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What I mean is that this variation is all different in the same way. If you've ever spent time flying around the Elite Dangerous universe, you'll find that once you've seen one system, you're more or less seen them all.

But this has more to do with current state of procedural generators rather than the concept of general. Try Dwarf Fortress, and you do get extremely varied environments to get your dwarfs killed in.

Only artists and animators are able to genuinely surprise you.

That is untrue. Any game with sufficiently complex mechanics will create surprising situations, through glitching if nothing else.

What humans can currently do that computers can't is recognize and combine tropes, or generic thematic elements, and adapt them to current situation. However, there is no known reason why an algorithm couldn't do so too.

An intermediate step might be to move the gameworld over from curent scripted and otherwise static model to a strategic simulation. Imagine, for example, an open-world game where the computer was playing a game of Civilization in the background and a procedural generator was responsible for rendering the results - city growth, roads, marching armies, etc - in the player-explorable environment, along with quests to affect the game either way (for example, the player could sneak into a besieged city to open the gates, or assassinate the army's general). Space Rangers does something like this: the missions you do affect how the game world develops, the war goes on in the background, and as you get stronger you become more and more important player in it.

The whole reason everyone and their dog is investing in physics engines is precisely that they can procedurally generate behaviour as it's needed, thus freeing the artist from having to guess everything the player might do (which is impossible). Procedurally generating animation is currently under development - beyond current ragdoll physics, that is - and then, of course, there's games like Victoria which are about generating alternate world histories. Then there's the ancient Neverwinter Nights Aurora toolset where the designer laid down rooms and procedural generator filled them with semi-random details.

The future of gaming is procedural generation, both because automation is the only way to keep costs under control and because the end result is superior. That doesn't mean those games won't require artists, it simply means those artists will be doing high-level design of thematic elements and interacting systems rather than hand-painting every pixel and modeling every room.

Call me when he re-writes Dwarf Fortress, which doesn't just build the dungeon but also the countryside around it along with a few more continents and oceans as well as a thousand years of history for each of the major civilizations living there.

Notch's Minecraft was inspired by Zach Barth's abandoned Infiniminer, but infiniminer was just one gameplay aspect of Dwarf Fortress extracted, purified, and switched to first person graphics. (worth noting that the predecessor to Dwarf Fortress was in fact first person 3d. It was even voxel-based.)

And what was the inspiration for the mining and building in Dwarf Fortress? Roguelikes and sim games.

There are no ideas that don't build on other ideas.

Ha! More like Autism Spectrum Disorder testing game. Hipsters are too busy "playing" Gone Home.

Dwarf Fortress is pretty amazing, but the last version I really enjoyed was 40d. I find the interface in the newer versions even more cumbersome. It runs reasonably fast with a decent processor, but doesn't benefit from multiple cores.

Unvanquished is a successor to Tremulous a free, open source game that was originally a quake 3 mod (but has been its own standalone game for quite some time). It is an asymmetric FPS, aliens vs humans that has some similarities to Natural Selection, but has been around much longer and is much better balanced.

Tribes Ascend is a good free-to-play FPS based upon the original Tribes series. Jetpack skiing with explosive discs is fun.

Dwarf fortress is a surprisingly detailed simulation game about dwarves, who build fortresses. So yeah. Losing is fun.

EVE Online is an MMO that is unique in having an impressively detailed economy, and largely lives and breathes by player-directed drama. It also boasts some rather good parody songs like this one.

The game we've chosen for this test is Dwarf Fortress

Unfortunately those same people have continued to streamline newer Diablo release far past the point they should have. When i play a character based rpg, I don't want to respec for each area I go through. It breaks my sense of character, and they all feel the same. I really enjoyed playing Skyrim, but after a while it turns into a 'follow the waypoint' sort of game, and even though every character has individual stories, I don't end up caring.

Personally, I prefer something like Brogue, Sil, or Dwarf Fortress. Even if they have ascii graphics, the emergent gameplay is far more in-depth than AAA titles.

There must be some happy middle ground where we can have the depth but also acceptable graphics.

