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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

#101

Post by mwaitjmp »

jtolmar wrote: post #95
kibwen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 play DCSS in tiles mode and DF in ASCII mode. It's not that I think graphics are a bad usability feature, I just think they're over-emphasized because they're the first thing people see. Adding graphics to DF means more new players give it a try, but most of them are going to bounce off of the wildly inconsistent menus. It's an acquisition funnel thing; the total players will be incoming players times the percent t…

The military menu was always the one which I had difficulty with, training and equipping dwarfs, etc.....

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#102

Post by yew »

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.

I always find this topic interesting, because it shows such a diversity of... aesthetic instinct? If you ask a dozen people why they don't like something that's known for being divisive, you can easily get a dozen different, incompatible answers.

People talk about the subjectivity of beauty, but I've never felt like the sheer polarity of opinion gets enough emphasis...

(For the record: Dwarf Fortress's controls never bothered me, and I've never been able to play without a tileset. The same for NetHack and other ASCII games.)

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#103

Post by seanhunter »

Natsu wrote: post #48
zionic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree. The ASCII "graphics" (if you can really call them that) are a huge reason why I've never even considered playing it. I've read all about the mechanics, and they're interesting. I just don't understand why anyone would spend so much time developing so many intricate features when the presentation is so poor.

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…

"this is a detailed simulation, so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics"

Consider Battlefield or COD Warzone, which simulate the effects of actions by multiple players (including projectile travel) in real time and still manage upwards of 100FPS of near photorealistic graphics.

Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.

Dwarf fortress is a very interesting game and a very deep simulation, but the idea that it's such a detailed simulation that graphics would not be possible is just untrue.

Honestly the UX in dwarf fortress is generally just insanely user-hostile and graphics are only a tiny symptom of that. And I say this as someone who plays and enjoys the game - I've had forts with upwards of 100 idiots^Wdwarfs in them, magma moats, breaching multiple cavern layers, surviving necromancer seiges etc. But every time I play I have to go through that thing over again where I try to figure out how to assign a pet to a person, when I set up a military squad getting them to wear the right equipment is a total chore, minecart UX is completely baffling. Also the simulation is very detailed but kind of broken in lots of annoying ways, like female dwarfs randomly dropping their babies while working, forgetting where they put them and then freaking out, random tantrum spirals because someone went out in the rain and so just decides to murder their colleagues etc.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#104

Post by dpc_pw »

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.

Came here to say the same thing. I know that ASCII is repuslive to a lot of people, but personally the UX inconsistency is kill the game for me. Every single thing in the game seem designed with a completely different UX idea, to the point it's almost impossible to build muscle memory.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#105

Post by VectorLock »

vanderZwan wrote: post #61
kibwen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Similarly, Cogmind's success is partially because it learned all the hard-won lessons on good game UI of the last decades, plus the importance of a fancy tile-set: https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ It does, however, also have the fanciest abstract ASCII graphics I've ever seen. (the other reason is that it's just a damn good game)

Never knew this game existed. Love the aesthetic.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#106

Post by yaur »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

Eagerly awaiting the graphical version to finally be available on Steam so that I can buy it and throw some money their way. I know the regular version has been available for free forever, but the ASCII graphics have always been a turn-off. I'm not opposed to MUD-style graphics in general, Dwarf Fortress is just so dense with stuff that I found I spent most of my time just trying to figure out what was going on.

IMO trying to decipher those glyphs is near trivial compared to trying to manage what your dwarves are doing in a moderately sized fortress without Dwarf Therapist. In order to play it (which I haven't done in a few years TBH) you either need to be willing to push through some abstruse UI choices or use third-party tools. Those ASCII graphics just serve as a warning of what's to come.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#107

Post by nomel »

d4mi3n wrote: post #2

Nice to see the classic getting some modern graphics. I love text based games, but something as complex as DF really benefits from graphics that can make it easier to determine what is going on on the screen.

My main DF consumption is through Kruggsmash playthroughs/stories on Youtube [1], so I don't live it, but I know I would would enjoy watching the game more if I knew which of the more than 30 creatures the "C" that I'm looking at represents [2].

[1] Kruggsmash: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaifrB5IrvGNPJmPeVOcqBA

[2] Creature characters: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Creature

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#108

Post by waiseristy »

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.

Maybe something to do with the pure voxel nature of DF. Pathing, liquid flows, etc. Factorio has a lot of pathing requirements, but everything is so much simpler when it's strictly 2D

Re: Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements

#109

Post by bmn__ »

jtolmar wrote: post #97
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. Pretty amusingly, DF used to spend most of its CPU on graphics. There was a graphics rewrite at some point that fixed it.

https://github.com/Baughn/Dwarf-Fortress--libgraphics-

This was not written by the game's author, ToadyOne, but someone else. ToadyOne complains that he cannot understand the code anymore. For this reason, he will not open the source code again until he is dead.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/dwarf-fortress/dwarf-fortress-sourc...

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