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

arstechnica.com

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

#161

Post by chris_mahan »

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…

So we increase the donations to, say, three million dollars, and he open-sources the game. He and his brother should be able to live on 3 mil, no? Ok, 5 mil...

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

#162

Post by chris_mahan »

intended wrote: post #48

In the recent threads on armor and armor piercing on the Bay12forums, the game calculates and checks for fracture stress and impact stress when crossbow bolts impact armor. So for example the game will test to see if the impact_yield, and further research in the threads below reach conclusions such as : " the IY (impact_yield) deflection mechanism is related to armor density, armor thickness, bolt size, bolt impact y…

This means, essentially, that the strategist can't build an Excel model of the game and win that way, the way many games are played and won. Excel would blow up...

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

#163

Post by ansible »

intended wrote: post #102
gchpaco wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ag…

Hmm. Maybe I should make an effort to pick it up, just to learn to think and operate like that.

It sounds like they have made an enterprise resource planning system for DF. That's very interesting.

That may also be why I never got into DF, it sounds like too much work. Like actual work.

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

#164

Post by intended »

Natsu wrote: post #156
intended wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Constant thanks to the people on the forums who do some of the very cool data gathering. How'd you pull the data for saguaro wood?

Empirically. I got my hands on a piece and measured the density myself. It's roughly 430 kg/m^3. Still have a box full of the damn stuff, actually, just in case someone can figure out any half-sensible way to translate the other properties into something DF uses.

Hmm, I think I remember coming across the material properties thread a long time ago.

Wow that was some data gathering. It's kinda strange to think that along with DF you can get a dataset with the properties of various real world materials.

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

#165

Post by eru »

gnarbarian wrote: post #95
gchpaco wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> [...] focus on optimizing DF with multithreading and GPGPU stuff.

You should probably start with algorithmic improvements.

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

#166

Post by intended »

ansible wrote: post #163
intended wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. Maybe I should make an effort to pick it up, just to learn to think and operate like that.

It sounds like they have made an enterprise resource planning system for DF. That's very interesting. That may also be why I never got into DF, it sounds like too much work. Like actual work.

Nah, thats just DF Hack, it adds lots of plugins and functionality that the more advanced DF player starts hankering for after a while.

The base game with a wiki, a tileset, and dwarf therapist, will be accessible and fun for the average HN visitor.

The ERP aspect of it is for people who just want to reach that level of gameplay. I don't. I just mass produce my stuff and never run out of goods.

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

#167

Post by intended »

chris_mahan wrote: post #162
intended wrote: post #48

In the recent threads on armor and armor piercing on the Bay12forums, the game calculates and checks for fracture stress and impact stress when crossbow bolts impact armor. So for example the game will test to see if the impact_yield, and further research in the threads below reach conclusions such as : " the IY (impact_yield) deflection mechanism is related to armor density, armor thickness, bolt size, bolt impact y…

This means, essentially, that the strategist can't build an Excel model of the game and win that way, the way many games are played and won. Excel would blow up...

Good God.

At some point Toady will add an economy module.

I... shudder at the thought of the processing required for that.

Each site will have its own produce, production rates and ability to transmit goods, (the current build is already deciding on how much transport succeeds based on banditry and so on).

Man. It just painful to consider how much processing is going to be required ><.

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

#168

Post by gchpaco »

pistacchioso wrote: post #55
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…

now, this confirms my opinion that the game has been really fun to program, much more than to play. Simulating inch by inch damage is a fun thing to think, model and develop, but in the end the player gets a bunch of chars and some description that could have been well picked up randomly with no impact on the gameplay

It is actually really a blast, enough so to cause these sort of really frustrated "it's awesome but it's awful" threads. It is a weird combination of open world architecture combined with really stupid minions. What is in reality probably an AI mistake really feels like massive stupidity the twentieth time your mason seals himself on the wrong side of a floodgate. You spend hours getting things set up just so and then a megabeast comes and seals you in your fortress and your dwarves go mad and start murdering each other for lack of a sock. Or you decide what the world really needs is pressurized magma cannon and spend a couple of real life weeks and countless in-game years and dwarf lives getting the pump stack to work, only to find out the first time you try and use it that the pressure system doesn't work and what is supposed to be a raging torrent of molten rock is actually sort of a sprinkler system. Of molten rock. And you haven't devised a purge system yet, so your half working masterpiece is going to have to be taken apart very, very carefully by a bunch of idiots. (This is not hypothetical; it happened to a succession fort that went by "FailCannon")

Not for nothing is the community devoted to megaprojects. Not only are they cool they offer countless ways to introduce Fun into your boring, dreary existence. And sometimes they even work; the "minecart shotgun loaded with gold bars (because, why not?) complete with optional F.R.O.G.G.E.R. system is just a gorgeous thing to watch happen, and it's viscerally satisfying to watch some goblin take a gold bar going a good 30, 40 mph to the face.

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

#169

Post by jessaustin »

I played DF quite a bit a few years ago. Sometime later I read Reamde, by Neal Stephenson: http://www.amazon.com/Reamde-A-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0062...

I only just realized, reading the comments here, how much the description of the game in Reamde is patterned after DF, with simulations of geological and even planetary processes driving mundane scenery and resource distribution. Although of course in the novel it's a MMORPG because that's cooler. b^)

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

#170

Post by Natsu »

intended wrote: post #164
Natsu wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empirically. I got my hands on a piece and measured the density myself. It's roughly 430 kg/m^3. Still have a box full of the damn stuff, actually, just in case someone can figure out any half-sensible way to translate the other properties into something DF uses.

Hmm, I think I remember coming across the material properties thread a long time ago. Wow that was some data gathering. It's kinda strange to think that along with DF you can get a dataset with the properties of various real world materials.

Part of it was crowdsourced to my fellow forumites, but a lot of that thread was just me, Google & Wolfram Alpha. You could probably still find it buried somewhere on the suggestions forum with that giant table of materials, material properties & sources.
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