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Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

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Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

#111

Post by astrobe_ »

shultays wrote: post #99
opportune wrote: post #62

I 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…

Learning the gameplay is reading a related wikipage, which is acceptable. The hard/annoying part is learning UX. It really shouldn't be that complicated. Talking to people in adventure mode, managing jobs (as you said, dwarf therapist is practically a must since the base interface is just horrible), managing armies, hospitals... everything is a chore and you need a tutorial for everything. And every UX in game is dif…

> Stuff like that is a hard barrier for most players and they won't be able to continue unless they are really committed.

Free software has a price too, in terms of efforts the user has to spend on dealing with issues and shortcomings.

Pay. Or do not pay. But there is no bargain.

Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

#112

Post by intended »

cletus wrote: post #91
opportune wrote: post #62

I 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…

There’s a very deep lesson in Dwarf Forts motto of loosing is fun.

I’ve struggled to embrace it because my habit is defensive safe playing. In other words “succeeding”- beating your enemies without suffering a loss or misfortune and never having to deal with jank.

My second fort blew up to a yellow “i” which I had no clue was a fire imp (2d DF era volcano embark.)

But I got lucky and found the ascii explosion of ascii booze barrels fascinating.

Embracing that pain makes all the stories of DF interesting. This does include just letting things blow up because you didn’t get the interface and just enjoying the situation you are in.

To a large extent, the new tutorials and helpful community have eroded that ideal, the long learning curve have you a crucial part of the DF experience - loosing is fun.

I have never been able to fully capture the point or explain how fundamental it is to appreciating the game and how it changes your enjoyment of things.

Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

#113

Post by rashkov »

shultays wrote: post #99
opportune wrote: post #62

I 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…

Learning the gameplay is reading a related wikipage, which is acceptable. The hard/annoying part is learning UX. It really shouldn't be that complicated. Talking to people in adventure mode, managing jobs (as you said, dwarf therapist is practically a must since the base interface is just horrible), managing armies, hospitals... everything is a chore and you need a tutorial for everything. And every UX in game is dif…

There’s a nice example of someone coming up with a good UX for this game, in the form of an iOS app that lets you play against a remote instance of DF called DF Remote (http://mifki.com/df/). I learned about it here on HN and I’ve found it to be a really impressive example of what the UX could be like. It’s not a 100% complete UI — but what’s there is pretty consistent and intuitive.

Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

#114

Post by Scarblac »

KMnO4 wrote: post #19
pkilgore wrote: post #10

As you might imagine after watching, and if you haven't read it before, the Dwarf Fortress change log[1] is a thing of absolute beauty. > - 0009195: [Dwarf Mode -- Pets] Cats dying for no reason - alcohol poisoning? - resolved. [1] https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/changelog_page.p...

For anyone doubting the complexity of Dwarf Fortress, the dying cats bug provides a fantastic glimpse. > Cats have a self-cleaning interaction that contains the [IE_SYNDROME_TAG:SYN_INGESTED] tag [...] They might be walking through spilled alcohol, licking it off their fur and ingesting the drunkenness syndrome. Toady also said alcohol effects are related to body size, so it theoretically wouldn't take much to do the…

Of course for the longest time, carp were the most dangerous animal in the game, they would drag you into the river and kill you if you were standing on the bank. The reason? Swimming trains strength. Fish swim all the time. Their strength went through the roof.

And of course, for the longest time a main way to defend fortresses (armies were broken) was to have an entrance corridor, with another corridor filled with molten lava underneath it. This would cause the upper corridor to become warm. Not really hot, but warm. And there was a bug with the melting point of fat being set too low, so your enemies entering your fortress through the main entrance would die from having all the fats in their organs melted off them. Path finding didn't know about warm rooms.

Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

#115

Post by throwaway4666 »

opportune wrote: post #62

I 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…

DF is much more forgiving and easier than it used to be. Follow the wiki, setup DFHack for a lot of bugfixes and UI improvements and you're pretty much set. You don't even need Therapist anymore when you have the in-game labor manager. Yeah there's a bit of fiddling involved but I can't possibly believe this can be a problem for Hacker News readers.

Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

#117

Post by CathedralBorrow »

sgillen wrote: post #25
itgoon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked Kenshi, but it was a bit too shallow and rather janky. I am looking forward to Kenshi 2.

Haha yeah, I consider Kenshi to be the jankiest game that I consider worth playing.

For me, that title was recently taken over by My Summer Car.

Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

#118

Post by throwaway4666 »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #44
Twinklebreeze wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time multi-threading gets brought up one of the devs explains that being single threaded isn't the bottleneck. It is the cpu cache that is the bottleneck.

And if it was written with a single thread in mind (which it most likely has been) naively 'multi-threading' it will likely not help do much except increase the number of bugs. Too many independent but intertwined systems communicating with each other. Making DF use multiple cores efficiently would be amazing, but I have serious doubts its viable in the short-ish term without a significant rewrite. The most you're li…

We don't really know how feasible multithreading is, but the community suspects at least some tasks could be computed on different threads, such as e.g. the pathfinding stuff that one of the worst offenders when it comes to FPS.

Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

#119

Post by [deleted] »

otikik wrote: post #105

I 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 the…

[deleted]

Re: Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

#120

Post by larzang »

bregma wrote: post #108
p1necone wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He did start out as an academic/scientific programmer, so yeah.
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