The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress • Hacker News Board

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#91

Post by gnosis » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 2:07 AM UTC

smarmius wrote: post #36

gnosis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have learned the keystrokes, and have spent countless hours playing it. The interface is still absolutely awful. It's so inconsistent and needlessly convoluted. Just to be clear, I'm not wishing that DF had a point-and-click interface. I'm happy that DF is keyboard-controlled. It's just that this keyboard control could have been made a lot less painful with a tiny bit of consideration for consistency and efficiency…

The keystrokes are user-configurable. Both in-game and in a human-readable text format.

Ah.. I didn't know that. Next time I give the game a try I'll have to look in to that.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#92

Post by saraid216 » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 2:07 AM UTC

forensic wrote: post #61

scott_s wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, what one person can program when they're truly dedicated is a pretty incredible feat. And I wonder if the level of dedication he has demonstrated requires Asperger's. He has all of the classic symptoms, down to the the involuntary rocking. I've worked hard, and I've sacrificed a lot of my time to my work. But I'm not willing to sacrifice as much of my time as he has. And it's quite likely his life's work wi…

The only thing he's missing out on is romance and sex. His occupation and lifestyle appears to satisfy all the other typical human needs. Taking a DSM perspective is not the most enlightening perspective. The sex thing is a big problem. In the past, great artists were able to find companionship and sex despite poverty and oddness. Why is it that hackers have such difficulty? If Richard Stallman's medium was anything…

>The sex thing is a big problem.

Seriously? Not everyone in the world is a sex addict. He's living his own life. He'll look for what he needs when he needs it.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#93

Post by gnosis » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 2:13 AM UTC

wallflower wrote: post #82

pnathan wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woz isn't a real hacker? Disagree. Read up on him.

Second your disagreement. Woz is a real hacker, if not one of the best ever. Long excerpt from his amazing Founders at Work interview. "This was two weeks away and Mike Markkula said yes. So that was my motivation. I always had these little fictitious motivations that motivated me and got me to do such great work. So I sat down and designed the floppy disk, and Randy Wigginton (he was the guy just out of high school)…

What's so hackish about this? Seems like pretty typical low-level programming.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#94

Post by gnosis » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 2:18 AM UTC

johnswamps wrote: post #89

pavel_lishin wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's broken in it?

A lot. Much of it isn't really relevant to beginners, but here's a quick list off the top of my head. Maybe broken wasn't the right word, these are just general problems with the game 1. The endgame is too easy and boring. 2. Elbereth and #pray make it too easy to get out of tough spots 3. Most classes end up playing similarly after the midgame (either wizard or melee typically) 4. Wands of wishing, magic markers, an…

This is all true. However.. how many years of gameplay did you have to put in to learn it?

Speaking for myself, I've been playing nethack since the 80's. How many other games can you name that will keep an audience interested for 20 or 30 years?

I'd count that as a fantastic success in game design.

Despite that, I do agree that the game has its weaknesses and could stand to be improved quite a bit. One of its greatest weaknesses is its glacial pace of development. The last release was in 2003.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#95

Post by wallflower » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 2:22 AM UTC

gnosis wrote: post #93

wallflower wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second your disagreement. Woz is a real hacker, if not one of the best ever. Long excerpt from his amazing Founders at Work interview. "This was two weeks away and Mike Markkula said yes. So that was my motivation. I always had these little fictitious motivations that motivated me and got me to do such great work. So I sat down and designed the floppy disk, and Randy Wigginton (he was the guy just out of high school)…

What's so hackish about this? Seems like pretty typical low-level programming.

Please read the whole interview. If not, we'll agree to disagree.

"My whole life was basically trying to optimize things. You don't just save parts, but every time you save parts you save on complexity and reliability, the amount of time it takes to understand something. And how good you can build it without errors and bugs and flaws.

Livingston: You were designing all of these different types of computers during high school at home, for fun?

Wozniak: Yes, because I could never build one. Not only that, but I would design one and design it over and over and over—each one of the computers—because new chips would come out. I would take the new chips and redesign some computer I'd done before because I'd come up with a clever idea about how I could save 2 more chips. "I'll do it in 42 chips instead of 44 chips."

