People who really 'got into' DF- What age were you when it clicked?
20. I tried it earlier, but I just couldn't figure out the interface.
Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
151–160 of 172 posts
Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you like DF stories, check out Bravemule's Matul Remrit or Bronzemurder.
Roomcarnage is the ongoing state of the art http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=139393.0
> Before the end of the first month, a weight is lifted off my shoulders. The dwarves will still gain unhappy thoughts when caught in the freakish weather, but compared to some of the procedurally generated horrors I've dealt with in the past, elf blood blizzards look like a fluffy wambler infestation.
> Besides, an active volcano comprised entirely of ice and coated in crimson snowdrifts of frozen gore? Fucking metal. I love this game.
I love Dwarf Fortress.
Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
#153Is Dwarf Fortress open source?
Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
A one-off 300K isn't a lot for two people to live on if it would cut off their donation stream completely, and if you've been doing this for 10 years it may not be easy to find a job.
Serious question. Why would it not be easy?
Because once an employer sees you're the Dwarf Fortress developer, they'll turn down your application because you have more important things to do.
Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each cycle calculates ridiculously detailed things like the temperature of the rear left femur of a water buffalo passing through.
Is that an exaggerated example or an actual thing that happens?
No, it's not exaggerated. It doesn't actually go so far as to call it a femur, but it does indeed keep track of the temperature of the left rear upper leg bone, as far as it is distinct from the temperature of the left rear upper leg's muscle, fat, skin or hair layers. After all, if the water buffalo were to stray into the path of a dragon's fiery breath, or a stream of molten lava, then it's vital that it be able to tell you whether the hair has burnt, the fat has melted, etc.
You can turn off temperature in the config file if it takes too much cpu time though, in which case everything just has an assumed temperature, with no heat flowing around to change it.
Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nitpick: It's not ASCII. It's simple 2D bitmaps. You can't play DF in a character console.
I believe it was originally displaying extended ASCII in a nCurses console, and switched to bitmaps with SDL. The majority of the world is still visualized by those character codes and two colors, but entities can be assigned arbitrary sprites http://i.imgur.com/zuMdqbv.jpg
Actually it was the other way around. It was originally a graphical game which deliberately used a set of bit-mapped tiles drawn from the CP437 (not ASCII!) font found on many old computers. It later grew the option to add in extra graphics, so that a dwarf or a cat is a picture of a dwarf or a cat rather than a colorized letter. In this mode it's actually an OpenGL game, although it doesn't do much with the hardware.
A release or two back it gained a true console mode which you can play on a real terminal.
Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that an exaggerated example or an actual thing that happens?
No, it's not exaggerated. It doesn't actually go so far as to call it a femur, but it does indeed keep track of the temperature of the left rear upper leg bone, as far as it is distinct from the temperature of the left rear upper leg's muscle, fat, skin or hair layers. After all, if the water buffalo were to stray into the path of a dragon's fiery breath, or a stream of molten lava, then it's vital that it be able to…
Pardon me while I pick my jaw off the floor. I had heard stories about the random instances of absolutely obsessive attention to detail when modeling the physics/chemistry of things in the game, but did not expect anything like that.
Out of curiosity, how do details about these things become known if the code is not open sourced? Is it in official documentation somewhere? Is there any sort of list of these ridiculous examples of awesomeness?
Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's not exaggerated. It doesn't actually go so far as to call it a femur, but it does indeed keep track of the temperature of the left rear upper leg bone, as far as it is distinct from the temperature of the left rear upper leg's muscle, fat, skin or hair layers. After all, if the water buffalo were to stray into the path of a dragon's fiery breath, or a stream of molten lava, then it's vital that it be able to…
Pardon me while I pick my jaw off the floor. I had heard stories about the random instances of absolutely obsessive attention to detail when modeling the physics/chemistry of things in the game, but did not expect anything like that. Out of curiosity, how do details about these things become known if the code is not open sourced? Is it in official documentation somewhere? Is there any sort of list of these ridiculous…
Through a combination of playing, reading bug explanations, and modding the game through the raw text files, which define everything from what types of organs a creature has to the different types of cheese that can be made from it's milk.
Since the learning curve is high, the best way to start understanding it is to first learn how to play. From there you can start tinkering with the available mechanics.
Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone who would be kept away by a warning about crashes because he “ain’t got time” would also be kept away by simply trying to play Dwarf Fortress for 10 minutes. It’s not a game for the faint hearted or impatient.
Hey you can read it however you like, but I find an expectation from an established player that the current released version is bug-ridden and may corrupt your save to be... scary. How many saves must he have had corrupted in the past? That's just not cool, man.
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Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. I'd definitely play it with that UI. I often wonder why games almost never have swappable (or even just scriptable) UI-s that could allow player to use shorthands through UI drudgery.
> Wow. I'd definitely play it with that UI. You may want to take a look at Gnomoria ( http://gnomoria.com ), which is basically "DF clone with sensible voxel graphics". For example: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/45067176442464... It's not a scriptable interface, but it is much saner than DF's, with a limited set of consistent hotkeys/toolbars/panels.
Gnomoria is to Dwarf Fortress as Nano is to Vim. It's much easier to learn to play and fun, but it's about 1/10 the magnitude.