DF and Aurora are the two 'games' i sunk the most time in by a far margin, what two pieces of great software!!!
Cogmind might be worth a look too, the author's dev blog is also superb.
Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
101–110 of 139 posts
Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, once you get accustomed to the tilesets for a bit it becomes trivial to switch to ascii. But I think it's nice to learn using the tileset because it's usually pretty clear what something is.
I think the joke went flying over your head. Edit: It is a Matrix reference, where Neo asks Tank if he can understand what is going on by just looking at the green characters whizzing in the screen. He answers "You get used to it after a while. ... For example, I see blondes, brunettes, redheads ... " Edit 2: I guess I remembered it wrong, it was Cypher!
Weirdly enough, they make that same joke in the video within the first few minutes.
Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgive my ignorance, but do you have any good references to multi-threaded cellular automata implementations? This is something I've been dabbling with myself.
You have two grids. Clear grid 2. Go over grid 1, calculate the new state for the current cell, write it to the second grid. At the end of a step you swap the grids. Just slap on a good old "#pragma omp parallel for" with OpenMP (a nice guide is here [0]). [0] https://bisqwit.iki.fi/story/howto/openmp/ I also found this pdf if you are interested. http://www.shodor.org/media/content/petascale/materials/UPMo...
You could even do it on the GPU, with 1 thread per cell.
Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
#104I played DF for a while and seems to me that its main usability problem is not text graphics, but general bad UI design. It can be used as a cautionary example of why action-object (instead of object-action) approach and many-modes lead to bad usability.
Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
#105I have learned to enjoy the game, but I enjoy it despite the abismal UX. I know other people can interiorize it, and that's cool, but it is not my case.
To be precise: I don't mind having keyboard shortcuts for lots of things. I think that's good UX. But all options should be mouse-clickable too.
I find the separation between Designations, Piles and Burrows (or whatever they are called) very confusing. In my mind they should be the same kind of "thing" in the UI (a "zone"). Farms are their own "kind of zone", with a custom UX which looks like the one used for building walls (which is just bad imho, just let us click on the two corners please).
That brings us to my biggest grip: lack of consistency across different windows. The initial overmap has a set of keys. The initial "prepare your journey carefully" has a different set of keys for moving around the menus. Then the zone designation window has yet another set of keys to navigate through the menu. The fortress task manager (where you queue new tasks) has another. When a merchant caravan asks you what items they should bring next year, that also comes with a custom UI which is not used anywhere else (and also has its custom set of keys). The steps required to set tasks on each dwarf are so contorted that there is a dedicated tool (Dwarf Therapist) just for that.
And over all this, there is the military management window, which I have never been able to master (I just rely on traps and atom smashers to deal with baddies, mostly because of this, and the fact that ranged attacks have been broken for a while). I wish Dwarf Therapist could handle that one as well.
This lack of consistency combined with the lack of mouse support means that in order to play this game one needs to learn and interiorize a bunch of keystrokes /for each single window in the game/. I understand that for others this is not a huge deal, but this really puts me off. I don't have the mental agility I used to have when I was younger and makes the game a struggle for me.
But the stories produced are great.
On that note, if you just want to see Dwarf Fortress stories and don't want to have to deal with all the UX issues I just mentioned, I recommend the Kruggsmash channel. He really takes this game to another level:
Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
#106I have been playing dwarf fortress for about 7-8 years. If anybody has any questions feel free to ask me. I think the difficulty of learning the game is overstated: if you follow a tutorial, use a graphics pack, and use dwarf therapist (dwarf therapist is a must, most experienced players also use this because it's just a better UI) I think you can get the hang of the game in a few hours of play time. Probably the big…
A few years ago i tried to get into this. Like I really tried. I too installed and used Dwarf Therapist. here's where I struggled: I still wouldn't have the hang of managing the dwarves I had and then a new crop would come along. Even with all these tools it quickly descended into me not having any idea who was doing what or why. Or why they weren't doing the things I was asking them to do. A lot of the things seemed…
Tools like Dwarf Therapist might give the impression that labor assignments actually matter a lot in the game, but really workers are really productive and a full-grown fortress of 200 dwarves can be easily run by under 10 workers. You could assign all your labors in the embarking screen, assign the first few arrivals as farmers and miners, and all the rest can be left to idle, or drafted into the military, or made scholars or priests or entertainers.
