Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
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Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
#2Dwarf fortress will crush your CPU because it isn't, and likely never will be, multithreaded.
Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
#3I encourage everyone to check out the game. It's quite crazy, and beginners inevitably lose due to the game's depth and crazy events ("Losing is fun!"). If the ASCII tile sets make your eyes bleed, there are other tile sets of graphics to try out. [0]
There's also a very vibrant modding community, including a lot of memory hacking through the dfhack project [1] – even fixing a lot of longstanding bugs in the game, like dwarves taking a pair of gloves and putting both gloves on one hand. There's a full engine to write tweaks in Ruby or Lua, too.
[0] http://www.dwarfcorp.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/df.... native versus http://i.imgur.com/FQaND.png (Phoebus tiles)
Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
#4I encourage everyone to check out the game. It's quite crazy, and beginners inevitably lose due to the game's depth and crazy events ("Losing is fun!"). If the ASCII tile sets make your eyes bleed, there are other tile sets of graphics to try out. [0] There's also a very vibrant modding community, including a lot of memory hacking through the dfhack project [1] – even fixing a lot of longstanding bugs in the game, li…
"beginners inevitably lose"
You seem to imply that it's possible to win ;)
Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
#5Dwarf fortress will crush your CPU because it isn't, and likely never will be, multithreaded.
Odd considering that several of the CPU-intensive procedures described in the article (rejection sampling of terrain, generation of independent feature fractals) are easily parallelized.
Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
#6We changed the linkbait title to one of the article's introductory sentences that accurately (if blandly) describes the piece.
Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
#7I encourage everyone to check out the game. It's quite crazy, and beginners inevitably lose due to the game's depth and crazy events ("Losing is fun!"). If the ASCII tile sets make your eyes bleed, there are other tile sets of graphics to try out. [0] There's also a very vibrant modding community, including a lot of memory hacking through the dfhack project [1] – even fixing a lot of longstanding bugs in the game, li…
I would wait for the new release to stabilize, though, and for the third-party tools to be adapted to it. Or just go with the previous release, which is 2 years old.
Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
#8Dwarf fortress will crush your CPU because it isn't, and likely never will be, multithreaded.
Odd considering that several of the CPU-intensive procedures described in the article (rejection sampling of terrain, generation of independent feature fractals) are easily parallelized.
Those take place during worldgen though, which is a one-time event that occurs before gameplay. Where most players actually experience CPU problems (and it matters) is during gameplay. The world is effectively frozen after world creation (though I think the latest version does allow for events to still go on), but what has historically been the source of performance problems is dwarves and animals pathing, large numbers of items, and water/lava flow. Even though you can generate these huge regions, the average fortress is built on a pretty small map.
Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
#9The truly exciting thing about Dwarf Fortress is that it proves that deep, detailed simulation is well within our reach.
It suggests whole new genres of games that have yet to be created; imagine a typical fantasy RPG (or perhaps one that plays more like Mount&Blade) where the entire world is simulated as you play, so every choice you make has logical consequences. The possibilities are endless, and while Dwarf Fortress is a great game on its own, it's really just scratching the surface of what can be done with world simulation.
Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress
#10I think it a loss that a game with such original complexity has the most primitive graphics. Nobody wants 3D acceleration, but an upgrade to a simple 2D with sprites and effects with a better interface, would open it to a wider crowd.