Dwarf Fortress: Very Ambitious Roguelike

[Morberis]

Dwarf Fortress at MoMA? I am so there. Better yet, I'll convince a date to come.

Might be fun to brig my netbook with Boatmurdered on there and let people see the madness first hand.

Edit: I value an API that let's people write a functional up for DF at 500$ . I'm willing to set up a paypal for other people to add into that if there is interest. If thee is, I'll set it up and make a thread about it on their forum. Any other folks interested?

Yeah if you mean a functional UI I would immediately donate at least $20 possibly way more.

What would the terms of donating into this paypal fund be? He gets the money anyway with the message we WANT a functional UI and are willing to pay, or what?

[gameoverman]

That article was very interesting.

Some of what I got out of it is that because they moved around a lot when young, he and his brother learned to depend on each other. So instead of reaching to new friends, new ideas, they help each other. That would certainly impact his view of things like 'improving' his game. Essentially, unless he or his brother think something needs improving, nothing needs improving. It also means that while he may enjoy his fanbase, he doesn't NEED his fanbase. I bet if everyone abandoned his game he and his brother would still be tinkering with it as always, because that's all they need.

It's a labor of love for him. This means, in my experience with other labor of love situations, that his reasons for doing anything related to the game are private and may not have any relation to typical concerns like making money.

In my view it's comparable to knowing someone who plays guitar amazingly well. So well that everyone he knows keeps telling him he should play professionally because he could make a lot of money. But the guy only plays because he likes to play, and that's all he'll ever do is play for enjoyment. All the people constantly trying to make business introductions for him or get him paying gigs are just background noise. They're wasting their breath.

[caesarbear]

Gamers are some of the worst offenders when it comes to obsessing about the business side of the hobby. Plus some publishers and developers in gaming are incredibly jaded to the art of making games, so I guess it's no surprise that the Adams get so much vitriol over their "customer management." Gamers might have a hard time reconciling that they aren't always a customer.

[Sir Digby]

I was really enjoying my comeback to DF but after roughly 16 hours played over this weekend I think I'm going to shelve it again.
I still love the game, but the huge amount of bugs, some of them ridiculous (e.g you need a Dungeon Master to tame exotic animals but Dungeon Masters are bugged so you can't tame exotic animals at all unless you edit a file...) and the "new" military interface, which in my opinion even made everything worse and is, surprise!, riddled with bugs, some of them stretching back to v0.23...

So yeah, I love DF but I'm not contributing again nor I'm actually going to keep playing until it gets "cleaned up" and some of the more atrocious bugs are ironed out (note I didn't mention the UI, by now I'm used to it again but yeah, some parts of it are second nature after some time but others are completely idiotic and just illogical).

[Sir Digby]

I was really enjoying my comeback to DF but after roughly 16 hours played over this weekend I think I'm going to shelve it again.
I still love the game, but the huge amount of bugs, some of them ridiculous (e.g you need a Dungeon Master to tame exotic animals but Dungeon Masters are bugged so you can't tame exotic animals at all unless you edit a file...) and the "new" military interface, which in my opinion even made everything worse and is, surprise!, riddled with bugs, some of them stretching back to v0.23...

So yeah, I love DF but I'm not contributing again nor I'm actually going to keep playing until it gets "cleaned up" and some of the more atrocious bugs are ironed out (note I didn't mention the UI, by now I'm used to it again but yeah, some parts of it are second nature after some time but others are completely idiotic and just illogical).

[Calistas]

I would love to see a pixelart version of DF, it would mean a 3rd party completely copying the game and it would be kinda mean, but I am tired of the interface frustrations.

People ask me when I am going to make another DF play-along tutorial and I simply refuse until the military (and some other) screens are better. I can't be bothered trying to fight my way through them.

[rezaf]

I was really enjoying my comeback to DF but after roughly 16 hours played over this weekend I think I'm going to shelve it again.
I still love the game, but the huge amount of bugs, some of them ridiculous (e.g you need a Dungeon Master to tame exotic animals but Dungeon Masters are bugged so you can't tame exotic animals at all unless you edit a file...) and the "new" military interface, which in my opinion even made everything worse and is, surprise!, riddled with bugs, some of them stretching back to v0.23...

