Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains Its Complexity and Origins [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 139 posts

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

#41

Post by Trasmatta »

pengaru wrote: post #29
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/

Thanks, just spent some time browsing through that source. At first I was going to say it didn't look too bad, but then saw some comments from someone named Chris Johnson that everything used to be contained in a single game.cpp file. The current state of the source honestly doesn't look too bad. Some large and scary case statements and functions, but that's not always a terrible idea in game dev, and it looks to be well commented. But I'm not sure how much of that is thanks to Tarn or other people that have cleaned up the source.

That being said, LCS came out in 2004, so presumably Tarn has improved over the years.

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

#42

Post by austhrow743 »

dmonitor wrote: post #36
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…

I can see it being very fun for a certain kind of person, but I don’t think most people will get a ton of pleasure from just making your base bigger without any end goal

I'm an "aiming to win in a fixed round" type gamer myself but I think lack of an end goal is less of an issue for more players than you think. Minecraft is huge. Animal Valley is currently all the rage. The Sims was once upon a time the shit. Farmville once (still?) dominated facebook.

People love base or society building for the sake of base and society building.

If anything, playing to win/end is the minority in gaming.

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

#43

Post by genocidicbunny »

eindiran wrote: post #30
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…

Create a smaller world with a shorter history and it shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. No need to overnight it -- not like a new player's going to get quite as much out of the extensive history of the world, so might as well get to playing sooner.

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

#44

Post by genocidicbunny »

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.

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 likely to see is some peripheral systems offloaded onto background threads when possible.

My hope is that with the upcoming Steam release they make enough money to hire another veteran game programmer or two to help them work on game and make it perform better.

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

#45

Post by genocidicbunny »

Jarwain wrote: post #37
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.

+1 for Rimworld. I've sunk hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into that game. It doesn't have the same depth as Dwarf Fortress, but still has a lot of depth and a ton of Fun. Especially with Randy Random and his random event generator

Another +1 for Rimworld. I picked it up after a particularly long stretch of playing DF, and it has managed to both satisfy that DF itch while providing plenty of its own unique Fun.

DF is certainly deeper, but Rimworld is much more approachable to the average player. I would argue that Rimworld is also significantly more moddable than DF is. While with DF you can change the raws, Rimworld allows modifying some of the base game code, so you can do way more with Rimworld mods.

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

#46

Post by genocidicbunny »

Trasmatta wrote: post #41
pengaru wrote: post #29

Earlier 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/

Thanks, just spent some time browsing through that source. At first I was going to say it didn't look too bad, but then saw some comments from someone named Chris Johnson that everything used to be contained in a single game.cpp file. The current state of the source honestly doesn't look too bad. Some large and scary case statements and functions, but that's not always a terrible idea in game dev, and it looks to be…

From my understanding, Tarn first and foremost focuses on making the game fun (and Fun) rather than making the code well-organized and clean; I seem to recall some interview or maybe forum post where he made that clear.

In practice that likely means that the code is not all that well organized and planned out. Doubly so if he and his brother have been the only ones who have touched it -- there's a lack of outside influence that would drive one to clean up their code. I of course have not seen any of the source code for DF, so I this is purely my own hypothesis.

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

#47

Post by p1necone »

pengaru wrote: post #29
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/

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).

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

#48

Post by Trasmatta »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #46
Trasmatta wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, just spent some time browsing through that source. At first I was going to say it didn't look too bad, but then saw some comments from someone named Chris Johnson that everything used to be contained in a single game.cpp file. The current state of the source honestly doesn't look too bad. Some large and scary case statements and functions, but that's not always a terrible idea in game dev, and it looks to be…

From my understanding, Tarn first and foremost focuses on making the game fun (and Fun) rather than making the code well-organized and clean; I seem to recall some interview or maybe forum post where he made that clear. In practice that likely means that the code is not all that well organized and planned out. Doubly so if he and his brother have been the only ones who have touched it -- there's a lack of outside inf…

Yeah, agreed. The Dwarf Fortress code might look like a mess to an outsider, but the only thing that really matters is that it works for Tarn. A codebase that will likely only have one contributor ever doesn't need to be written to the same standard as codebases with many contributors. (I believe Tarn does all the programming and Zach does creative work / writing -- somebody correct me if I'm wrong.)

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

#49

Post by andrewzah »

dmonitor wrote: post #36
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…

I can see it being very fun for a certain kind of person, but I don’t think most people will get a ton of pleasure from just making your base bigger without any end goal

The fun comes from logistical planning as you get more dwarves and they do more sophisticated things. The !!FUN!! comes from events/creatures that can kill your dwarves and cause issues.

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

#50

Post by andrewzah »

austhrow743 wrote: post #42
dmonitor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see it being very fun for a certain kind of person, but I don’t think most people will get a ton of pleasure from just making your base bigger without any end goal

I'm an "aiming to win in a fixed round" type gamer myself but I think lack of an end goal is less of an issue for more players than you think. Minecraft is huge. Animal Valley is currently all the rage. The Sims was once upon a time the shit. Farmville once (still?) dominated facebook. People love base or society building for the sake of base and society building. If anything, playing to win/end is the minority in ga…

> Animal Valley

Do you mean Animal Crossing? Stardew Valley drew inspiration from Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon.

Post reply on HN