It’s 2011, you’re laying awake after midnight and can’t quite seem to switch off. You put on the latest episode of DFTalk and listen to Toadie1 and Rainseeker talking about their road map for the magic release but first they’ll have to do night creatures and armies and a completely redo the whole world gen, and you gently fall asleep to Tarn’s classic guitar melody.
I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.
Dwarf Fortress's Steam UI is by far, my least favorite thing about the game. Does anyone else agree?
After playing with the Lazy Newb's Pack and other similar tools for years, I found the Steam version to be a maaaaasive downgrade. The mouse was tied to the framerate, everything felt sluggish and hard to control.
It really irks me because I had been telling everyone for years to play this game, and finally it gets an "official" release and I found it to be... the worst version of the game I'd tried yet.
Maybe its improved since I last tried it. But it would be hard to outdo what the fans had done with the UI, IMO. Even features like seasonal color schemes felt almost vital to me. Not to mention customizing your own preferred sprites...
I almost wish Tarn and Zach had kept to building core gameplay and let the fans handle the UI, with some sort of official team-up to bring it to Steam.
I'd recommended Lazy Newb Pack to almost anyone but I don't think I'd recommend the Steam version, at least the version I tried.
I actually think this type of suggestion/thinking is not good for the game. the mystique of dwarf fortress is that it's a game that plays in your imagination, not on the screen. the point of the ascii visuals is to give a player enough context to understand the state of the world, but it's intentionally obtuse so fun arrises from your brain having to color in all the details. any suggestion that tries to add more polish to the graphics brings you farther away from where the fun lives
Going to have to agree to disagree here. Graphical polish would make it much more enjoyable for me, and I spent enough time with the ascii version back in the day to get used to it.
Granted I haven't played the steam version in awhile, I didn't have a ton of issues with it, and the non-steam version was just not for me.
Additionally, I believe they hired another dev who was cleaning up a lot of things, so maybe better now?
The menus and lack of native ui controls for some things (dfhack) were by far the biggest problem, not the ascii. I get that the ascii is noisy and a matter of taste - not disputing that - but there were much bigger UX problems.
Steam version is much worse than the fan UI options that were already available, sadly. Its also why I explain why DF really failed to take off after the Steam release. It's nowhere near the best, or even best looking, way to play the game.
I pretty strongly disagree. I can see some preferring some fan art style over the official one, even if I don't. But the official gui having support for rendering all the various critters, and factoring in clothing, multi-level, etc, really made the Steam version's graphics vastly better than anything else that was available at the time.
Qud is a gem of a game, same publisher too! I get what you are saying, and it's use of ASCII plus ASCII-like graphics makes the experience a lot friendlier imo.
In a documentary about them putting Dwarf Fortress on Steam Tarn talked about how he had to split the $7 million first payment from Steam with his brother and it turned out the easiest way was to just use the bank app.
I’ve never received $7M but a few times I’ve handled large sums (when buying a house and previous startup exit) and it felt so weird to be how completely normal it was. Like just… oh yeah go ahead and write a cheque for six figures. Or do an e-transfer into your chequing account for six figures. It felt like… no there has to be a whole special world for large sums, no?
I'm sure there is special handling for large sums... but six figures isn't it. Businesses routinely write checks for half a million dollars, two million dollars... it's perfectly normal to see such amounts within the banking world. There might be some extra scrutiny on the back end that you don't see, but since it's well within the realm of normal operations that the bank sees happen every day, it's nothing special.
Now, eight or nine figures, that's probably going to pass the threshold for special attention. As in, you might be required to go to the bank in person with photo ID in order to authorize the transaction, that sort of thing. But under 10 million U.S. dollars? Many businesses will handle those amounts monthly, and the bank is used to seeing them.
You’re talking about businesses in a reply to someone talking about their personal finances. Can you think creatively for a moment, maybe use some empathy and think through some reasons that these are different situations?
It depends on the part of the system you are talking about. Under the covers, many a system will send reports higher up for 5 figure transfers, just for money laundering detection. And there will be all kinds of things blaring for anomaly detection. It's not the same if an account that normally moves large sums, and has been cleared and "explained lol moves a large amount than if it's one making nothing. See, for instance, how Notch's PayPal account was flagged when suddenly the game started to do great sales. So the special attention will vary, and there might be a human involved at some point even if they don't call you.
In Spain, if you try to casually use your bank app to transfer a big amount, you hit a limit. If you need to do that, you can go to a bank office or do a phone call, tell them, and they will temporarily lift the limit, and then yes, you can just go to your regular everyday app and type the large amount and it will work. Doesn't it work like that where you are?
Reminds me of when a guy earned like a million off of cryptocurrency, but the cash was in a foreign account (the exchange, I presume). He couldn't just transfer it to his own account because the bank had issues with it. He opened a new account with another bank that had no issue accepting it, and transferred it from there to his main bank which suddenly also had no problem with it lol.