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#96

Post by scott_s » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 2:28 AM UTC

keenerd wrote: post #79

scott_s wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, what one person can program when they're truly dedicated is a pretty incredible feat. And I wonder if the level of dedication he has demonstrated requires Asperger's. He has all of the classic symptoms, down to the the involuntary rocking. I've worked hard, and I've sacrificed a lot of my time to my work. But I'm not willing to sacrifice as much of my time as he has. And it's quite likely his life's work wi…

> And I wonder if the level of dedication he has demonstrated requires Asperger's. People always jump to Asperger's the moment they hear this was all put together by one guy. It is as if they refuse to believe a normal person can have willpower enough to accomplish so much. It is simple: take a single step every day towards a single goal for several years. Listen to his podcasts[1]. He is about as chill/normal/well-a…

It's entirely possible, but the big three cues to me where his extreme social awkwardness, the rocking, and finally, his dedication to technical interests. The final one alone wouldn't make me think Asperger's. Even the first and the third wouldn't make me confident, but unconscious rocking is a symptom of autism in general.

I'm a big proponent of the idea that genius is more about raw effort over extended periods of time rather than innate intelligence. But perhaps some people are wired for that kind of dedication moreso than others.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#97

Post by scott_s » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 2:30 AM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #58

angrycoder wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you are coming from saying Carmack 'coasted (technically)' after he made his bucks. He is about a hard core coder as they come. Its not like he took some CEO desk job after Doom came out. From the first commander keen all the way through probably Quake 3, the stuff he wrote was all cutting edge.

My point was, from a "how well-known are they" standpoint, these other guys earn a lot more points for just being rich and famous than they do for being great hackers. No doubt many of them continue to do great technical work that constitutes "great hacking" in anybody's book. But that's not why (by and large) people buy the books and become fans. If you are focusing on the technical skill of hackery then you are goi…

The notion of hacker-points is just so tiresome and not the kind of discussion that I want to have. We don't need to constantly one-up people, even if we're comparing this person to that person.

Put another way: it's possible to praise his behavior without pissing on someone else.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#98

Post by rdl » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 3:50 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #12

joshklein wrote: post #8

For those of you who are seeing this for the first time and have any love for games like Minecraft, Civilization, etc... please take the time to break through the very steep learning curve to give this game a fair shake. It is truly a work of art. Please note that the Wiki helps make the game playable: http://df.magmawiki.com/

You might benefit from having played Nethack first. At least the culture shock will be a smaller.

I liked nethack, angband, and rogue.

Then I found ADOM -- (www.adom.de), which is great fun, but turned into a "second system" problem with JADE (development slowed so he could rewrite entirely in Java...). Still, amazingly fun.

I never got into dwarf fortress or minecraft, but will check them out more after 25 August :)

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#99

Post by vessenes » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 4:17 AM UTC

gnosis wrote: post #93

wallflower wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second your disagreement. Woz is a real hacker, if not one of the best ever. Long excerpt from his amazing Founders at Work interview. "This was two weeks away and Mike Markkula said yes. So that was my motivation. I always had these little fictitious motivations that motivated me and got me to do such great work. So I sat down and designed the floppy disk, and Randy Wigginton (he was the guy just out of high school)…

What's so hackish about this? Seems like pretty typical low-level programming.

Steve Wozniak recreated a disk controller in assembly on a motorola 68k chip in less than a day, and it worked pretty much perfectly first time, and you are complaining that he's not much of a hacker?

What do you do in your spare time, if I may ask politely?

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#100

Post by vessenes » Sat, Jul 23, 2011, 4:23 AM UTC

rhdoenges wrote: post #64

praptak wrote: post #34

Being a Nethack fan who has also lost countless hours managing civilizations, space fleets, cities, insect colonies, zombie apocalypse survivors' camps, I have three words to say: Must... not... play...

Dwarf Fortress sounds to me like nethack in its difficulty but unlike nethack in its endlessness. You can play all you want, but there will be no end!

Dwarf Fortress is, in many ways, the anti-nethack.

In Nethack, you can parse the source code to figure out nearly any situation, that is, it's a closed, nearly solvable system. (See http://sporkhack.com/design_concept.html for some commentary on nethack being 'solved'.)

Dwarf Fortress, on the other hand, is totally emergent. Toady logs in and plays to check if his coding worked well, that is he goes looking for the situations he is referring to in his code and observes them.

I love them both, but I'm enjoying dwarf fortress more right now.