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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

#81

Post by praptak »

Holbein wrote: post #33
coder23 wrote: post #10

I 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.

The funny thing is, Dwarf Fortress is simulated in 3D. With the 3D viewer, you can even look at your terrain in 3D: http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r21/khyron2k/Dwarves/Dwar... If DF would look like that during gameplay, I'd immediately start playing.

A good 3d GUI for DF would be challenging. Usually[1] most of the game takes place in corridors/caves that are underground, so the naive approach would have everything obfuscated by solid rock.

[1] Obvious nitpick: some players do indeed challenge themselves to build everything above ground.

Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress

#82

Post by hyperion2010 »

dpeck wrote: post #2

Dwarf fortress will crush your CPU because it isn't, and likely never will be, multithreaded.

Ya, sadly Toady has basically said "I don't get multithreading, and it is so far down the list of things to do that it might happen in... who knows when."

Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress

#83

Post by intended »

steventhedev wrote: post #76

"Fun" aside, they should take a page from GRRM, and look at what makes popular fantasy fiction so popular, and borrow some elements from there (such as allowing nations to commit atrocities during worldgen). The occasional godly intervention makes things more interesting as well. From a developer's perspective, though, there is a lot of "fun" left in their codebase. They handle massive pathfinding, temperature and fl…

I just genned a world where the southern elves were crushed for 70 years by a goblin Civ. 3 queen regents and princesses were put to the sword.

The 4 iteration, resulted in Ivis Voidwinds (or something), the new elf princess who promptly went to explore the wilds and tamed giant dingos, lions, polar bears, bears and a host of other animals.

In 162 she led an army and attacked the goblin civ, pillaging 3 cities in an unstoppable attack till they signed a peace treaty in 163.

In 163 the goblins broke the treaty, at which point she waged war till 250, when world gen stopped. She was victorious in battle and converted 5 conquered sites to Elfdom.

She did this all with only 1 kill to her name, she was a high master strategist.

Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress

#84

Post by erikb »

What I hate about the developers is that they live in their tiny little closed source Windows cave. They develop so many cool things but you can probably never use most of it outside of DF. Like how many cool games would we have if the world generator would be an open source C library? How many languages would have been added by other people who actually study language related science if they knew how to. How many people would have developed 3D graphics engines and usable mouse+keyboard menus if there would have been a publicly defined interface to interact with DF.

There are actually many cool tools but as far as I know a lot of the time of these developers is drained by having to find out about the API themselves (which might change) and most of them are naturally only working on Windows as well.

Think of Minecraft style community + DF on all available operating systems. How cool would that be.

Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress

#85

Post by erikb »

intended wrote: post #83
steventhedev wrote: post #76

"Fun" aside, they should take a page from GRRM, and look at what makes popular fantasy fiction so popular, and borrow some elements from there (such as allowing nations to commit atrocities during worldgen). The occasional godly intervention makes things more interesting as well. From a developer's perspective, though, there is a lot of "fun" left in their codebase. They handle massive pathfinding, temperature and fl…

I just genned a world where the southern elves were crushed for 70 years by a goblin Civ. 3 queen regents and princesses were put to the sword. The 4 iteration, resulted in Ivis Voidwinds (or something), the new elf princess who promptly went to explore the wilds and tamed giant dingos, lions, polar bears, bears and a host of other animals. In 162 she led an army and attacked the goblin civ, pillaging 3 cities in an…

I never got around to really learn to play it, but here and there I gen a world just to see that kind of thing happening :D

Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress

#87

Post by fulafel »

dpeck wrote: post #2

Dwarf fortress will crush your CPU because it isn't, and likely never will be, multithreaded.

Multithreading is a last ditch effort since you can only get your speedup from it once and it will add a whole new level of hard bugs and will dramatically complicate everything forever. For something like df it is much better to work on smarter code first.

Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress

#88

Post by boomlinde »

glittershark wrote: post #46
hibikir wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an entire subgenre of games trying to make less ambitious, prettier versions of Dwarf Fortress. Banished, for instance. You could argue that even Minecraft attempts to be a 3d dwarf fortress, where you control your one dwarf. The extra effort in the UI tends to leave far worse games than Dwarf Fortress though.

Minecraft was actually started as an explicit DF clone and then deviated from there

I don't know what definition of "clone" you use, but in my eyes you are using the word too liberally here. Was there any stage of Minecraft development that was even remotely similar to Dwarf Fortress in concept? When I started playing it it lacked, say, crafting, and the only concept it really shared with Dwarf Fortress was the idea of generating terrain procedurally; a concept shared by many games, and one that makes Minecraft compare to Dwarf Fortress like a propeller beanie compares to a wind turbine.

Re: Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress

#89

Post by kbart »

TillE wrote: post #9

The 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 Fortr…

And it's also fun! http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/4/40/FunComic.png
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