I think generally speaking, there's two systems; the one is a scam / self protection system that disallows large transfers but the user can disable it themselves, the other is something that works after the fact that looks for things like money laundering and tax evasion, but these processes run nightly, yearly, or maybe even once a year. I'm half expecting a tax bill for some unreported crypto assets abroad, half because it's only a few hundred worth.
Banking regulation varies from country to country, where I'm from a regular personal account isn't usually allowed to directly transfer more than a few tens of thousands of dollars per month. Anything beyond that is handled by the bank itself. Business accounts work differently.
I'm certain receiving a lump six figure sum on my personal account would trigger a review, if only because the taxman wants to know about it.
Backend-wise, it's just different sets of flags. The infrastructure is the same.
At that point, there's an IB team handling the deal, an LLC holding the money, and probably several banks holding its accounts. Few banks are happy to handle that kind of concentration in a retail sight account.
I'm guessing at those sizes the bank holding that much of your stuff becomes a risk for them so they have someone you can talk to directly to smooth over any potential problems
Yeah I love all their Arkane stuff, and the two Half Life docs they did under their whitelabel company Secret Tape company for Valve. And of course the big Disco Elysium series.
It is actually their 10th anniversary in September, so if you like their work I would highly recommend their patreon to make sure they can do another 10 years.
Their discord is actually one of my favourite places on the internet to talk about games because everyone in there has such great taste and is knowledgeable about the actual production process of games.
They also have a second channel/patreon now called noclip_2 which is focused on underground/indie games which has been a constant source of joy for me, all the best games I've played in the past year I've discovered via their videos or their discord.
Just great vibes all around.
Edit: almost forgot, they are also running a project to digitize old videogame tapes so if you want to see old interviews with carmack or footage from E3 in really nice quality they have a YouTube channel for that too
I had the muscle memory for the full keyboard control on pre-steam releases and the loss of some complete keyboard controls and things just changing made it so I never really got into the Steam release, which was pretty disappointing. I get it though.
I'm in a similar, but less extreme boat. The new interface has its perks, especially in terms of discoverability, but for tasks that need to be done repeatedly (request 10 beds be made before you have a manager, for example), you really miss the ability to rock some chords.
It took me some time to remap the muscle memory but it felt so worth it. The Steam version is not just a new AI, it introduced a lot of gameplay changes which really improved the underlying systems a lot.
The version available for free on their website is the same exact program as the one you purchase on Steam. It simply includes a different set of graphics for the UI. These graphics are designed to look as if they are made up of text characters, but in reality they are still just sprites. The sprites that come with the version you buy from Steam are designed to look like a normal but stylized gui.
“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay.
EDIT: To people who are rebutting this by saying “it’s just not for you” - that’s entirely my point. Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything.
I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
How would you suggest someone make a good tutorial for DF that doesn't leave the player exhausted by the time they start a new game?
That's my core complaint w/ strategy games. By the time I'm done with the tutorial i have to do other things only to forget everything I learned the next time I get to sit down with it.
At best "hints" or a glossary/help menu is the best way imo.
Several people have given the opinion in this thread that DF is basically immune to having a tutorial; I am trying to figure out why. I don't see a tutorial as an end-to-end blueprint of everything the game is capable of. It's just a series of info, hints, and follow-along instructions, possibly with railroaded / simplified UI. I mean, the first time I booted up DF with no context circa 2013, it took me a few minutes to figure out that we're seeing a top-down view. I certainly would have appreciated a hint or a tutorial (though I do not necessarily fault the game for not having one; it's _not_ a game that is aimed at onboarding heaps of fresh newbies by the truckload each week).
It depends, for me it is boring and has pretty dim graphics. I wanted to love it, but it is not fun. It looks like a Sims game, it lacks what e.g. factorio has, that "spark".
DF sounds like it might have that "spark", but I'm afraid to touch it.
Yeah, I think this actually supports the idea that Dwarf Fortress is needlessly bad at onboarding players. Every time I try to get into it, I end up confused by why people enjoy it and unable to figure out how to play it. Whereas with Minecraft, exploring how to play it was actually fun, with Dwarf Fortress, it felt frustrating and unnecessarily obscure.
That's because the UX/UI is utterly awful. It's cargo cult: the game. (And BTW my complaints have nothing to do with the controls. The actual UX is just... not thought out at all).
Minecraft's early game is relatively boring. Empty busywork like punching trees, village raids and strip mining are vestigial gameplay loops that neither Mojang nor Microsoft had the confidence to fix.
I'd agree that they're a bad comparison though. Despite Notch's inspiration from DF, Minecraft has worse bosses, biomes, trading, mining, diplomacy, cooking, innkeeping and NPCs.
I had a good number of hours in Minecraft Classic's browser version, mostly in online servers though. Solo wasn't much fun.
Modern Minecraft is still not much of an appeal to me without mods. I'm happy to see more block games like Vintage Story push the medium forward while Microsoft... wraps up post-production on A Minecraft Movie: Squared, I guess?
