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Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

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Re: Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

#81

Post by gnarbarian »

gnarbarian wrote: post #67
starpilot wrote: post #9

Great explanation of DF's bodily combat damage modeling: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/95316-complex-dama... > DF's damage system is just as complex and oftentimes difficult to keep track of as the rest of the game. Instead of simple health points or separate body parts DF simulates each individual by the sum of it's parts. This starts at the single parts of a body, then adds layers of tissue, muscle and…

The UI in Dwarf Fortress is completely indefensible. Even when you do understand how to play the game it's a kludge. Let alone the fact that AN ASCII GAME CAN BRING AN 8 CORE DESKTOP TO A CRAWL. (The ASCII is actually rendered in OPENGL for performance which is a joke in and of itself because 99% of the system resources are spent poorly simulating stagnant blocks of air rock and dirt with nothing happening to them).…

I recommend everyone watch the following video to learn about how the actual gameplay works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koZUS2h-Yzc

And to get a feel for some of the hilarious emergent humor you need to check out BOATMURDERED:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmfoL9kJ0R0

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Boatmurdered

Re: Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

#82

Post by wladimir »

James_Duval wrote: post #79
kaolinite wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he just wants to make his game, perhaps not a game for you or many other people - but his game. For him. Not everything has to be simplified and dumbed down. We have plenty of those kinds of games. Also, I'm confused by your shock that an ASCII game can bring an 8 core desktop to a crawl. Just because most games spend most of the system resources on displaying pretty graphics, doesn't mean that DF has to as wel…

I believe that the ASCII isn't true ASCII, though, as I believe gnabarian said - which is part of the problem. This post has more: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/24693/pseudo-ascii...

Normally the DF executable works like a terminal emulator, rendering the glyphs using GL or such. You can however run dwarf fortress in a console (ie, to run it over SSH) by changing the configuration file, and then it is a true text game.

BTW it doesn't use only ASCII but a larger subset of unicode. ASCII would be a very restricted set of characters to use.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

#83

Post by nwh »

wladimir wrote: post #82
James_Duval wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that the ASCII isn't true ASCII, though, as I believe gnabarian said - which is part of the problem. This post has more: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/24693/pseudo-ascii...

Normally the DF executable works like a terminal emulator, rendering the glyphs using GL or such. You can however run dwarf fortress in a console (ie, to run it over SSH) by changing the configuration file, and then it is a true text game. BTW it doesn't use only ASCII but a larger subset of unicode. ASCII would be a very restricted set of characters to use.

> to run it over SSH

Cloud gaming. I like it.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

#84

Post by gchpaco »

gnarbarian wrote: post #77
kaolinite wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he just wants to make his game, perhaps not a game for you or many other people - but his game. For him. Not everything has to be simplified and dumbed down. We have plenty of those kinds of games. Also, I'm confused by your shock that an ASCII game can bring an 8 core desktop to a crawl. Just because most games spend most of the system resources on displaying pretty graphics, doesn't mean that DF has to as wel…

Regarding the inefficiency of the engine. There is something seriously FUBAR with the design when you must choose the size of simulation (the rendered rows and columns of ASCII representing the playable zone in the window not the physical dimensions) at the beginning of a game before embarking. The performance of the game is directly proportional to the number of blocks in this zone + the number of dwarfs and NOT the…

Current hypothesis on the forums is that he uses some simplistic variant of A*; in extreme situations everything pathfinds to everything else once a tick in a totally serial program. The player base sometimes resorts to weird hacks and layouts to reduce the branching complexity of the path finding, but ultimately the more loose stone and objects you have to pathfind off and the more things you have pathfinding the worse everything gets. You don't even have to have a large number of dwarves for it to crop up; sheep are capable of bringing your machine to its knees if you don't ruthlessly cull them, or notoriously the catsplosion problem.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

#85

Post by Deestan »

DanBC wrote: post #72
jebblue wrote: post #35

It uses ascii symbols?

...and it uses text in an annoying way. It renders the text in OpenGL, which is one of the reasons why a 'text mode' game is so resource intensive.

> It renders the text in OpenGL, which is one of the reasons why a 'text mode' game is so resource intensive.

