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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]

#51

Post by 29athrowaway »

genocidicbunny wrote: post #45
Jarwain wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+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 th…

I got the expansion. It is mostly for people that do the quests. I am not too much into the quests, caravans and such.

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

#52

Post by nitwit005 »

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/

That style seems similar to a number of other terminal games. I think it's just the natural pattern to grow more and more switch statements and arrays if you expand your game without major refactoring.

At one point I tried to edit Nethack to make it impossible to die. It was kind of shocked by all the random checks strewn throughout the code.

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

#53

Post by rhn_mk1 »

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 tried Caves of Qud, but after dying a dozen times due to botched combat, I can't get into it.

The way I played I got more of a NetHack in an open world setting vibe, rather than a sandboxy exploration of a generated world.

I'm not sure what I was doing wrong. Was I focusing on battle too much? Is it even avoidable when the plains are full of monsters, and goals are placed on the other side of the plains?

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

#54

Post by rhn_mk1 »

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…

Isn't (a large part of) DF basically a huge cellular automaton? That problem is already solved for multiple threads.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by genocidicbunny »

29athrowaway wrote: post #51
genocidicbunny wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I got the expansion. It is mostly for people that do the quests. I am not too much into the quests, caravans and such.

I actually haven't gotten that yet. With how much there already is to do, I haven't found the itch to expand the base game just yet.

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

#57

Post by genocidicbunny »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #54
genocidicbunny wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't (a large part of) DF basically a huge cellular automaton? That problem is already solved for multiple threads.

In a lot of ways, yes it is. But that's where theory and practice diverge. Could all the current systems of DF be implemented anew in a way that easily scales to however many CPU cores are available? Most likely in some way yes they could be. Could the current systems as implemented be ported to better scale with the number of available CPU cores? Questionable.

Game engines are incredibly complex -- there are usually dozens if not hundreds of systems interacting with each other. Over time, this all ossifies to the point where making changes to one system requires changes to many other systems. This is kind of a fact of life with almost every game engine or codebase that I have encountered, worked with, or heard of. When you start getting into more than a decade of development, there are going to be a lot of tangled systems that are going to be very difficult to pull apart.

Yes, the fundamental problem may be solved for multiple threads, but DF solved it for one thread, and that solution is part of what makes DF fun. Messing with that solution is asking for trouble.

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

#58

Post by genocidicbunny »

andrewzah wrote: post #50
austhrow743 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley wires got crossed.

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

#59

Post by opportune »

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

There is an endgame area you can either accidentally or intentionally enter and some players have managed to 'beat' that.

It's an interesting simulation game for sure, if you enjoy sim city but want to try something a LOT deeper and more complex I think you would like it.

There is also a lot of time that can be spent actually growing up to that size and managing all the various things that can happen (spoilers: raiders, kidnappers, war, were-things, vampires, forgotten beast attacks, very strong creature attacks, tantrum spirals)

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

#60

Post by flatline »

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…

And yet I have seen other code bases become true unmaintainable messes after so long a time, even by their creators. DF works remarkably well. I know he has gone through a few large refactorings in the past out of necessity. I doubt the code is pretty or easy to follow, but I also doubt it’s bad in many ways that code can be so.
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