It also has effectively zero physics. I still remember being annoyed at how water worked in Minecraft when playing with my kid, and the fact that trees don't collapse if you cut 'em down.
> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
The majority of people do not play videogames.
The majority of those do not play any roguelikes.
Citing the majority is completely useless.
Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress.
There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know.
Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.
> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.
On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game.
The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours.
The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog.
That to me is some excellent playtime.
Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
The tutorial is the wiki. I used to play Dwarf Fortress back in the 2008-2009 era, and I kept going back to the wiki when I needed to learn something. It was, and still is, comprehensive, containing not just a "getting started for beginners" tutorial page, but also a list of every building and workflow (from ore to metal to swords and armor, from seeds to plants to food and drink...). In-game tutorials are not the only way to learn about a game; a well-maintained wiki (that isn't on wikia, oops sorry they're called fandom dot com there days — but that's a whole other rant) is also an excellent resource. And certain types of games seem to lend themselves to having well-maintained wikis: Dwarf Fortress's wiki is perhaps the best I've ever seen, narrowly beating Minecraft's also-excellent wiki.
It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
This depends largely on your expectation for what a 'game' should be.
Puzzle boxes, for example, have zero on ramp, and yet many many people enjoy them, enjoy the struggle of discovery.
Arguably the edges of mathematics and science are inhabited by similar people, living where the rules are ill defined, where there is much to be discovered rather than pre-digested and spoon fed.
I have little patience for games that don't spoon feed, so I get where you're coming from. I watched my brother play DF and decided I didn't want to spend my time like that, trying to parse ascii, trying to figure out how all the things interacted.
I found exactly the discovery fulfilling in Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and Minecraft. Once I mastered those (well, maybe it is fairer to say "once I plateaued", there are way more skilled players than me) I found much less interest in them. Sure, I still play occasionally for a bit after a big update drops, but that is pretty much it. Oh and yeah, puzzle focused games (as long as it isn't slide puzzles) are great too. I fondly remember Myst, Monkey Island and other puzzle games like that.
Some people like games where you need to grind (idle clicker games seem to be purest/insanest form of that), and that is something I don't get at all. It is just pointless busywork, just like those repetitive achievements ("kill N enemies with X style attacks") or collectables. (Achievements that are on the form "find this hidden thing" or "do this out of the box thing once" I do understand more.)
>It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding.
No, it is a games job to be entertaining for those it was designed to entertain.
>It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
Certainly there are many people who take a longer time to learn and grasp concepts and find challenging tasks something to be avoided, and this game isn't for you! That doesn't mean that every game should be designed so that the lowest commoner denominator can understand and enjoy the game! Some people not only enjoy being challenged by complex games, but seek those out those challenges and that complexity. The game market is flooded with easy to learn and easy to win games designed and made for simpletons, so there's no reason for you to complain about the rare game (these days) that deviates from that.
Plenty of players have fun with the game, regardless of your personal opinions on the "on-boarding experience".
I think you want this game to be something it's not. It's not a casual game for casual gamers. It's a game whose mantra is literally "losing is fun". It's esoteric menus and attention to detail are the result of decades of work by a couple of guys that just wanted to make the game they and their fans wanted to make.
It's imperfections are part of it's charm and if that turns you off from the game then it's not for you and that's OK.
No, that’s not a game’s job. You will not enjoy every game. Those games that you did not enjoy are not necessarily failures. They are simply games that _you_ did not enjoy.
Sure, that's not what I'm saying though. It's the job of the game to be fun in general, not in specific to some individual, and one of those ways is to have a good onboarding experience. People saying DF is fun are having fun despite its terrible onboarding, not because of it; in other words, cope.
No, no. If you cannot figure out a game then it won’t be fun, and you won’t enjoy it. But other people _will_ figure it out, and will enjoy it. And many of them will enjoy it more _because_ it was challenging to figure out and to do well at. It’s ok to write an approachable game, but not all games must be approachable.
Because it’s not a complete or compelling experience if the systems aren’t naturally exposed and taught over time in a progressive manner. This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
I wouldn't consider that a universal feature. It can certainly help, especially if you are aiming for a generalized audience, but not every game needs to be either intended for or accessible to every person.
I would use Crusader Kings as an example, it doesn't even seem like a game at first, you have no idea what is going on, and large swaths of options and features may take dozens of hours to stumble across. But yet it is still a great game with many fans and players.
> it doesn't even seem like a game at first, you have no idea what is going on, and large swaths of options and features may take dozens of hours to stumble across
For me personally, figuring these things out was the most fun I got out of such games. I had an absolute blast loading CK2 without a tutorial and spending the next several hours trying to figure out what is all this nonsense about. Same with DF btw, once I figured out the idea, mechanics, control, and played for some hours to learn to build a somewhat sustainable fortress, it kinda stopped being fun.
Eh, I definitely can't agree with this one. Some of the most beloved games of all time had effectively no on-ramp of any kind - especially if you're willing to go back 30 years - and none of the fans of those games would say "they are not compelling experiences" because of a learning cliff.