The likely reason for there not being food is underproduction. Causes of that could be not having enabled planting for every season, planting textile crops or crops that need to be processed before they are edible (if the textile crop fields are too large it might be fine on embark when you have only 5 seeds, but end up using up all planting time once the seed count is high), lacking seeds, perhaps from cooking the plants directly (cooking does not give back seeds), or being bottlenecked on field size or planter count. Food will rot if not in a food stockpile, but the rate is pretty slow and easy to outproduce, also if underground the rot will produce miasma making it easy to notice. The next likely reason is that a single dwarf might have become unable to path to food. In such a case the dwarf is likely walled off from the fortress in either the caverns or the surface, because anywhere else there wouldn't be water and they would die of dehydration first. Disabling web gathering at game start helps prevent dwarves being stranded in the caverns. It's also possible all food was forbidden or there was an active civilian alert.
It's a bit complex in that there are many ways to fail, but again the winning formula is simple. For me the learning curve was first giving up because I didn't even know what I was looking at or that z-levels existed, and then a year or two later watching a video tutorial that quickly laid down all the basics, and finding the game relaxing to play after that. Unfortunately I don't remember what the tutorial was and some tutorials out there are pretty mediocre, e.g. anything that recommends making a refuse stockpile outside is not adequately conveying that sealing off your fortress from the outside world is key, and IMO building an indoors well should be mentioned as something you need to do even if the process's not covered.
Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I have to install 2 third-party tools and follow 2+ third-party tutorials/guides for a few hours before I can potentially start enjoying the game. Doesn't sound overstated at all...
There are lots of games with some learning curve. When starting with Crusader Kings II, I spent more time reading the game wiki than actually playing the game.
Not to mention doing a detailed study of the geography and history of medieval feudal Europe, including just what the heck agnatic-cognatic gavelkind succession is and that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.
Some days I prefer a sickly in-bred imbecile devil-worshipping king, and some days I just want to deal with short sturdy creatures fond of drink and industry.
Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
He wrote Liberal Crime Squad [0] which is GPL. If LCS is any indication, the code in DF will be a horrible mess. [0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/lcsgame/
The fact that the game has been seeing continuous development of relatively complex new features for this long means the code can't be too horrible. Perhaps very idiosyncratic and particular to Tarns personal preferences, but certainly not unmaintainable (this is just an assumption though).
I have maintained a fork of LCS. The code is unspeakably horrible. It's like its been run through an obfuscator. It requires a hardened, dedicated developer who has developed life-long immunity to code cooties to hack it.
Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
#109I would love to be able to read the Dwarf Fortress source someday. I know Tarn considers Dwarf Fortress to be his life's work, so it would be amazing if he decided to release the source someday -- even if that's 10, 20, 30 years from now.
He's hinted that he could release the sources if the Steam/Itch sales make enough money that he could stop worrying about the stability of his income in the long term. The worry was that if DF got open-sourced and forked, people would give more money to the forked, polished version as opposed to the one version Toady is working on, but he wouldn't mind if he had enough money in the long term.
Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]
#110I have been playing dwarf fortress for about 7-8 years. If anybody has any questions feel free to ask me. I think the difficulty of learning the game is overstated: if you follow a tutorial, use a graphics pack, and use dwarf therapist (dwarf therapist is a must, most experienced players also use this because it's just a better UI) I think you can get the hang of the game in a few hours of play time. Probably the big…
I was surprised how fast the (frequently inconsistent) keyboard commands just get into your fingers, where you don't think about it anymore. Similarly for the graphics, and that applies to games in general. You really stop noticing the graphics around ~30mins into a session, because you're running this asynchronous simulation in your head that only needs minimal information to update. That might be a reason why we re…
Dwarf fortress are an example I used to bring up in some discussions on UI UX.
You are just far more productive with a keyboard, especially once the commands are in muscle memory.