So yeah, I love DF but I'm not contributing again nor I'm actually going to keep playing until it gets "cleaned up" and some of the more atrocious bugs are ironed out (note I didn't mention the UI, by now I'm used to it again but yeah, some parts of it are second nature after some time but others are completely idiotic and just illogical).

I'm totally in the same boat, except it's been a while since I last tried it.
I don't care about the UI all that much ... or, let me rephrase that, I DO care about the UI, but I can live with the crappy one if at least it'd work as intended. What kills the game for me is the tons and tons of bugs, and Toady's complete lack of ambition to fix them. Instead he adds tons of additional stuff on-top that comes with fascinating new bugs etc.
_____
rezaf

[Destarius]

Well, reading that article makes me feel he isn't someone who's keen on polishing the experience as opposed to indulging in himself. He's a lazy smart guy who just wants to do what he wants to do, so everyone is either on that ride or off it. I don't see much in the point of complaining.

[Teiman]

I don't see much in the point of complaining.

Some student with a lot of time in his hands can join a effort like Goblin Camp (a open source DF clone) and try to improve it to a point is decent enough.

$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/genericcontainer/goblin-camp

[Bad Neighbor]

This game is kicking my ass.

[Lunch of Kong]

Not exactly sure why i have written all that stuff, but I am not going to backspace the page, so here we go.

I like this new poster. Can we keep him/her? Please?

[Bad Neighbor]

Is there a way to tell your dwarves to get the hell inside during an invasion?

[Squee]

Is there a way to tell your dwarves to get the hell inside during an invasion?

There is. You can make the outdoors entirely verboten or you can limit it to military dwarfs only. Been long enough that I don't remember the commands for it, but I know it's there. I used that a lot since it's more fun to rely on a military than traps.

[Serial Kicked]

I like this new poster. Can we keep him/her? Please?

Thanks (I guess?). Him, by the way.

Back on topic, I know that asking for a new GUI or bugfixes even in exchange of money won't have any kind of impact. Others tried before, with the lack of result we know.

Is there a way to tell your dwarves to get the hell inside during an invasion?

Before the military "update", it was a simple keystroke in a menu. Now you have to define a burrow (preferably with food and drinks), and assign your civilians there through the military menu. Because, hey, why make things simple when you can make them overly complicated? I can't remember the specifics right now, but it's in the wiki.

I just let the stragglers die in front of the gate instead if my military isn't ready at the time of the first invasion. It's not like there's a shortage of dwarves.

[Mazuo]

The burrow system is the newest solution for that. Designate your meeting hall or somewhere else safe and with food and drink as one, then create an alert that causes civilians to flock there.

With one alert you can have your military rush to your front gate to defend it and have everyone else run to safety.

[Marcin]

Is there a way to tell your dwarves to get the hell inside during an invasion?

It's complicated but it kinda makes sense. However, I think you have to juggle 3 interfaces to do it - because all at once it sets your military on alert, cancels their current orders and sends them to their battlestation posts (provided you assigned them), and can do this for ALL squads you've created, *AND* sends your noncombatants inside to a previously designated zone or subset of zones. So in theory all you need to do is hit your Red Alert button and this all just happens.

However as you can imagine, the UI to do this in is painful, because lassoing and right-clicking "assign to squad a, b, c or noncombatant" would be clearly too simple.

Every time I think of giving DF another shot, I remember how much not fun it was to do things like this, and how much simpler it could be, and my willpower just drains away.

[zengonzo]

Man, the amount of times I have accidentally deleted a higly-complex burrow ..

That interface ..

[Serial Kicked]

*in theory* is the important part in marcin's post. Because your military has also to be in "on duty" mode to do anything (and for that you have to give them a schedule and hope they are not sleeping), also your marksdwarves will probably stare at the nearest wall once they arrive at their destination.

Marksdwarves are useless.

And as I am in a good mood, here's how to make the ultimate badass military in one or two in-game years. All you need is iron, wood and stones.