There are plenty of good or even great games that dont give a shit about "good game design". And developing in the direction of "good game design" is sort of like Carcinization, AAA games have been tending towards a single unified structure. Its great for mass media but its terrible for art.
I learned Dwarf Fort through a mate of mine. We both played separately, and we would have phone calls discussing how we were able to achieve x or y outcome. Eventually we determined an ideal set of bootstraps to achieve a plateau of semi functional Dwarf society.
And then they dropped the dwarf economy update, and everything went to shit and we got to relearn how to pick ourselves up all over again.
Then Bees, then Taverns and Travellers. Then Danger Rooms started causing more serious wounds.
You are welcome to limit yourself to AAA games and yellow paint but thats you deciding to artificially limit what experiences you participate in. It doesnt cast a single shadow on people tooling around and experiencing the art of games.
>This has been a cornerstone of good game design for over 30 years.
First, this is completely wrong. There are many good games that have been designed over the last 30 years that didn't assume you were an invalid and needed your hand hand held every step of the way.
Second, many of us (including myself) have been playing computer games for ~50 years! In the 80s and 90s the average game was far more difficult than even the most difficult games put out today. It wasn't assumed that everyone, or even most people, were ever going to beat the game. There were games I played for hundreds of hours back then, and enjoyed greatly, that I never finished or even mastered all the complexities of! That didn't make it any less fun. I want to be challenged by a game. If I load up a game and am spoon-fed everything it isn't a game I play for long.
Religiously subscribing to every "cornerstone of great game design" is how you end up with the plain oatmeal of videogames. Inoffensive, bland, and easily forgotten.
I, for one, hate games spoonfeeding me. Most games are unlikely to be a player's first videogame. I don't need every damn mechanic tutorialized. Present me with my toolbox, and let me get to it.
>It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding.
Its the games job to present their unique style of fun to the market, and let the market sort it out. A game made by 2 blokes has to have a set of priorities, and their priority has always been the simulation.
>It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”
I mean, ignore Dwarf Fortress for a minute, this is exactly what Paradox has built its little empire on. I was at 300+ hours of Crusader Kings 2 and had only a sort of intuitive grasp of most of the games systems. And at the time, most of the safer european powers were at risk of just getting rolled off the map by the golden horde mid game, and the work arounds for that were quite insane. I still dont reckon I have the war/conflict systems mastered. Paradox does tutorials, they just suck immensely and you end up on the forums or wikis anyway.
Dwarf fortress has managed to create a game with that kind of skill curve with 0.0001% of the resources.
>that’s just shitty game design.
I feel sorry for you, I get the impression that this hostility is coming from a place where you really wish you could share in these fantastic games but haven't quite got the gumption to stick with them. I get it I really do, I mod Battle Brothers to make it easier, because I love the texture of the game but I haven't been able to master the combat or save scumming required to play at a real difficulty.
No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of.
Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.
If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.
If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX.
The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system.
I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.)
I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM.
FYI, the newer versions with their mouse-driven interface solve a lot of those issues. Dwarf Therapist (the RAM reading tool you were thinking of) isn't needed any more, because there are much better in-game tools for managing what kinds of work certain dwarves do. The new menu layouts are a lot more discoverable, allowing you to find most things with just a little bit of clicking around (and the descriptions of stuff are a lot better now, so no more googling "what the heck is a quern?"). I miss the old keyboard controls sometimes, but they're gradually adding them back in the form of shortcuts. DFHack is still around, and basically necessary for automating some of the more fiddly resource chains (stuff like, "request 50 trees get cut down out of this patch of forest if our number of logs gets below 200").
I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.
You may prefer a game like 'Going Medieval' which is a similar concept to Dwarf Fortress but is heavily simplified, almost as though someone played Dwarf Fortress then decided to make a version for their kids.
As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.
The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. It's the opposite of the approach taken by AI games that want to generalise based on simple prompts.
I would pose that's a matter of holding it wrong. Like, integrating generative AI as a prompt to an API endpoint exposed to the user is one of the worst, most naive and bland ways to use it as a game subsystem that I can think of.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with trying to use generative AI as a subsystem for a game, problems which exist at a conceptual level. But all the games I've seen that integrate AI as a subsystem don't even come remotely close to hitting that ceiling. I think it's ultimately up to the fact that an interesting usage of generative AI requires a level of technical competency and theory that's well beyond that of the layman. The people making games that utilize AI generally seem to lack the chops to make a good game or do interesting things with AI. The people with the chops and manhours to make a good game with AI:
- Don't want the backlash of having a generative model in their game, because no matter the context that's a lot of very bad press for something that's very difficult and time consuming to implement.
- See the immediate problems and difficulty that arise from a decently integrated concept and execution, and even without the bad press, understand that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That it's always going to be an immensely stupid gimmick in the end, one that's trying way too hard.
