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Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

bay12games.com

91–100 of 172 posts

Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

#91
Word to those who want to begin their DF journey: counter to what you might expect for a text-based game, DF can chew a lot of CPU cycles. I always pick small world size and very short world history at worldgen, bc the larger/longer worlds have a lot more stuff for the game to keep track of and can slow it down, IME.

Strike the earth!

Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question. Why would it not be easy?

There are still a lot of employers who see time spent on your own venture as a gap in employment history. I mean, I guess it literally is, since you aren't an "employee". But they completely discount any applicable experience during that time.

The founder Tarn Adams has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Stanford, so I don't think any of his potential employers will mind that he spent his time working on a fantasy economic simulator of this scope.

Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

#94
The only thing that is frustrating for me about DF (well ex-game frustration, not in-game) is that getting visualizations and interface changes in is gated by Toady. I dearly wish that this part could be taken over by the open source community; it would let him keep writing the simulator, and we would get some amazing VR-friendly worlds on top of the simulator.

I know that he doesn't want to support an open developer community because he, you know, wants to write his simulator and make it even more incredibly awesome than it is, but if only there were a way to get that code unlinked and into an API, it would make millions of people very happy.

Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it's free and written by 2 people, you can only expect so much.

It's actually written entirely by one person; Zach is just an idea man.

> It's actually written entirely by one person; Zach is just an idea man.

At some point when you've mastered basic code writing, ideas become the hardest part. This is especially true in game design, but also true even in solving business problems.

Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

#96

If you'd like to learn to play the game, it's not easy. I've created a multipart video tutorial to help you sort of find your feet, learn a few of the keybinds, and get a checklist of things you need. It also talks about how to get better graphics and an isometric view. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBrdUj1adIBD-vgUodaax... Enjoy all the fun. Dwarf Fortress is one of the only single player games that has hel…

If memory serves, there's even an O'Reilly Press book on this -- "Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress" or thereabouts. (And it's for two major releases ago!)

Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

#97
post #8

For anyone who is thinking about giving it a spin for the first time, do yourself a favor and don't get this .01 version. Either wait for a few patches or download the far more stable and mature 0.40.24 ( http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/older_versions.html ) Dwarf Fortress is basically a perpetual beta with lots of major bugs as it is, but especially brand new major versions like this one usually have multiple game…

You might even want to go a little further back from 0.40.24 to start out. The game has grown and evolved over time, and some of the recent features raise the price of entry. (These days, for example, you need soap production and a hospital up and running before the beginning of your second year...)

Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

#98
post #8

For anyone who is thinking about giving it a spin for the first time, do yourself a favor and don't get this .01 version. Either wait for a few patches or download the far more stable and mature 0.40.24 ( http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/older_versions.html ) Dwarf Fortress is basically a perpetual beta with lots of major bugs as it is, but especially brand new major versions like this one usually have multiple game…

You might even want to go a little further back from 0.40.24 to start out. The game has grown and evolved over time, and some of the recent features raise the price of entry. (These days, for example, you need soap production and a hospital up and running before the beginning of your second year...)

I've never had to produce soap even during extended sieges. The only instance it would have helped in was with a FB that had poisonous blood (and killed half my fortress). I always felt that the medical aspects were a bit too easy.

Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

#99
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Against my better judgment I downloaded this and started it up. World-gen seems to be crashing more than half the time (but not every time). Then it crashes most of the time in the "Updating World" phase when you try to start a game, before the embark site selection screen. When I did get it to embark, it crashed in the first minute. So, yeah - wait for patches.

What the game actually crashing or was world gen just restarting with a different seed? World gen works with different parameters and will scrap worlds that are generated with in compatible conditions (e.g. There aren't enough evil biomes to support the minimum number of goblin fortresses).

I mean actually crashing.

Re: Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01 released

#100
post #73
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I know. The poster to whom I was responding was gleeing about a "dot release" having a bunch of features, and that that's something only a "text-based game" (and DF isn't a text-based game, unless your text-based games normally support tilesets or the IBM upper-ASCII set and run inside of SDL) can do. Which is trivially untrue, both in terms of pumping up the impact of the DF release and downplaying what others…

Well the main attraction is the stories it creates and what you create in game. So I'd say to play Craft the World if you want a DF-like with more direction to it, but DF itself is irreplaceable if you want to do things like attacking Hell with minecarts full of whales for the added mass (and therefore, momentum). DF is more about the crazy stories that happen when you're, say, draining the ocean to set up those whal…

"Well", it's not a complaint about direction, it's more that the ability to create interesting stories hasn't expanded a lot in a long time. Early on in my time with DF, I really enjoyed the exploration, mastering the subsystems involved and developing cool stories out of both my successes and mistakes--but then the mistakes stopped happening because the game ended and it became a time sink rather than a growing and evolving challenge. I have built most of the stupid dwarf tricks (I have an embarrassingly large attempt at a CPU lying around somewhere) because of the lack of breadth to the stories that can be told, but eventually, I very much hit the end of the interesting and challenging things and reached the point of "this would take a dozen hours to do and wouldn't be fun." It's not much fun if you can't fail, and the mastery ceiling of DF is much lower than most people think it is; the self-imposed challenges are artificial ones, and while mechanically they can be interesting, I do not find them fulfilling when I know how it's all supposed to work.

(Minecraft would have this problem if not for the tremendous mod support, Forge, etc. that enables you to make what you want of it. Crash Landing is still one of my favorite things in games--not because of the use of HQM, but rather just the profoundly different environment and options for exploring the same rules in a very different milieu.)

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