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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]

#21

Post by chongli »

grawprog wrote: post #12
simaldeff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great but I wish the creator'd do something about death by FPS. Which is arguably how I end up all the time. I like to build big complex fortresses with a lot of industry and a lot of mining. And oftentimes I end up with a lot of animals to produce meat, leather and bones (had a very promising Draltha industry at one point). It's quite disheartening to put time in a fortress and "die" by FPS just because you a…

Being able to explore goblin spires and human cities in adventure mode would be nice too. It's sad when you have to avoid exploring the biggest city in your world mode because taking a step takes two minutes or more. It sucks all the more because exploring things in cities in adventure mode has given some of the best roleplaying adventures i've had in a game. It just take so damn long to do anything. Can't think of a…

Caves of Qud [1] is a fantastic roguelike with procedurally generated backstory, quests, towns, etc.

If you like the classic Fallout games (1 & 2) and you enjoy roguelikes with a lot of weird stuff, I think you’d get a kick out of CoQ. The game has incredible atmosphere that gives you this feeling like you’re exploring a real, living, breathing world. There’s a lot of depth to the gameplay as well, with deep character building and a complex crafting system.

I really want to get back to playing it but I’m in school right now and have a ton of work to do!

[1] http://www.cavesofqud.com/

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

#22

Post by grawprog »

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…

Modding dwarf fortress is ridiculously fun. All the raws are a plethora of awesome just too detailed things like that.

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

#23

Post by ViViDboarder »

Twinklebreeze wrote: post #16
stryan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering DF is still all mostly single threaded and IIRC Toady doesn't really know how to make it multi-threaded (per his own admition) that might take a while.

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.

Does that sound right? Do I have this wrong: there is too much to cache so some of the memory goes to RAM or disk where loading will take longer than cache. You could move some of the loading to another thread so that the UI (text or otherwise) can continue while other data in the backend is moved around between cache, RAM, and disk, and then processed before sending to the interface.

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

#25

Post by sgillen »

itgoon wrote: post #15
sgillen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should also checkout Kenshi, on the surface very different, but in practice I think it can scratch a similar itch.

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.

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

#26

Post by ducaale »

29athrowaway wrote: post #7

Some casual alternatives to Dwarf Fortress include Gnomoria or Rimworld. They do not have the same level of depth, but they're enjoyable.

There is also Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead[1] which is open source

[1] https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA

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

#27

Post by eindiran »

I attempted to play DF in high school many years ago, booted it up and was immediately overwhelmed. I ended up uninstalling it and forgetting about the game for a long time. Recently I remembered the game and gave it another shot, and have been having a lot of fun [0]. Having the noob pack available to try out some titlesets made it a lot more approachable as well. And there have been a lot of quality of life improvements for new players; I think the Steam release will add a lot more in this direction as well.

There is also a large community of content creators who play the game and post the stories of their fortresses. This can be an interesting place to jump in. I enjoy Kruggsmash's videos [1] and if you haven't heard it yet, a classic DF story is Boatmurdered, from the Something Awful forums. I recently listened to this reading of the story: [2]

[0] https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=Fun

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/kruggsmash

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZF59Dkk73g

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

#28

Post by kibwen »

chongli wrote: post #21
grawprog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to explore goblin spires and human cities in adventure mode would be nice too. It's sad when you have to avoid exploring the biggest city in your world mode because taking a step takes two minutes or more. It sucks all the more because exploring things in cities in adventure mode has given some of the best roleplaying adventures i've had in a game. It just take so damn long to do anything. Can't think of a…

Caves of Qud [1] is a fantastic roguelike with procedurally generated backstory, quests, towns, etc. If you like the classic Fallout games (1 & 2) and you enjoy roguelikes with a lot of weird stuff, I think you’d get a kick out of CoQ. The game has incredible atmosphere that gives you this feeling like you’re exploring a real, living, breathing world. There’s a lot of depth to the gameplay as well, with deep characte…

I just learned about Caves of Qud by this great talk by its developer that goes over examples of its procedural history generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClGAApZYIvI

Apparently it's slated to leave early access in Q4 2020, so I'm holding off on buying it for the moment, but I'm very eager to play it.

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

#29

Post by pengaru »

Trasmatta wrote: post #24

I 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 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/

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

#30

Post by eindiran »

eindiran wrote: post #27

I attempted to play DF in high school many years ago, booted it up and was immediately overwhelmed. I ended up uninstalling it and forgetting about the game for a long time. Recently I remembered the game and gave it another shot, and have been having a lot of fun [0]. Having the noob pack available to try out some titlesets made it a lot more approachable as well. And there have been a lot of quality of life improve…

In case anyone wants to try out the game, these are two great tutorials for very recent releases:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtQyRNNEMRA

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTeQJOC1H38

Head over to the Bay12 Games forums (https://bay12games.com/dwarves/) and find one of the noob packs for your platform (there are versions for macOS, Windows, and Linux). Download and install it. It'll take a few hours to create the world, so let it run over night or plan to watch DF tutorials while it runs.

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