That won't stop us from having 10,000 pieces of shovelware getting churned out that have the worst, most uninspired integrations imaginable mind you. We clearly already have those. For those that could do something better with the tech, there's too many good reasons to not touch it.
> The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail.
I don't know, it's basically Minecraft with Lemmings. You control a lot, but at the end, the AI comparison might be somewhat apt - you tell the dwarves what to do, and they mostly do it. When they're not struck by a strange mood, or when they're not too depressed to work, or when they're not being eaten by a Forgotten Beast (beware its deadly dust!)
I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI.
Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how much they were receiving. Tens of thousands of $ a month, mind you. For monthly contributions at that level for many, many years I would expect at least a nod - instead they straight-up told everyone they'd abandon keyboard users, a decision later recanted.
That said, Dwarf Fortress holds a special place in my heart. Only regret I have is that I didn't track how many hours I put in. In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
I was under the impression that the classic keyboard-only version was kept up to date with the Steam version? They're both on patch 53.16[1][2] which was released simultaneously on 8/5, so it doesn't look to me like keyboard-only is forgotten or left behind unless I'm missing something.
Sadly no – the current 'classic' is just the Steam game without the steam features AIUI – i.e. still the mouse-oriented UI. 0.47.05 is the last keyboard version AFAIK.
Ah I see, I misunderstood. I just tried the latest classic version and it was all mouse. I agree then that it's disappointing as someone who has played both versions
Adding a G to the UI is 'giving the finger' to their old players? When they include support for ASCII-like tilesets so you can play the exact same way? "Gamers" are the most entitled people on earth, I swear
So, the developer updates both the free version and the paid version with the latest features (the only difference is the free version is sans GUI), and continues to serve the older free keyboard only 0.47 version on his website, and I'm supposed to be upset by this? Because he dropped the keyboard UI feature?
They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh.
[1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.
While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.
I don’t think it has anything to do with their gaming specific capabilities, just their general philosophy matches poorly with the games industry.
Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down.
As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit).
There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.
Optimization and bug hunting makes supporting multiple graphics api's a pain. I really don't understand Apple's stubborn refusal to make vulkan drivers. Between Apple and the better performance on SteamDeck, I can see PC game developers seriously considering Vulkan over directx.
Sony's PS3 is an interesting comparison. It had some borderline ridiculous hardware by the standards of console development. I mean that both as a positive in terms of theoretic capability, and as a negative in terms of practical usability. Sony had a huge market, so I think they were banking on developers bending over backwards to build things to the strengths of the PS3 which would be such an undertaking that it'd almost undoubtedly have left the PS3 version of stuff as definitive, and other platforms operating as second class citizens. Unfortunately for them developers took the path of least resistance and ended up doing the exact opposite.
If game devs want to reuse their Vulkan code on Apple device, they can use MoltenVk or the more recent KosmicKrisp.
> Optimization and bug hunting makes supporting multiple graphics api's a pain.
The problems usually lurk in the graphics drivers, and not in the 3D API layer (e.g. optimization and bug hunting isn't much difference even when your code only supports a single API, and especially Vulkan drivers from different vendors may behave wildly differently on Windows, at least compared to D3D).
> I can see PC game developers seriously considering Vulkan over directx
Lol. That train has left the station long ago (around the time when Stadia was shut down, Vulkan saw a small uptick because of Stadia, but that soon fizzled out). Games need to support multiple 3D APIs anyway once they release on consoles. One or two more for the PC and Mac version doesn't make much of a difference (and most games are built on top of an off-the-shelf-engine anyway).
When a game glitches because of a driver bug, its the game developer that gets the bug reports (and the heat) and often has to isolate the problem to convince the gpu driver-team to fix it.
You may note that I specifically said "PC game developers" Your whole but consoles argument, completely misses the mark.
1. They don't exist, so if you own the game you still want it to work on your computer without maintenance updates
2. They still exist, so they don't want to have to update it every year because they can use that effort on making a new game and continuing to exist while still being able to sell from their existing catalogue because it still works
Either way it's in a game developer and gamers interest to have stable platforms
The sad thing is that current Macs are perfect machines for DF. The recommendation was always to get as fast a single threaded machine as possible with the biggest cache. Even the least expensive Macs are monsters in those regards. The game is more multi-threaded than before but still is dominated by single threaded performance.
I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme.
Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?
And I do use that option, as i said, for games that you play in finite sessions and that have a beginning and an end.
Also as I said, I don't use it for forever games (mmos or endless simulators like DF) by choice. My playing pattern for those is not finite and relatively long sessions. I fire them for a short break, do something in them, close them and move along.
If you have to turn on a separate box for that half your short break is gone with booting and shutting down. And you may lose interest before the other box is finished booting.
Same for running games under crossover. Start crossover - SLOOOW. Wait for the game to start through the layers of emulation - SLOOW. It's fine if it's a weekend and I want to play say Dishonored [1] for a few hours. It's not fine if I want to spend 20 min improving a build in Minecraft and then go do irl stuff.