I don't entirely agree with this. I think the reason major development houses don't put resources into procedural content generation is lack of imagination, and fear of taking risks. Several independent software researchers have solo developed demonstration projects recently that hint at what can be achieved and how much work it takes, and in terms of programmer hours vs. artist hours it actually looks very promising, as well as in terms of actual product quality. I think the big studios just have a winning formula that is making them millions and they are afraid to step out of their comfort zone and risk trying something new.

His researchers are also working on a system modeler tool, which will allow researchers to simulate complex devices with tens of thousands of components

How many years until it catches up to Dwarf Fortress?

And can it get more than 4 frames per second modeling 200 dwarves down to the fingernail on a 3.5GHz machines with 16Gb of ram and SSD drives?

Try Dwarf Fortress. I guarantee you a 100% better bang for your buck. As long as you have enough hardware to deal with crunching through all those cats.

Dwarf Fortress?

Fiendishly, breathtakingly complex world-simulation engine from Bay 12 Games. Comes equipped with "Fortress mode" city simulator, "Adventure mode" Roguelike play, and "Arena mode" battle sandbox. The wiki is pretty much required reading.

Try creating a large world on Dwarf Fortress and get back to us.

Can using a charset really be counted as "graphics" ?

Ask the folks at Bay 12: Dwarf Fortress

See, for that you need is Dwarf Fortress. It's free, too.

Oh and just a little more challenging. And by a little I mean "holy shit a lot".

The screenshots look like a cross between a beta version of Civ before they did the artwork and a random Sinclair Spectrum game from the 80s. I know gameplay is more important than shiny graphics, but even so...

See, for that you need is Dwarf Fortress. It's free, too.

Oh and just a little more challenging. And by a little I mean "holy shit a lot".

And if you're neither of those things then what reason do you have not to release the source with the binary?

Because they don't want to?

You do realize that Freeware predates the open source movement, right?

Dwarf Fortress is a fine example of a closed-source hobby project, released to the world for all to enjoy.

There are only about a million other examples, now stop being an ignorant twat.

I dont see those participating in Humble Indie Bundle with problems in marketing... in fact, they are making a good money

Big publishers releases today are mostly just remakes of the same games, with better graphics... in fact, many times the game is even less fun to play, because "all" the development work was put in the graphic and very little on new ideas, the game story, bug fix, balance or simply in the fun of playing!

That is also why humble indie have lots success, most of the games are original and very fun to play, even if sometimes the graphics arent the state or art.

Taking things to extreme, to show that what is important is the fun to play, nethack and Dwarf Fortresshave almost no graphic feedback, yet are very famous, fun to play and people play it for years, even decades!

Not everyone (and dare I say most people) don't want to play a game where you get grazed in the leg with a bullet and your movement becomes entirely awkward, your character develops some sort of infection and then his leg needs to be amputated in the middle of the jungle with charlies everywhere, then being required to finish the rest of the game with one leg. (surely one person will reply to this begging for that)

And for those who do, there already is nethack and DwarfFortress.

This nethack game is easy: all the stairs are right next to the entrance. I've been playing this game for a few minutes and I'm already way down in here. Hey, what's a floating eye?

Losing is Fun!

What do you mean, everyone in the Fortress committed suicide because one child's pet cat fell down a hole? Well... the cat broke its leg, the leg got infected, the pet cat died, the girl had a tantrum and stopped drinking so died. Then so did her parents. Then all their friends. Except the ones who went berserk from seeing the girl's ghost and started punching other people. Yeah, they may have all been a little on edge...

Randomly generated content does work. Quite well, actually. See Spelunky, as an example. Not only that, but the entire genre of roguelikes is defined by randomly generated content and it has been for quite some time.

Of course Minecraft isn't like Mario or any other game, it has won its place due to its own merits. Although it isn't completely unlike Amnesia in the sense that many players can tell tales of silent tension and desperate flights, but I digress.

You have to remember that Minecraft isn't finished yet. It started as just lego pieces, but it greatly increased in complexity. It's still a sandbox, but it's more like a living (albeit simple graphically) world each new update. While it probably won't be as complex as Dwarf Fortress (which is also an astounding game based on randomly generated content), it is easier to get immersed into.

