Live data from Hacker News

Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

rockpapershotgun.com

251–260 of 273 posts

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it like when billionaires sell like $10 billion worth of shares? Do you need a special bank account to hold that much?

yes, you can't stick with a 32 bit account any more, needs 64.

Money should never be stored using floating point variables. That is why the Decimal type exists and why IBM Mainframes have hardware acceleration for binary coded decimal math.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#252
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love DF, havent played the steam version. The menus and lack of native ui controls for some things (dfhack) were by far the biggest problem, not the ascii. I get that the ascii is noisy and a matter of taste - not disputing that - but there were much bigger UX problems.

Steam version is much worse than the fan UI options that were already available, sadly. Its also why I explain why DF really failed to take off after the Steam release. It's nowhere near the best, or even best looking, way to play the game.

This just isn’t true. Plus, all the DFHack stuff that added UI to the game has been ported over and now integrates with the new UI perfectly well.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing. I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more intere…

I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structu…

They fixed all that. Go give the free version another try; it has the updated UI but not the new sprites so it feels a lot like playing the older versions of the game but with more polish.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Game devs don’t want a major support burden What fraction of game studios still even exist 10 years after releasing a game?

Which gives two options in the market: 1. They don't exist, so if you own the game you still want it to work on your computer without maintenance updates 2. They still exist, so they don't want to have to update it every year because they can use that effort on making a new game and continuing to exist while still being able to sell from their existing catalogue because it still works Either way it's in a game develo…

Yes, I can sort of understand Apple's argument that people should be running an email app that's been updated in the last 20 years, but I don't think it's defensible for software like games (or any offline productivity software, for that matter).

They've said that Rosetta 2 will stick around for games after it's phased out for other software, but it's hard to give much credence to that. Wouldn't be enough to make me want to bother publishing or buying games on Mac. They've dropped OS 9 compatibility (after having Classic), they dropped PowerPC support (after having Rosetta), they dropped x86 support after years of the OS supporting both 32 and 64 bit. And if they're keeping it available for games why not let me run other Intel Mac software?

Hard to imagine Rosetta 2 sticking around more than a couple years when Apple gets bored of supporting it.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#255
post #249
post #164

Nostalgic for when Dwarf Fortress was 2D and had an ending (if you dug too deep a catastrophic monster emerged as I recall)

Both of these are still true.

DF isn't 2D anymore! Back in the day it was literally dig down and dig left right, no Z axis.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#256
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's not what I'm saying though. It's the job of the game to be fun in general, not in specific to some individual, and one of those ways is to have a good onboarding experience. People saying DF is fun are having fun despite its terrible onboarding, not because of it; in other words, cope.

No, no. If you cannot figure out a game then it won’t be fun, and you won’t enjoy it. But other people _will_ figure it out, and will enjoy it. And many of them will enjoy it more _because_ it was challenging to figure out and to do well at. It’s ok to write an approachable game, but not all games must be approachable.

They should be approachable to have the maximum number of people be able to enjoy them and even cynically increase sales. That some people find them fun despite the lack of approachability is just that, cope.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's not what I'm saying though. It's the job of the game to be fun in general, not in specific to some individual, and one of those ways is to have a good onboarding experience. People saying DF is fun are having fun despite its terrible onboarding, not because of it; in other words, cope.

I remember the "onboarding experience" essentially being losing over and over again and learning from my mistakes, getting a little further or trying a new approach altogether on each new attempt. Maybe it's an acquired taste but by the time I started playing Dwarf Fortress, I was not only already used to that, but thoroughly enjoying it as a core mechanic of games like Rogue, NetHack and Ancient Domains of Mystery.…

Some games are not fun to anyone, that is what I'm talking about for fun in generality. Games must be fun for someone, at least some number of people, to be called a good game. Some games get there with a good onboarding and some do it despite that as I said.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#258
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the same way, it's a game's job to make sure their players have fun, one of which is to have a good onboarding experience.

Plenty of players have fun with the game, regardless of your personal opinions on the "on-boarding experience". I think you want this game to be something it's not. It's not a casual game for casual gamers. It's a game whose mantra is literally "losing is fun". It's esoteric menus and attention to detail are the result of decades of work by a couple of guys that just wanted to make the game they and their fans wanted…

I play Dwarf Fortress quite a bit. It does not stop me seeing the flaws in it. It is not perfect so I'm not sure why people act like it is, they're just coping that it doesn't have a good onboarding experience and once Tarn adds it (as he's always been doing), suddenly gamers will act as if that's what was missing all this time. It's a sense of hypocrisy I've not seen elsewhere.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the developer updates both the free version and the paid version with the latest features (the only difference is the free version is sans GUI), and continues to serve the older free keyboard only 0.47 version on his website, and I'm supposed to be upset by this? Because he dropped the keyboard UI feature? DFHack already added back the keyboard cursor, anyway: https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/tools/toggle-k…

This DFHack command just toggles the 'enable keyboard cursor' feature. The issue is that the new keyboard cursor only works under specific scenarios, like designating digging sites. I don't think there's a way to use the keyboard cursor for everything like in 0.47. (I agree with your broader point that it's not reasonable to be angry at Bay12 for dropping this feature.)

I think it is fair for die hard fans to be annoyed if they paid to support and that way triggered a timeline where devs drop features they like in favor of friendliness to noobs. When economics kicks in, there's more money to be made from noobs.

Also it's not either or. If it is paid or free it's irrelevant. For example even if you pay, the seller doesn't owe you anything than what you paid for. And by contrast with totally free software we still file tickets and want things.

We can be frustrated by somebody's actions knowing we can't really demand something.

Re: Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

#260
post #38

I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI. Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how…

The new GUI is... not great. But the UX old UI was downright awful. There were like 5 different paradigms how to use individual screens, not just layouts, completely different ways to navigate and interact with controls.

After couple tens of hours you memorized the arcane keyboard invocations to do what you wanted, but it never felt intuitive.

Post reply on HN