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The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

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Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#81

Post by tensor »

sunir wrote: post #62
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #51

Some notes: First, these guys are the real hackers. Not Carmack, Woz, Bill, or Zuck, or all the super-cool guys that made the bucks and then coasted (technically). These guys are living the life just because they love it. They're a much better representation of the inner hacker in all of us than those stories of riches and fame. I got the impression they would continue doing this no matter what their financial circum…

Sorry. I hear what you're saying and I think you are deeply wrong. (Oh no, someone is wrong on the Internet! :) Carmack, Gates, Zuck and Woz are the real deal. Saying they aren't because others toil in obscurity is some hopeless romanticism about hacker culture. A heart warmer, maybe?, but not justified. Just because financial outcomes are not matched to your hacker ideal doesn't invalidate either approach. The rich…

To be fair, Gates was more business man than any sort of hacker. While Zuckerberg may have actually coded his first product, unlike Gates, making a web app, no matter how popular, is far cry from what Carmack and Wozniak have done.

Perhaps it's an illustration that it's often not fancy maths and algorithms that pay, but rather being in the right place at the right time with the right product. That said, there are instances like Google and Carmack where it really was the algorithms that made the difference.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#82

Post by wallflower »

pnathan wrote: post #73
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #51

Some notes: First, these guys are the real hackers. Not Carmack, Woz, Bill, or Zuck, or all the super-cool guys that made the bucks and then coasted (technically). These guys are living the life just because they love it. They're a much better representation of the inner hacker in all of us than those stories of riches and fame. I got the impression they would continue doing this no matter what their financial circum…

Woz isn't a real hacker? Disagree. Read up on him.

Second your disagreement.

Woz is a real hacker, if not one of the best ever.

Long excerpt from his amazing Founders at Work interview.

"This was two weeks away and Mike Markkula said yes. So that was my motivation. I always had these little fictitious motivations that motivated me and got me to do such great work. So I sat down and designed the floppy disk, and Randy Wigginton (he was the guy just out of high school) and I came in every single day including Christmas and New Years for 2 weeks. I came in every single day leading up to, I think it was January 3 or 5, when we went off to Las Vegas. I almost had this floppy disk done.

I got it to where it was writing data on a track, reading the data on a track. Then I got it to where it was reading the data in the right byte positions. Then I got it to work with shifting tracks, and we wanted a simple program where we would say "run checkbook" or "run color math" and it would run the programs that were stored on the floppy disk. So we went off to Las Vegas, and Randy and I worked all night and we got it done to where it was working. At the very end, it was 6:00 a.m. and I said, 'We have to back up this floppy disk." We had one good disk that we prepared with the data hand-massaged to get it just right. So I stuck it in the floppy and wrote a little program, and I typed in some data and I said "read track 0," stuck in the other floppy and said "write track 0, read track 1, write track 1." There were 36 tracks—I had to switch floppies back and forth.

When I got done, I'm looking at these 2 floppies that look just the same. And I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I did. So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my head and my listings, recreated everything, got it working again, and we showed it at the show. It was a huge hit. Everybody was saying, "Oh my God, Apple has a floppy!" It just looked beautiful, plugged into a slot on our computer. We were able to say "run color math," and it just runs instantly. It was a change in time.

But the real eureka moment for me was the very first time I ever read data back. I wrote it on the floppy, which was easy, but read it back, got it right. I just died."

The whole interview (and book) are inspiring:

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#83

Post by GHFigs »

jonnathanson wrote: post #46
jokermatt999 wrote: post #38

If you're ever worried that a feature will be too complex to implement, take a look at the ridiculous number of things Dwarf Fortress keeps track of and simulates some time. The article briefly touches on it, but like any look at Dwarf Fortress, it bared dips its toes in the water. Just a quick list off the top of my head... In world gen, it simulates geology and erosion, climate/biomes, growing civilizations, politi…

Dwarf Fortress has a level of micro-complexity that I wish Civilization had. I think there is a niche -- albeit probably a very small one -- for more super-hardcore strategy games in a variety of settings and genres. Folks like me would love to play a game like Civilization and have incredibly rich, complicated diplomacy and trade and other issues that simulate, as closely as possible, real-world geopolitical issues.…

I can vouch for Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, and Victora (all from the same developer as Europa Universalis: Paradox Interactive) as having the kind of beyond-Civ levels of depth and complexity you're looking for. Each is tailored to it's own slice of history in a way that Civ by nature can't be.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#84

Post by forensic »

marvin wrote: post #66
forensic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing he's missing out on is romance and sex. His occupation and lifestyle appears to satisfy all the other typical human needs. Taking a DSM perspective is not the most enlightening perspective. The sex thing is a big problem. In the past, great artists were able to find companionship and sex despite poverty and oddness. Why is it that hackers have such difficulty? If Richard Stallman's medium was anything…

You've got it backwards. Women aren't scared of hackers, hackers are scared of women. This is a gross generalization, but it fits for the examples you mention. Yes, some nerds are completely unattractive and girl-repellent. But it doesn't take that much effort to become attractive, and a lot of hardcore computer guys are attracted to computers precisely because working with computers allows you to lead a solitary lif…

You're right. The issue is that for a woman to pick up one of these nerds she would have to be unusually aggressive in pursuing the nerd-genius and yet also unusually submissive since the nerd-genius (like any great artist) would have strange and demanding needs to which she would need to conform and satisfy.