[1] Dishonored is an example of the type of game I'd jump through hoops to play. I've always streamed it actually. No idea how it runs in Crossover.
What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports.
Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense.
Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).
> There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't
They probably stopped supporting macOS when Apple introduced the notarization bullshit. Can't blame the DF team tbh, macOS is a royal PITA to support (even without notarization), Apple doesn't mind breaking stuff from one OS release to another.
I still remember getting support mail every time Apple released an OS update. For a week or two there'd be reports of things crashing randomly with stacktraces that didn't seem to make much sense.
One of reasons why I stopped trying to make mac/ios apps.
macOS is also just a proper PITA through and through. I'm annoyed that I can't play it on my m4 but I also understand that supporting macOS has always been a nuisance.
If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.
It’s kind of insane that we can play windows x86_64 games on macos arm almost perfectly. I got a bit annoyed with it being slightly jank and built a (linux) gaming pc for my kids in the end but it worked fine for most things for a while.
I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds.
Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit from their perspective shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.
It wasn’t “tens of thousands a month” outside of some exceptional months. IIRC usually it was in the single digits which is not fantastic for a two people in the US
It makes me sad to think about. I would love to get into the new UI, but the immersion just won't come back. My muscle memory, hands firmly on the keyboard, is too persistent, and playing with the new UI feels like stumbling around and misclicking.
What you are asking for is completely unreasonable. There’s no way that one programmer can maintain two completely separate UIs. Keep in mind that they could not simply “add graphics” to the existing interface, they had to write a completely new one that was not based around fixed–size character cells.
Wasn't the graphical interface 95% outsourced to others? And originally the graphic version was suppose to be layered on top and leave the underlying version of the game barely touched from the player's side. It was even touted as an excuse at the time to fix some of the keyboard shortcuts that were inconsistent among different submenus, and certainly not to eliminate or supersede keyboard interfaces.
Programmers and artists at Kitfox helped, but no, 95% of the work on the UI was not outsourced. Perhaps if you add in all of the countless time spent drawing sprites for all of the creatures in the game.
And your understanding of “layering” is simply wrong. The _game_ is the same underneath the UI, aside from the new features that have been added and the bugs that have been fixed, but the UI was ripped out and rewritten. It could not be any other way. You are correct that the goal was not to eliminate keyboard–driven interfaces, but the rewrite did completely replace the entire UI with something new. And that new UI does not have the same structure as the old UI.
For example, in the old UI you used to have to first enter the “designations” menu and then choose “dig”. So digging had the keyboard shortcut ‘d d’. To place buildings you typed ‘d b’ to “designate buildings”, and to “designate stockpiles” was ‘d p’.
But now these three things are all at the top level of the menu, so simply typing ‘m’ for digging, ‘b’ for buildings, or ‘p’ for stockpiles is all you need to do. (Digging cannot be on ‘d’ because the view is now moved using the WASD keys.) There is no designate menu any more. The old keyboard shortcuts are simply meaningless.
If you prefer different keyboard shortcuts then you can customize them. One of the features of the rewritten UI is that there is also a new UI for customizing the key bindings.
I have to agree. Sure, the new GUI is a some kind of accessibility improvement over the old, but is seriously underpowered for e.g. any kind of repetitive tasks (which are not atypical in DF). Most annoying is the fact that even though a fair number of keyboard shortcuts exist, a full pipeline often does not. It's barely more efficient to use the keyboard since you'll still have to switch over to the mouse every second action.
I know that the keyboard features are coming at some point, but I doubt it's a very high priority. My hopes rest on the modding improvements; once the UI becomes moddable, the old one is recreated in an instant. Until that, I'll stick to the trusty 0.47. (I have bought the "new" game to show support and thank for all the earlier work, of course.)
Is it really that bad? I haven't played since the GUI update but was thinking about getting into it again because I still have years of muscle memory from it. But if I am forced to use the mouse im not sure I even want to bother. There is absolutely no way I could play the game at the same speed I use to if I have to resort to mouse-only features.
IMO, the steam release is not very good. Especially if you had been used to using the top mods that existed before the steam release for ease of control.
Dwarf Fortress used ASCII graphics & KB controls because that's what was cheap and fast to implement. Tarn & Zach always wanted proper graphics & mouse support, and has always been the vision from day one.
>Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either -
You clicked on a button that said "support", where it was explicitly pretty much a tip jar, and now you feel entitled to keyboard controls ? You're full of shit.
You dont want to know your hours. Perhaps my greatest shame is the number of hours i have spent on factorio. I was afk for much of that (letting the factory run) but ... i would not want other people to see the number.
Why? Dwarf Fortress only exists because it was given away for free for decades, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars in donations, and eventually leading to a fandom popular enough to bring others onboard with the project to produce a GUI and paid steam release version.
If something you build brings in a lot of critique, it is likely something of great value. Because something that doesn't have value won't bring much critique at all.