1) Make/buy 4 full iron sets of armor + axes.
2) Make a 5x5 room filled with upright spikes made with wooden training spears (2-3 spears per trap) and one weapon stand in the middle.
3) Link all the spikes to a lever
4) Get 4 useless dwarves, enlist them and order them to use the said room as a training barrack.
5) put the lever on repeat, enjoy the ridiculously fast/broken stat increase

You can put more spears per trap, it's faster but more dangerous. Also prevent your military from owning pets and keep your cats in cages, you don't want animals to die there (as someone will go clean it up and die in the process). Oh, and male military only, you really don't want babies / children in the room.

[chequers]

Heh, does the continuous dodging make them level crazy fast?

[RepoMan]

People ask me when I am going to make another DF play-along tutorial and I simply refuse until the military (and some other) screens are better. I can't be bothered trying to fight my way through them.

After reading that NYT article I was, for some odd reason, having daydreams of volunteering myself to build a better UI for DF. I live two hours away from Silverdale, so meeting in person would actually be conceivable, and I think I have the coding chops to do something useful there.

But seeing some of the more recent posts in this thread -- in which even Calistas, one of the guys who's done the most to promote DF via tutorials, has given up on the more recent builds -- clarifies that it's kinda pointless.

If Toady is consistently adding more buggy features without fixing old bugs ever, then any attempt to work with him would be doomed; it'd be like trying to remodel a sandcastle while someone keeps pouring more and more sand on top. The key to long-term large-scale software development is to work clean -- you have to have something solid, or over time entropy will kick your ass. Sounds like Toady doesn't even have a test suite per se, nor any kind of effective bug tracking system ("effective" in the sense of "leading to fewer bugs over time"). And yeah, it also sounds like he really doesn't want anyone entering into his cozy and familiar interpersonal dynamic with his brother.

Not a whole lot of room for fruitful collaboration there....

[Daagar]

As someone above mentioned, if you want to collaborate on something that has the potential of DF, check out Goblin Camp. I haven't actually played it to know how far along it is, but it is clearly the "open source" DF clone.

[chequers]

Goblin camp doesn't intend to be DF, it explicitly wants to remove a lot of the fiddliness. You might as well go play Dungeons of Dredmore or some other terrible modern assault on the word "roguelike".

[Wolff]

Those are some fightin words with no explanation!

But seriously I've looked at Goblin Camp and even according to the design goals/docs it appears much closer to Dungeon Keeper than DF.

[chequers]

Hehe. I picked up DoD last night and after dying on level 1 three out of four times it actually appears even harder than nethack :-)

Read Goblin Camp's "Future plans" page:

I want to concentrate on macro rather than micromanagement. You won't be looking at labour settings for individual creatures, nor will you be ordering anything at individual workshops. Instead the player's role is to situate buildings efficiently to allow products to flow well, set the aims of the industry and the military. Various managers will handle the micromanagement.

That's like, the opposite of DF.

[Wolff]

Ya sounds like a game where you place buildings in 30 seconds then do nothing for 30 minutes...awesome!

[chequers]

YOu haven't even played it have you? Here's the best explanation of the differences I can come up with: If Goblin Camp is like Sim City, Dwarf Fortress is like Dwarf Fortress.

[Serial Kicked]

Heh, does the continuous dodging make them level crazy fast?

Yup, that's the idea, and it works (too) well, as not only dodge, but all their combat skills will increase. The only issue is that it makes your combat log kind of useless with the constant "dodge" spam.

[Teiman]

Is a open source project.

It can always be forked to be more like DF, and less like Sim City.

[Madmarcus]

Hehe. I picked up DoD last night and after dying on level 1 three out of four times it actually appears even harder than nethack :-)

Read Goblin Camp's "Future plans" page:


That's like, the opposite of DF.

That sounds a lot like Dwarf Therapist assigning jobs and the manager screen for creating stuff.

[zengonzo]

I always feel like macro is what Dwarf Fortress is intending, but ultimately impractical for normal purposes.

I'd rather the macro be the intention, and the micro be exception. Like when you have some stupid itch to make a crimson-caped katana squad with badger skull helmets.