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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

#91

Post by gnarbarian »

gchpaco wrote: post #86
gnarbarian wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opp…

Thank you! I will definitely check that out.

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

#92

Post by kunil »

gosu wrote: post #10

I actually got bored towards the end of my first game of DF because it was too easy. The interface adds a lot of illusory difficulty, but that's not an issue for people used to reading manuals. On the other hand, when you're not wrestling with the system, there's not much fair challenge. When your underground fortress is filled to the brim with traps and completely self sufficient, no one is ever going to touch you u…

Difficulty depends entirely on you. You can easily wall yourself in, build a couple farm and game pretty much can play itself.

Just don't forget to fuel your dwarves with booze from time to time

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

#93

Post by jokermatt999 »

I've noticed a lot of people in this topic complaining about graphics/UI. I'll give you that the UI does need an overall badly, but there's a reason for the graphics: the sheer complexity of the game, and the fact that his last game's development stalled because of graphics.

In the "sheer complexity" department, imagine trying to depict any of the following well graphically: randomly generated artifacts made of random materials, the ridiculously intricate damage models, and completely randomly generated titans (which do start with a base creature, but have random materials/bodyparts galore). While you could just do essentially what he does for the ASCII and have one symbol that represents all these, he doesn't seem to want to go this route. Which is insane, but hey, insane seems to be the normal for DF development.

The second part is that his last game died partly from his trying to implement graphics too early. Notice how the full title is "Dwarf Fortress: Slaves to Armok"? Armok was the game before this. Similar in overly ambitious scope, but with an early 3d style graphics. However, for some reason or another, it became to difficult to support its development after graphics, and it collapsed under its own weight. Hence the switch to ASCII: he could continue implementing hundreds of features without as much regard for performance or implementation. It's easy to add in dozens of new creatures, random titans, genetics and randomized traits when you don't have to actually worry about representing it. I highly suggest reading his devblog (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html) just as inspiration for what one crazy ambitious man can do.

As for why he doesn't enlist more help, make it open source, etc, the answer is even simpler: this game is his bread and butter and both he and his brother live off the donations. Yes, part of it is that he wants to maintain control of the project, but if a program was literally the sole means of supporting you and your sibling, I think you'd be wary of giving away its code too. He has said it will likely be open sourced when he dies however.

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

#94

Post by kunil »

jokermatt999 wrote: post #93

I've noticed a lot of people in this topic complaining about graphics/UI. I'll give you that the UI does need an overall badly, but there's a reason for the graphics: the sheer complexity of the game, and the fact that his last game's development stalled because of graphics. In the "sheer complexity" department, imagine trying to depict any of the following well graphically: randomly generated artifacts made of rando…

It is not just the ASCII. He could write a more useful GUI. With buttons and better mouse control, it would be much appealing for the crowds.

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

#95

Post by gnarbarian »

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…

I would love to see a bunch of hard hitting engineers focus on optimizing DF with multithreading and GPGPU stuff. It would probably require a full rewrite. Having some experience with AI and pyopencl physics simulations I have no doubt that DF could be many orders of magnitude faster and capable of sooooo much more. That's really where my angst stems from.

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

#97

Post by smogzer »

The creators of DF could partner with some game studio to create a nice GUI for playing, or create an API that could allow for beter interfaces to evolve, the tilesets are great, but custom tutorials would be awesome. I tried playing DF once but was overwhelmed with the information and didn't try again, and i used to play nethack and adom.

I also recommend ADOM for those who like nethack and redrogue that is a roguelike meets platformer, very nice !

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

#98

Post by tehwalrus »

roryokane wrote: post #60
aqme28 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the weird-but-essential moves such as castling and en passant will not be apparent to you even after hours of playing like that.

I definitely wouldn’t call castling and en passant “essential”. I just now played a game of chess against the computer on the lowest difficulty, and won easily without using either of those moves. And during the game, the computer itself castled, which might have helped me to learn the move if I hadn’t known it.

My partner's dad was evil: he taught "simple" versions of games, leaving out complicated rules like castling, when she & her sister were small, and then never explained the full rules later.

Thus, when she played me at uni, she was furious that I was "cheating," until I showed her the full rules (the internet is brilliant) and she realised that it was her dad being crazy.

In summary; it is essential to know castling exists, because otherwise as soon as you play another human, they will beat you with it.

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

#99

Post by varjag »

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…

> 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.

Minecraft does that (the fog distance).

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

#100

Post by Natsu »

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).…

There is (was?) actually an isometric add-on. It really only makes things slower and more confusing as far as I can see. The UI isn't the part bringing one's computer to its knees, rather the very detailed simulation going on (and a whole lot of pathfinding over ever-changing maps).

His goal has always been a sort of "fantasy world simulator" which is anything but simple. I should know... I helped find a ton of physical properties of random materials. Saguaro wood in particular was a pain & had to be determined empirically because there simply weren't any good sources.

Lastly, there is one guy helping with the interface. I don't think it will ever turn into a simplified GUI, though. To be honest, that would require so many different buttons that I wonder how it could work.

Chalk it up to the price you pay to play a game where you can drain the ocean, trap whales, load them into lead cages in lead minecarts, set them on fire, then push them down a giant ramp to ram them into the demons down in hell (yes, you can really do that). I'm not sure he wants to be a huge success anyhow. I think he sees this more as a lifestyle business.

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