Their donation revenue was alright for a pretty significant chunk of that time. For the first decade it was ~$5k/month, which jumped up to ~$10k/month for the second decade before the Steam release.
Toady wasn't exactly raking in the cash, but he didn't need another job.
It's been a while since I last played DF and I'm surprised to see that both this article and the video are a bit light on details, IIRC they used to showcase upcoming updates a lot more.
Digging a bit more it looks like the magic system will be built around deities, spheres of influence [1], and workshops/professions centered around magic leading to procedurally generated spells. I'm really excited to see how it'll turn out.
They have a history of at least trying to be transparent, especially in their Future of the Fortress posts[0]. Emphasize on trying to, as they're not exactly great at sticking to plans, though that certainly improved with the Kitfox partnership.
Some of the effort that folks have put into recording their dwarf fortress experiences, and captureing that special something that emerges out of the game is wonderful.
I’ve been tinkering with a game engine where magic is made of first principles for a very long time. Cannot wait to see the gameplay and mechanics here!
Only working on the magic system itself, unfortunately making the game around the mechanics is not something I enjoy, so I have been implementing different approaches with some minimal debugging UI. Did not reach the need for an actual game engine
Does any other game have true procedural generated magic systems like DF talks about? I have always been curious how and if they'll pull it off and if it will just end up being all pretty much the same
Noita isn't really on the level that DF describes. Noita randomizes wands and allows you to make custom spells by leveraging different qualities, but its not procedurally generating the rules of magic themselves. The rules are locked in from the start.
What ive generally heard is that this is more of a refactor and base functionality improvement, rather than building out all the actual magic systems to start with.
2-10 updates in the future will have much more fleshed out magic
this game will be updated until the creators die, its a passion project and is a genre defining masterpiece if you are into procedurally generated narrative driven world sims.
Historically, they did a big update every year or two. Since the Steam release, they've sped up significantly, with medium sized updates every 2-3 months.
Super neat. So instead of just randomizing a map and generating random geography like Minecraft, it's going to randomize the fundamental rules of the universe. Brave new world!!
I remember finding this game back in the summer before 8th grade. right after the z-axis was added. talk about a spirtual wakening. I remember printing off the wiki and reading it in my science class. This game is probably the main reason I became an engineer honestly.
Try the game again, the performance has improved significantly. One major problem that was affecting most players were the line–of–sight calculations. Every person and animal in the game has an opinion of every other, and can get mood changes simply from seeing people (or animals) that they like or dislike. And that opinion is both based on the history of interactions between them as well as other factors like consanguinity. So every time someone moves the game has to check who they can see, and for every person (or animal) that they can see it has to check to see if they are related, and if so to what degree. Guests, invaders, monsters, zombies, ghosts, sneaks, villains, etc all have their effects.
The fundamental O(n²) behavior remains, but caching has greatly improved performance for typical forts. They also improved cache locality and refined the exact set of conditions that affect mood. They also parallelized this specific part of the code, though I believe you have to enable that in the options.
You can also improve performance by making changes to your fort. Primary amongst these is simply to reduce the number of people and animals on the map. Don’t keep 50 sheep and 100 cats and 100 dogs and so on. Cut those numbers severely. In the mean time use cages. Caged animals in small rooms behind closed doors don’t see very many people in any given frame, so the cost goes down. Plus you can sell the cages with the animals in them, which is nicer than simply butchering all of your puppies and kittens. Kick out some of the guests too. If you have public taverns, libraries, and/or temples with guests in them then either close them down or make them smaller. Focus on quality over quantity. (Actually for taverns and I guess temples I still recommend having a large room with a big square area with a nice floor and no furniture so that everyone can dance. If you haven’t seem them dance then you have been missing out!)
You can also consider changing the layout of your fortress. I don’t recommend going too far down this road, but even small changes can have large effects. Long corridors full of people are the most expensive, so try breaking line of sight using doors or corners. Put things on different floors instead of along a single long corridor. Naturally some players experimented with zig–zag corridors so that nobody can see more than a tile or two in any direction, which works, but of course that results in completely alien fortresses that feel terrible to the player.
So what we're saying here is that personal computers can run open weights models that can literally code earlier versions of Dwarf Fortress all by themselves, but handling lines of sight for a 101st dwarf in a mountain fortress remains past the frontier of computer science. I love this so much.
O(n²) scaling is brutal. If n=100, then that is 100×100=10,000 mood checks. When n=101, that grows to 101² = 10201. 102² is 10404. You see how fast it is growing¹? Every person you add causes far more mood checks than the last person you added. There is nothing that computer science can do to reduce this growth. The whole study of computer science is the study of the limits of computing, and these are the limits. No amount of brain sweat can reduce the the rate at which the problem scales.
Of course we could redefine the problem; make each mood check simpler, for example. We could simply leave some of the current factors out of the calculation, so that the calculations are cheaper to do. For example we could make the mood check ignore consanguinity. A dwarf’s reaction would depend only on whether they saw a friend or not, but not on whether they saw a cousin or a sister. That will allow us to scale to higher population counts, but we still face the fact that there will be _some_ population limit.