She'd have to be Courney Love, and there aren't many of those. And shed have to somehow meet the nerd despite his reclusively.

The fear of girls is definitely what makes hacker geniuses more like monks than painters. I admire the crap out of great hackers but my sex needs come before my art.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#85

Post by pavel_lishin »

johnswamps wrote: post #70
pavel_lishin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't get a grip on Nethack. I think I need to print out the list of key bindings in order to actually play.

I would try playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead. It's another roguelike that is heavily inspired by nethack but is more modern and more beginner friendly. I love nethack (I've ascended twice) but it's definitely showing it's age (not to mention that the game is pretty broken in some regards). Crawl has a better interface and tries to remove all the tedious parts of roguelikes, though there's still a learning cu…

What's broken in it?

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#86

Post by thricedotted »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #85
johnswamps wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would try playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead. It's another roguelike that is heavily inspired by nethack but is more modern and more beginner friendly. I love nethack (I've ascended twice) but it's definitely showing it's age (not to mention that the game is pretty broken in some regards). Crawl has a better interface and tries to remove all the tedious parts of roguelikes, though there's still a learning cu…

What's broken in it?

Not sure if this is what johnswamps was referring to, but the two big things that come to mind are the Sokoban levels (there are only two fixed variants which can only guarantee you one of two things, and a lot of the time if people don't get the thing they want (usually the bag of holding), they end up restarting since the odds of getting it anywhere else in the game are pretty low after that) and the fact that you can do things like pudding farming to obtain items/corpses easily. A lot of actions in Nethack are formulaic and based on tricks, whereas DC:SS encourages things like unknown item use more. In the end, I love Nethack and it was my first roguelike, but DC:SS is just a lot more fun.

Also, here's a post comparing Dungeon Crawl and Nethack that I just remembered: http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Linleys_Dungeon_Crawl

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#87

Post by ShardPhoenix »

astrofinch wrote: post #49
jokermatt999 wrote: post #38

If you're ever worried that a feature will be too complex to implement, take a look at the ridiculous number of things Dwarf Fortress keeps track of and simulates some time. The article briefly touches on it, but like any look at Dwarf Fortress, it bared dips its toes in the water. Just a quick list off the top of my head... In world gen, it simulates geology and erosion, climate/biomes, growing civilizations, politi…

I wonder what techniques Tarn uses to manage that complexity. Does he write extremely clean code? Use test-driven development?

Supposedly his code is pretty rough. That would explain why development is slow and the game pretty bug-ridden.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#88

Post by ShardPhoenix »

cageface wrote: post #71

Just as an aside, a game like this with deep algorithmic complexity but trivial graphics seems like a natural fit for a functional language like Scala or Haskell. I wonder why Tarn chose C++ instead. Was it just out of familiarity? With his background in math I'd imagine he'd be very comfortable in an FP language.

Apart from age, there's performance - even written in c++ and running on a modern CPU, the framerate can get pretty slow.

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#89

Post by johnswamps »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #85
johnswamps wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would try playing Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead. It's another roguelike that is heavily inspired by nethack but is more modern and more beginner friendly. I love nethack (I've ascended twice) but it's definitely showing it's age (not to mention that the game is pretty broken in some regards). Crawl has a better interface and tries to remove all the tedious parts of roguelikes, though there's still a learning cu…

What's broken in it?

A lot. Much of it isn't really relevant to beginners, but here's a quick list off the top of my head. Maybe broken wasn't the right word, these are just general problems with the game

1. The endgame is too easy and boring.

2. Elbereth and #pray make it too easy to get out of tough spots

3. Most classes end up playing similarly after the midgame (either wizard or melee typically)

4. Wands of wishing, magic markers, and polypiling are too powerful

5. The game is nearly unbeatable without spoilers

6. Sokoban is boring after you've played through it a few times

7. There's a bunch of cheap tactics like pudding farming

8. It's too generic and boring to put together an ascension kit. There are very few trade-offs you need to make in choosing what armor and weapons to use

9. The religion aspect is too simplistic

10. Combat gets tedious in the endgame. Most of the time you're just plowing through monsters. This results in tons of "battle spam" with you getting several messages like "You hit the minotaur!" every turn, forcing you to not read them and possibly miss important information

11. The game requires several patches to be playable (menucolors, sortloot, hpmon, etc.)

12. The default options are pretty bad

13. Traveling and exploring can be boring

Wow, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be. But I only write so much because I care :) I had a lot of fun beating nethack and and it's one of my favorite games of all time. I'm possibly prouder of beating nethack than of my MS degree :)

Re: The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

#90

Post by saraid216 »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #69
Produce wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it another way, the makers of Angry Birds are crack dealers while Tarn prefers to expand minds by selling LSD.

I was going to say: I admire Tarn's exquisitely esoteric sense of taste, which informs his art and makes both him and others happy, but I try not to shame other people for being addicted to achievement. We are all addicted to achievement. Some of us are just much, much kinkier about it than others. ;) I have yet to definitively locate the bright shining line between a great game and an evilly addictive game. I certai…

The line is in the intent of the design. A certain class of game is designed to immerse you in addictive feedback loops purely for the sake of keeping you in place and (usually) draining your wallet.

It's the difference between the architectural design of a casino and a museum. They're both very technically beautiful and nuanced in the subtle intent, but one is about trapping you by exploiting your animal brain whereas the other is about something else, like walking you through a narrative.

Alternately, distinguish between writing a computer virus and any other kind of excellent code.

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