No, that is not really resource intensive. The massive simulation behind the graphics is resource intensive.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

#86

Post by gchpaco »

gnarbarian wrote: post #67
starpilot wrote: post #9

Great explanation of DF's bodily combat damage modeling: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/95316-complex-dama... > DF's damage system is just as complex and oftentimes difficult to keep track of as the rest of the game. Instead of simple health points or separate body parts DF simulates each individual by the sum of it's parts. This starts at the single parts of a body, then adds layers of tissue, muscle and…

The UI in Dwarf Fortress is completely indefensible. Even when you do understand how to play the game it's a kludge. Let alone the fact that AN ASCII GAME CAN BRING AN 8 CORE DESKTOP TO A CRAWL. (The ASCII is actually rendered in OPENGL for performance which is a joke in and of itself because 99% of the system resources are spent poorly simulating stagnant blocks of air rock and dirt with nothing happening to them).…

I assure you, the current player base is acutely aware of how bad the UI is. It's not even that it's opaque until learned, it is sometimes just downright impossible in vanilla DF to answer certain elementary questions like "how many dwarves are set to mine?" Workflow automation is really primitive, leading to either the "constantly assign dye thread jobs through the manager so the fools will do it" problem or the opposite "oops I left the mason alone for five minutes and now I have a hundred masterwork statues in a single 5x5 square" problem. Not for nothing does Dwarf Therapist exist, and I flat out will not play the game without dfhack's workflow and autobutcher plugins.

It's still genius. But it is definitely one of those "scribbles on the wall in crayon" type works of genius. As the innards of the program itself is better understood, I expect dfhack to supplant more and more of the original UI; it already has a dwarf therapist like mode, a much better job manager, and has started venturing into fundamentally reworking the UI. I recall a plugin not too long ago that allowed you to say things like "as soon as a bed is constructed, put it here".

Re: Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

#88

Post by gchpaco »

intended wrote: post #49
gchpaco wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that DF's learning curve is really comparable to vi. Maybe TECO. Almost everybody's first fort dies because they didn't set plant orders or ran out of booze or something similar. Next, forts die because you got enough wealth to spawn an ambush and you are totally unprepared. There's a litany of failure conditions that can shut you down hard and once they've begun it is very difficult to impossible to rev…

I've never used the workflow plugin, what are you primarily using it to achieve? Do note I am a slightly more impulsive player, so I tend to make massive stock piles of things so that I don't need to manage Just In Time systems. DF conditions tend to be similar to Hard Core modes on games like D3/Torchlight, which in turn inherit from Roguelikes like Nethack, so there is an old tradition of hard choices that mean stu…

Steady state things, mostly, like "ensure that there is always 30 bars of pig iron" or "ensure that ten quarry bush leaves always are available"; if there are too many objects it will stop making them (particularly useful with things like pig iron, which is worthless except in its role in the steel making process, so you need to have some but not lots), and as it dips below the threshold it will start making them again. This is really useful to ensure that e.g. there are always barrels available when needed, but you don't blow your entire wood harvest on barrels or bins or what have you; it can also be used to ensure that your idiot brewer does not brew everything leaving nothing to eat.

If you play one if the mods with multi-stage metal refining, it is even more useful to ensure that the pipeline does not go dry on the one hand but you don't get a glut of pig iron or whatever either.

Re: Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

#89

Post by kunil »

gchpaco wrote: post #84
gnarbarian wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the inefficiency of the engine. There is something seriously FUBAR with the design when you must choose the size of simulation (the rendered rows and columns of ASCII representing the playable zone in the window not the physical dimensions) at the beginning of a game before embarking. The performance of the game is directly proportional to the number of blocks in this zone + the number of dwarfs and NOT the…

Current hypothesis on the forums is that he uses some simplistic variant of A*; in extreme situations everything pathfinds to everything else once a tick in a totally serial program. The player base sometimes resorts to weird hacks and layouts to reduce the branching complexity of the path finding, but ultimately the more loose stone and objects you have to pathfind off and the more things you have pathfinding the wo…

Last time I played it, it wasn't that bad. It was like a year ago, before that minecart updates. People are exaggerating a bit or performance went worse?

Re: Dwarf Fortress: Ten hours with the most inscrutable video game of all time

#90

Post by gchpaco »

nnq wrote: post #57

I never played DF, but... wouldn't his be way cooler and maybe motivate more people into learning it if it was a MMO?

Good god isn't it addictive enough?!

More realistically there are things you can do in DF like bathe the world in lava or crack the Maximum Fun Chamber that would be kind of obnoxious for your neighbors. A bit like playing Minecraft with IC2 and accidentally leveling half your neighbor's house because your nuclear reactor melted down. Just because you are even worse off does not make people any happier about it.

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