Or we could reduce n somehow. For example, we could arbitrarily decide that some of the population doesn’t participate in line of sight checks. Maybe livestock are never checked at all, so the 50 cats don’t make n bigger. But then your cats won’t run away from zombie invaders, because they don’t check line of sight to see what is around them. Is that acceptable? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s disappointing to to the game designer but they go ahead with the change because the players will still have fun.
The third thing to do is to optimize the mood checks so that they use the processor more efficiently. This is hard but doable, and can be done without changing the problem. And in fact it has already been done, to one extent or another. But modern processors are actually pretty hard to optimize for, and all the low–hanging fruit has been picked. For example, I have a 16–core CPU, and until a few years ago the game could only use one of those cores to run the line of sight checks on. The other 15 would be idle. That obviously leaves a lot of performance on the table. Now that the game uses all 16 cores equally you’ll find that n has gone up quite a lot. But it didn’t go from 100 to 1600, it went from 100 to about 400. 100²=10,000 line of sight mood checks, and 400²=160,000 mood checks. But once spread over 16 cores that’s still 10,000 per core! So now it can do the line of sight mood checks for a population of 400 in the same time as it could do them for a population of 100, only a 4× improvement. And if your CPU only has 8 cores then the new limit for you is really a population of about 283, etc.
But there is still more processing power in our CPUs that is going untapped by DF, and language models are actually really good at making use of that power. A modern CPU can run SIMD, or Single Instruction Multiple Data, instructions that can operate on many values at once. It can multiply two numbers together, or it can multiply a vector of 4, 8, 16, or even 32 numbers together all at once. And multiplying the vectors takes the same amount of time as multiplying two ordinary numbers! All a language model is doing is repeated matrix multiplication, which boils down to multiplying lots of individual numbers together. An LLM is _only_ doing vector instructions on 32 half–width floats at a time, over and over again, but DF doesn’t have that luxury. Most of what DF does just cannot be done using vector math in any useful fashion. The graphics could be (sprite compositing), but DF sends all of the graphics over to the GPU instead. So LLMs are not an apples–to–apples comparison for Dwarf Fortress.
I haven't played since the GUI release, but in the past you definitely had to set a fortress population limit to prevent FPS death.
Also, assuming DFhack still exists, you can try using it to clean up the messes and splatter which can bring it down a decent amount.
Fortress design may also have an impact on FPS from pathfinding according to some, but I had limited success in improving FPS through more optimized pathfinding designs, and the number of entities on the map still seemed like the biggest factor.
Dfhack still exists and also works with the steam version.
They got one of the DFHack contributors(? i think) Putnam on as programmer to do some multi threading and moddabilty (exposing stuff for lua scripting), I'm not sure they are currently working on DF but they have worked on it a bunch for the past 3 years, and also did some in-depth talks about it on BlindIRLs channel:
They can make a simulation of magic based on the fabric of a procedural universe work, but even they failed to make a simulation of economics work. Fantasy magic makes more sense than modern economic theory.
It’s not that economics is hard to understand, it’s that it requires the participants to reason about their actions.
First problem was the coins. To buy something the dwarves had to haul the coins to the seller, one at a time of course. And then when given change they had to haul the change back to their room. One at a time. And the merchant had to haul their new coins, one at a time, to their room. But that was an easy problem compared to the real difficulty.
The other problem was balancing incomes with expenses. Everything was just assigned arbitrary numbers, and those numbers were fixed. So in one player’s fort they were building a huge mega construction out of glass blocks and so the glassmakers become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice simply because so many glass blocks needed to be created. But the weaponsmith was only ever asked to create ten battleaxes for the single squad of military dwarves so he went broke. After all, everyone had to rent a room and eat. Prices need to depend on scarcity and the need to eat as much as on the labor needed to create an individual item. The weaponsmith might have earned more income for a sword than the glassmaker did for a glass block, but that didn’t help him in the long run.
For this one, I loved playing Dofus when I was younger. It was (hopefully still) a quite popular french turn-by-turn 2D MMORPG.
The main goal is PoE or PvP, but actually I ended up fully playing for the economy.
You can get a job with its own leveling system, like a farmer, cutting crops, collaborate with a baker who will make you a cut so that he can get baker xp, and then sell the bread in an auction based local marketplace for player to buy and heal.
You can as well just arbitrage: buy something cheaper in one town, and sell it in an another where it was more popular.
I ended up with a tone of paper notes, just calculating the margin of different product, e.g jewellery, so that I can buy the materials, calculating the risk of loss during the building process, partner with someone for some materials, and then finding where to sell the end product
You might really enjoy Caravaneer 2 (the original was a flash game, RIP, but the sequel requires no knowledge of the original). Whole game is traveling around a wasteland, hauling trade goods between towns that have their own industries, and thus varying supply and demand for various goods.
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