Minecraft is about exploring as well as creating. It isn't about platforming and probably wouldn't be better if it was. But if that's what you want, there is Terraria.

Yes they are. Same gameplay mechanics, same addiction rates. They are just to user friendly and too fun for ordinary person to be considered one by fans of genre.

Fun fact: Diablo 1 was actually turn based in early stages of development.

On the other hand Dwarf Fortress ( http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html , http://df.zweistein.cz/ ) is also sometimes labeled roguelike. It seems like anything in text mode and arcane controls can get this label - even sims crossed with simcity.

At least you could play Dwarf Fortress!

Duh, someone's been playing Dwarf Fortress for too long on that small island. Well, I guess there's not much else to do in the wintertime (disclaimer: it's below -10C where i live now, so I'd better not pull their leg like this).

Dwarf Fortress. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Allow me to introduce the bastard offspring, Minecraft. It's highly addicting, and (in single-player) quite challenging. The game's still in Alpha, but boy is it exciting. Adding a 3D environment and positional sound makes for a game that keeps you on edge. With the updates on the way, it'll be even more dangerous without being tedious.

Dwarf Fortress. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

You will probably give up quickly because you are a lame n00b that gets ate by skeletal crocodiles or starve to death. You will most certainly not make it to the point where you make a !!magma!! cannon to shower your enemies with hot death from above.

Yea, you can camp spawns all day, but can you build a pressure plate activated super computer?

Further, these advances are without any need. Nothing runs slowly on yesterday's hottest new thing.

Pov-Ray runs slow on today's hottest new thing. So do various physics simulators. And just try to run a physics simulator and AI on a same machine (to do robot research without having to build actual robots)! In fact, even Dwarf Fortress, and ASCII game, still slows down occasionally!

Simply because you use a modern computer as a glorified typewriter doesn't mean that we all do.

What on earth are you talking about?

Business.

Price is driven by cost of development - of course it is. If it weren't, then companies would be selling a product for a price floated on the market as you suggest, and then finding themselves out of capital b/c their total income would be *less than* their total expenditures.

No. Cost of development is a sunk cost. Once it's paid, there's nothing to do but to try and maximize your income. If the total income - number of units sold * (price per unit - cost per unit) - is less than price of development, then yes, the company will be running a deficit rather than profit on that product. That's precisely why they often conduct market surveys before investing in R&D.

How they recoup their dev costs depends on the business model, but to suggest that dev costs don't impact pricing is just nonsense.

It's math, and unless and until you understand it - and I mean really understand it - you better not try to run a company, for your own sake, because you will fail miserably.

To recap: profit = number_of_units_sold * (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit) - cost_of_development, where number_of_units_sold is a function of price_per_unit, benefit per unit to the buyer and human psychology.

Seriously, all aspiring businessmen: read this and understand it. If you can't, you can't succeed. There is no way around this.

If one company has lower dev costs than another, they have what's known as "competitive advantage" -- they can create new products with equal value to the consumer at a lower cost. That company now has a viable option (not available to their competitor) to float their product to the market at a price lower than their competitor, and still make positive net revenue.

Of course they do. That's perfectly in agreement with the equation and its implications. After all, they make the same profit with less (price_per_unit - cost_per_unit), since their cost_of_development is lower.

However, in the long run, for long-selling goods, the cost_per_unit is the dominating factor. That's why it's often a good idea to spend some extra R&D to make sure your manufacturing processes are as efficient as possible. Experience shows that this is especially true of goods with low cost_per_unit. In the bottom end are Internet-downlodable games, where all of the costs are in cost_of_development, and cost_per_unit is for all practical purposes zero; in such items, it's almost always beneficial to decrease the price, since it increases the sales a lot - a hundred times as many people pay for a $1 game than $10 one, adding up to 10-time profits.

In the very extreme end of this, Girl Genius, Dwarf Fortress and The Freenet Project seem to survive entirely on donations/auxiliary sells. But then again, they are bringing something valuable and wonderful to the Internet, unlike most corporations.

Dwarf Fortress logs all of your activity in story form as you play. Also, you can explore your creations in Adventure Mode, which is essentially creating a game from a game. Assuming Apple is smart (stupid?) enough to patent the general concept of using the result of one form of media to create another form of media, most every game will be infringing simply due to the incredible amount of fan-content created.

