf Fortress.

A lot of people like to say that Dwarf Fortress is too deep and complex to ever be "easy," that making it more usable would dumb it down. This is silly. No one is saying that it should have fewer variables, fewer controls, that the underlying model should be changed any way. None of those things are necessary to build an interface which e.g. doesn't assign different keys to the same options in different menus.

To compare it to another famously unforgiving game, would Dark Souls be better if the controls reversed themselves every time you opened a menu? Would people consider that an exciting challenge?

I've worked with people like the DF developers, and even when they're skilled enough to tolerate their eccentricities, no one would ever pretend that it's a good thing. I think that's my real beef with it. As a programmer, I don't like shitty design. Dwarf Fortress is an awe-inspiring concept and engine buried in the shittiest of shitty design.

tomc198514• 10 years ago

My sentiments exactly. Brilliance doesn't excuse bad design.

squeaky-clean• 10 years ago

I think git is a great example of this. Amazing tool, I can't imagine software development nowadays without it. But that doesn't mean the interface couldn't have been more consistent.

SixSigma• 10 years ago

Play it in text mode then, it is only menus.

alekratz2• 10 years ago

If someone thinks they're better than you because they use the ASCII graphics rather than a graphics pack, then they are being a jackass. It's about the game, not about what it looks like.

That being said, I play it regularly and I found its learning curve incredibly similar to learning Vim. Videos really help in this regard - plus reddit's dorf fort community is really welcoming. Watch videos, pause a lot, and practice. A huge part of the game is !!FUN!!, which can be directly translated to "you will lose quite often". And that's okay!

amyjess• 10 years ago

From what I remember, the developer has said that he doesn't want to put much effort into the UI until the very end of the project, because he's constantly redesigning large subsystems and reworking the game mechanics. Any UI tied to any system or mechanic that gets ripped out, redesigned, or otherwise turned inside-out is going to have to be reworked every time that happens. So it gets a barebones UI until the underlying game mechanics are stable.

jealousgelatin• 10 years ago

Love DF. Didn't know the community was so vast. Fingers crossed for open source, definitely would add some years of playability for the kiddies.

Praise the miners!

vog• 10 years ago

This looks great, but I hope they don't fall into the "manual window placement" usability trap.

There is a reason the "old-fashioned" tiling window managers are still popular. And today most applications are internally structured via tiling/splitters and tabs, rather than individual window placement. Let alone that all attempts for a "web desktop" never took off.

Alas, I don't know any authorative sources for that, but I bet that manual window placement (and most of the time, also overlapping windows) is a well-known anti-pattern of user interface design.

alekratz2• 10 years ago

Dwarf Fortress has never been about its usability and user interface - it's 100% focused on the background processes that drive the game.

RangerScience5• 10 years ago

If you want to read the best stories the community has gathered from playing this game, here's a collection!

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=41896.0

shultays2• 10 years ago

I love DF, played it for a long time but haven't touched it for last 1-2 years. A feew weeks ago I tried to play it again, I was excited about new features such as libraries and crafting in adventure mode.

I first started with adventure mode, and tried to make a conversation with someone... tried. New conversation system is a huge mess. Sure it is much more advanced but interface is needlessly complicated, it takes away all the fun.

I just closed DF and didn't even try fortress mode after that. I love DF but Toady's tastes with ui is too eccentric for me. I hated military UI when it came out and now this.

People doing awesome job with DF using reverse engineering. Playing it without dwarf therapist for example would be a nightmare. I wish it was opensource or at least had more modability.

edem• 10 years ago

Toady should decouple the ui from the game so people could write a nice ui for a change. The only thing which stands between me and the game is the horrible ux.

loydb• 10 years ago

Once a year or so, I pick up DF and play for a few weeks just to see what has changed. Coincidentally, I just finished my 2016 playfest last month.

I am sold on the ASCII graphics, especially once you drop in a decent replacement set. Generating unique icons for all the bazillion different things would be a huge undertaking graphically, and you pick up what things are quickly.

Sadly, the UI (and I use the term loosely) is still, well, awful. The menu system makes no sense (sure, you can memorize where something is, but that's not what I mean), and the keystrokes seem to be randomized across menus. As others have said, there's actually a pretty good game under there these days. It's just horrible to interact with.

imdsm2• 10 years ago

That's fair enough. The menu can be a little tricky. But if you've played it on and off for almost a decade like I have, then the key bindings are so natural that I don't even look at the menu. Should they change, the game would be unplayable.

I suppose for new folks, it can be hard getting into it, but for the rest of us, I think it works quite well.

sageabilly• 10 years ago

Is Dwarf Therapist still being maintained? (I'd look it up but I'm at work and all DF stuff is blocked by the firewall as "games") DT made the difference between playable and fun DF and endless fucking about with menus.

dopu3• 10 years ago

Sure is [0]. Really grateful for it. I don't think I'd be able to play this game without using Dwarf Therapist. Generally it becomes way too difficult to manage dwarf occupation assignments once your population shoots past 15 or so.

[0] https://github.com/splintermind/Dwarf-Therapist

ghotli• 10 years ago

Honestly, I think eventually a central question of our time will become whether or not it is ethical to turn off dwarf fortress.

throwanem• 10 years ago

The sense of entitlement that crops up throughout this thread amazes me.

It'd be bad enough coming from the people who actually donate the money that adds up to the steady living the Adams brothers earn by their work on Dwarf Fortress. Coming from random Hacker News commenters, many of whom hasten to add that they'd never play anything with such an awful UX themselves, it is bewildering and disappointing.

Isn't this community supposed to be above such things?

dopu3• 10 years ago

It is a bit discouraging. And keep in mind that the game is technically still in Alpha, everyone.

jandrese2• 10 years ago

It has been in Alpha for a decade now. It's not clear if it is ever going to advance to Beta status.

gldev• 10 years ago

I am thankful enough to have this incredibly fun game available to me; let's hope they can keep improving it.

dopu3• 10 years ago

I find it interesting that there are so many complaints about the UI / keybindings. I agree that the keybindings are a bit confusing once your start, but I didn't find them to be that difficult to master. No more difficult than say, learning to use Vim effectively.

However, certain things do become issues once your dwarf population scales past 15 or so. Checking dwarf occupations manually (e.g., to make sure that there is at least one dwarf who is currently assigned the furnace operator occupation) becomes a pain, so I'd suggest using Dwarf Therapist [0] to manage that. It also lets you quickly check other things, such as whether any dwarves are feeling particularly sad.

Also, I encourage people new to the game to check out some of the stories that the community has generated throughout DF's existence. The game's ability to generate interesting scenarios that lead to good stories to tell your friends is perhaps the most interesting part of the game. Boatmurdered [1] is a classic. Roomcarnage [2] is currently in the process of being told and is quite good.

[0] https://github.com/splintermind/Dwarf-Therapist

[1] http://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/

[2] http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=139393.0

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