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Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

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Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#81

Post by Der_Einzige »

There is already a pretty excellent 3D isometric front end for Dwarf Fortress. The name eludes me but it's well known within the community.

However - I found that many parts of Dwarf Fortress disappointed me (and I was hyped as heck to play it - given that I'm a fan of Nethack, DCSS, Cataclysm, and basically any rougelike or rougelite). The game just feels extremely unfinished. Adventure mode is a total joke. Performance is totally garbage. The creator refuses to open source his game (no one will laugh at you man!). The documentation is horrific (no one quite knows how some of the BASIC SKILLS work or what they do)

It's got the potential to be a true gem, but right now, it's like an uncut diamond in the rough.

Might as well just play Rimworld. Rimworld solved every single problem that Dwarf Fortress had and its world is more compelling to me.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#82

Post by kd0amg »

tarboreus wrote: post #69
gnulinux wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I would normally disable invasion. When I enabled invasion, I'd just lock my dwarfs in my fortress and not leave the fortress for a season and eventually goblins abandon the invasion. I just never figured out how to prepare an army and attack, so figured, I'd much rather focus on things like farming, smelting, jewelry etc.

You can just put down stone traps and it will kill 85% of invasions. The rest you can create a drawbridge or something and pull it up if you see an enemy you can't deal with. Closing yourself off also means you can't trade, generally, so it's good to leave your fortress semi-open.

If you use cage traps instead, you can set up a target range to train your crossbowdwarfs.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#83

Post by herpes »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #77
Natsu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, it's really not. Granted, I always used the Lazy Newbie Pack which gave you basic tiles, but once you get used to ASCII, things tend to be a lot easier. Also, this is a detailed simulation, so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics. Remember, each creature has a bunch of parts with individual health, each tile can get stained by various materials (that can spread disease) and ev…

> Also, this is a detailed simulation, so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics. Nonsense. Rendering a grid of 2D tiles is exceptionally fast, so much so that converting font data into tiles is how you make text grids go faster! And even if you do have a slow method, you can just run it on a different thread.

Dwarf Fortress is single threaded, and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#85

Post by Dylan16807 »

herpes wrote: post #83
Dylan16807 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, this is a detailed simulation, so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics. Nonsense. Rendering a grid of 2D tiles is exceptionally fast, so much so that converting font data into tiles is how you make text grids go faster! And even if you do have a slow method, you can just run it on a different thread.

Dwarf Fortress is single threaded, and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.

The simulation is single threaded. But a rendering thread that only needs to copy a kilobyte of data each frame? Trivial.

Also hopefully there's a pathfinding thread at some point.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#86

Post by empath75 »

nineteen999 wrote: post #84

I wonder how this will affect the performance; last time I played DF it was pretty much single-threaded and the performance would tank noticeably once your colony grew to around 100+ dwarves. Granted, it's been about 10 years since I played it.

I don't think the graphics will add significantly to the work the simulation is doing.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#87

Post by Tyr42 »

gnulinux wrote: post #72
rstupek wrote: post #47

The biggest single thing DF can do after graphical improvements is fixing the performance, perhaps make it not single threaded. I've been able to get past the graphics, and work through using the keyboard menus, but having the fortress come to a screeching crawl when there's a ton of things going on is when I stopped playing.

It seems like factorio is very well optimized and is single threaded (as per devs). Even when you make a ginormous factory, everything works mildly fine on a good laptop. I think dwarffortress mechanics is a bit more complex than factorio's in terms of computation, so maybe some parallelism can be utilized there. But it seems like as long as you optimize well, single thread goes a long way.

I think this is only possible because factorio has a team of very dedicated programmers who care about performance. Tarn is one guy, and I don't think he's going to be able to pull out a comparative level of performance.

I mean, the pipe performance fix took one factorio dev half a year. I feel like having no forward motion apart from performance for that long might demotivate tarn, and that was just for one subsystem. In a game which already invested in multithreaded performance.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#88

Post by bmn__ »

hutzlibu wrote: post #73
Natsu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, it's really not. Granted, I always used the Lazy Newbie Pack which gave you basic tiles, but once you get used to ASCII, things tend to be a lot easier. Also, this is a detailed simulation, so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics. Remember, each creature has a bunch of parts with individual health, each tile can get stained by various materials (that can spread disease) and ev…

"so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics." Thats why most have a GPU and that is why there are graphic engines, who do the rendering only of what is needed and produced by the simulation. So no, unless DF uses the gpu for simulating which I doubt, better graphics will not really affect simulation speed, if done right. But yes, that is much harder.

DF employs OpenGL for rendering, see file df_linux/g_src/renderer_opengl.hpp, so the GPU will be used if appropriate drivers are installed. "Text" tiles and graphics tiles are equally fast – they are always bitmaps under the hood, see df_linux/data/art/*.png.

There is also an ncurses renderer with plain Unicode text output for use in a terminal emulator which may be GPU accelerated, but most term software is not.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#89

Post by pasabagi »

kibwen wrote: post #23
jtolmar wrote: post #10

I never thought the ASCII graphics were a big problem in Dwarf Fortress; once you get used to it using a bunch of symbols as decoration, almost all the weird stuff ends up being things you placed yourself. On the other hand, the complete lack of UX consistency - whether a given submenu will use primary/secondary cursor keys, nested menus, or a pile of hotkeys - is a lot harder to deal with.

In addition to DF I also play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a venerable (and actively developed!) roguelike with the classic ASCII look, and I'd like to present a counterpoint: once it became possible to play DCSS online using the graphical tiles interface rather than the ASCII look, new players overwhelmingly prefer the graphical. Stats that I have seen indicate >95% choose the graphical tiles. I myself still play both…

I think there's a big diference - in DCSS, it's extremely important to know whether that 'g' you're looking at just some random gnoll, or crazy Yiuf. In dwarf fotress, it's pretty rare that it really matters. The ascii graphics are also a bit nicer - especially when it comes to stuff like drawing walls.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#90

Post by robinhoodexe »

rstupek wrote: post #47

The biggest single thing DF can do after graphical improvements is fixing the performance, perhaps make it not single threaded. I've been able to get past the graphics, and work through using the keyboard menus, but having the fortress come to a screeching crawl when there's a ton of things going on is when I stopped playing.

I personally limit my fort to 60 dwarves (not including children) in the config file. Makes managing a lot easier as well and I find 60 is enough for 2 squads and most of the professions.
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