If you are interested in playing Dwarf Fortress, I highly suggest watching the video tutorials. They are dated, but they give you a great start

You can write "Hello World!" in Visual Basic, but can you write a geology, history, economy, and military simulator that can keep track of hundreds of individuals giving them each unique personalities, skills, and health levels (down to which parts of their body are injured)?

"Advanced" is a rather subjective term for games. Dwarf fortress (DO IT!) is a revolutionary game due to it's depth. It is a civ-like game that drills down to the individual left-pinky finger that holds the gem-encrusted ring (that menaces with spikes of iron) which makes the noble dwarf more confident in his finances so he drives a harder bargain bartering for the weapons traded to the Elves which ultimately causes their raid on the orc stronghold to fail and changes the political currents of the region.
DEPTH.

CPU crushing depth. Even if it dealt with mutli-cores better, it still wouldn't skip right along.

It was on sale, and I thought it would be a cute little gardening sim for the spousal unit who loves her Sims.

Now I realize I had a POS graphics board, but it ran Civ III acceptably well, though Civ IV was slightly laggish, but hey...gardening sim. How many textures does it need to map, anyway? And besides, this a genre whose target audience is even happy with ASCII text ( http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ ).

It ran like it was being run in a 360 emulator running on a C64.

Humans nearly went extinct during the nuclear missile crisis

In that event, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts. The radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep. And in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in dwelling space could easily be provided. Nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could be bred and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country. But I would guess that dwelling space for several hundred thousands of our people could easily be provided. With the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.

There is even a simulation for this!

Always wondered who and how they plan out which direction they use to cut new rooms.

They used state of the art simulation software, of course.

You've obviously never played the OpenGL accelerated majesty that is Dwarf Fortress. http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=40349.0

The dwarves at Dwarf Fortress are fairly efficient and can be remotely controlled from already existing software!

for something else with curses-like graphics and a completely different gameplay concept than roguelikes, have a look at dwarf fortress

The deepest Roguelike ever. If you aren't sure why you might want to play it, start here.

Get the Linux 40d16 version from this page

If you prefer graphical tiles to (nearly) pure ASCII (I certainly do) get the Mike Mayday tileset from this page and use the instructions to get it working.

Then watch the 40 tutorial videos to ease the neigh vertical learning curve. You will of course supplement the videos with lots of careful reading of the wiki.

This game is a time vampire, but lots of fun if you have a little patience and an attention span.

I'm sure it'll come up elsewhere, but you can't really talk about "unintended" ways of playing a game without bringing up Dwarf Fortress. Though I suppose it's hard to specify what the "intended" way to play is, I'm sure it didn't originally involve killing goblins by catapulting them into the ceiling with a drawbridge.

I agree with your idea and also with the point about not being able to charge for copies individually as well (double-dipping is just greedy).

More to the point, so does Tarn Adams, the creator of Dwarf Fortress. The current development version is available as a free download, he survives entirely on donations.

And the game is AWESOME. You don't get games with that depth from the commercial companies anymore. I donated 80 bucks a few months ago (more than I would ever consider paying for Elder Scrolls 5 or whatever) and I'll send some more his way when the next version is released if not a bit before (expected in November/December).

The Development Log is a great read in itself - he updates it quite often (probably every other day on average) and the updates are detailed and interesting.

Not only that but the near future plans are worth reading. The farther future plans (too lazy to look up the link; I have the others memorized) are just awe-inspiring.

Also in the development section of the website is an approach to game design that I've never known of before. The creator and his brother ("ThreeToe") write short stories and then post-hoc analyze them to figure out what gameplay elements would need to exist and how they would need to be developed to make similar situations and stories appear naturally in the game.

I agree with your idea and also with the point about not being able to charge for copies individually as well (double-dipping is just greedy).

More to the point, so does Tarn Adams, the creator of Dwarf Fortress. The current development version is available as a free download, he survives entirely on donations.

And the game is AWESOME. You don't get games with that depth from the commercial companies anymore. I donated 80 bucks a few months ago (more than I would ever consider paying for Elder Scrolls 5 or whatever) and I'll send some more his way when the next version is released if not a bit before (expected in November/December).

The Development Log is a great read in itself - he updates it quite often (probably every other day on average) and the updates are detailed and interesting.

Not only that but the near future plans are worth reading. The farther future plans (too lazy to look up the link; I have the others memorized) are just awe-inspiring.

Also in the development section of the website is an approach to game design that I've never known of before. The creator and his brother ("ThreeToe") write short stories and then post-hoc analyze them to figure out what gameplay elements would need to exist and how they would need to be developed to make similar situations and stories appear naturally in the game.

I agree with your idea and also with the point about not being able to charge for copies individually as well (double-dipping is just greedy).

More to the point, so does Tarn Adams, the creator of Dwarf Fortress. The current development version is available as a free download, he survives entirely on donations.

And the game is AWESOME. You don't get games with that depth from the commercial companies anymore. I donated 80 bucks a few months ago (more than I would ever consider paying for Elder Scrolls 5 or whatever) and I'll send some more his way when the next version is released if not a bit before (expected in November/December).

The Development Log is a great read in itself - he updates it quite often (probably every other day on average) and the updates are detailed and interesting.

Not only that but the near future plans are worth reading. The farther future plans (too lazy to look up the link; I have the others memorized) are just awe-inspiring.

Also in the development section of the website is an approach to game design that I've never known of before. The creator and his brother ("ThreeToe") write short stories and then post-hoc analyze them to figure out what gameplay elements would need to exist and how they would need to be developed to make similar situations and stories appear naturally in the game.

I already contribute to the production of games which I want to see developed more.

I've donated 20 to this: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ so far and when the next release comes out in a few months I plan to donate more.

Sure it has a learning curve like a brick wall and it isn't much to look at at first but it has depth like a mid ocean trench.

It's the only game which allows me to build glass towers from which to dump magma on enemy hordes(fortress mode) and also exercise my psychopathic desires to kill everyone in a village except one child(adventure mode) who is left sleeping amongst the blood, bones and scattered limbs of his parents, friends and family dog.

I then come back again(fortress mode), build a wall around the home of the emotionally scarred survivor and drop angry skeletal goats in to force him to fight.

Yes I'm a bad person.

Oh I forgot, once the wolves finished him off I made a totem out of his skull and a bag out of his skin.

This game is worse than manhunt in some ways....

Dwarf Fortress -- a modern ASCII-graphics game.

Toady would be the first to admit the interface sucks. Future developments are listed on the main site; note the sizable Interface Arc. e.g. Core52 is "INTERFACE OVERHAUL, (Future): A coherent interface, additional options and mouse support". It'll happen when it happens, probably once more of the underlying behaviour stabilizes.

Toady would be the first to admit the interface sucks. Future developments are listed on the main site; note the sizable Interface Arc. e.g. Core52 is "INTERFACE OVERHAUL, (Future): A coherent interface, additional options and mouse support". It'll happen when it happens, probably once more of the underlying behaviour stabilizes.

Dwarf Fortress is fucking retarded. A text based game that requires Windows or OSX, 512 MB of RAM, and an OpenGL video card. No Linux and no mobile device support

Linux version. And it works fine on my laptop, great way to wile away a 4 hour train journey.

What's the point?

Um, it's a fun game? What other point do you want?

After coming out of a 3 week bender of Dwarf Fortress http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/screens.html I can definitely say that graphics are not required for a good game. I literally had *dreams* about that damn game when I first started playing it.

Also, for anyone who doesn't know the saga of Boatmurdered, enjoy: http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/

That's called donation work, I know at least one small game company that works fine this way.

A serious question, and not an attempt to troll: has anyone actually done it that way, successfully?

Bay 12 Games uses this business model for Dwarf Fortress.

A serious question, and not an attempt to troll: has anyone actually done it that way, successfully?

Bay 12 Games uses this business model for Dwarf Fortress.

Now we just need to invent immortal elephants and we've got the universe in our grasp.

Immortal elephants were invented some time ago, but were then superseded by immortal carp.