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The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress
The NY Times is running a story about Dwarf Fortress, an independently produced, ASCII-rendered fantasy game that thrives on its own uniqueness and has influenced countless other game developers (and runs on Linux). Quoting:
"Though it may seem ungainly at first, the game’s interface — rendered in what are known as extended ASCII characters — has a sparse elegance. As seasons change, trees, represented by various symbols, shift from green to yellow. Goblins’ eyes appear as red quotation marks; if you shoot out an eye with an arrow, the symbol becomes an apostrophe. On a message board, one fan likened the ASCII experience in Dwarf Fortress to the immersive pleasures of reading a book: 'You can let your imagination fill in the gaps.' The community that has arisen around Dwarf Fortress is remarkable. Fans maintain an extensive wiki, which remains the game’s best (and, effectively, only) instruction manual, and which even Tarn and Zach admit to consulting. ... Perhaps most fascinating are the stories that fans share online, recounting their dwarven travails in detailed and sometimes illustrated narratives. In a 2006 saga, called Boatmurdered, fans passed around a single fortress — one player would save a game, send the file to another player and so on, relay-race style — while documenting its colorful descent into oblivion."
It may be brilliant, and I enjoyed playing it too.. But it seriously need a good gui. I stopped playing because I got tired of going thru menus and trying to memorize the key combos. It's a great game, just make a good GUI into it!
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the ASCII experience in Dwarf Fortress to the immersive pleasures of reading a book: 'You can let your imagination fill in the gaps.'
Just like Nethack, Dungeon crawl, etc. Great fun!
...Because Dwarf Fortress is what is important!
Also, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
DF is an ALMOST great game. The problem is not the graphics so much...it's the utterly confusing command/menu system. The strange progress of its development, for example, implementing bees and armadillos in the face of game-ending crashes or utterly useless military commands, is also frustrating.
Wow dude!
Are you a 'real gamer' who doesn't need 'fancy graphics'!
Someone mod this fucker up! We have a REAL GAMER posting in this story!
http://www.bravemule.com/
An illustrated tale of what happens in those fortresses.
Ask 4chan, specifically /v/ about this. They can go on for hours about it, including with dozens of suitable images describing this game versus others.
The thing that really kills DF is the UI. It's not that it's a bad interface, it's that it isn't internally consistent. If the menus were cleaned up a bit, it would go a long way towards making DF much more playable.
"Goblins’ eyes appear as red quotation marks; if you shoot out an eye with an arrow, the symbol becomes an apostrophe."
Where do you see anyone's eyes in DF? I have played it a moderate amount (10s of hours). and all characters are portrayed as a single ascii characters, not multiple.
And no it really does not have a sparse elegance, even with tilesets (the only reason it is moderately playable).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
For those of you who require graphics with your roguelikes, you cannot go wrong with DCSS, available here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ Be brave enough to try the 0.9 "Trunk" branch rather than the latest 0.8 release; there are a lot of nifty changes to it.
It's hurting my eyes just looking at it. I can't imagine playing it for more than a few minutes.
MULTI-THREADING. The game overtaxes even modern single cores. If we could get some multiple cores going, our games' complexity wouldn't have to be limited by the game's binaries.
... by the awful menu-structure.
Seriously, it is so broken. It makes the game more of a chore to play.
That is the reason there are about 50 different DF management programs because the menu system is so obtuse.
If the menu system gets cleaned up, it might actually open the game up to more people.
It's not like it will be hard. Just standardize all the menus. They are so horribly inconsistent right now. They are context-sensitive as well, which just confuses things further when you are in a different menu category.
Hotkey on every item in menu, a-Z (if needed), no assignments based on relation, alphabetical, 1 reserved for up and down.
Already that menu system sounds decent and easy to use.
Nobody... nobody normal likes memorizing millions of hotkeys. And this is coming from a person who extensively uses AutoHotkey on Windows. But even I put most of those hotkeys behind menus now. (with a similar structure to the above)
People regularly make it out like this game is stupidly complex which is why nobody plays it.
The only complex thing about this game is the menu system. It is a pain in every ass ever.
It pushes away so many people. The concepts and functionality of the game is easy enough, but it is being held back so much because the menus.
Please Toady, PLEASE, make a new menu system.
Have it as an option if people really, REALLY want to use the current one. (whoever does is insane and must love suffering)
It really is hurting the game, a LOT. This game would be significantly more popular than it is now if it got a more streamlined menu system to it.
As a person who doesn't have much time in the day to play, it saddens me that I can't play this game without using a bunch of tools because managing those dorfs is just too slow and chunky with the current mess.
so what?
Wow. The New York Times just described a Something Awful Let's Play forum series as a fascinating saga.
I'm not denying it (and I quite enjoyed Boatmurdered, and the upgraded followups Headshoots and Syrupleaf (Syrupleaf being arguably the best of the three)), but it's saying something when a collection of forum posts from SA can get that kind of praise in a dead tree newspaper with global circulation like the New York Times. Wow.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
No, I am not a pirate!
Yes, this is... Yet Another Roguelike.
Some are good, some are bad, and some get a lot of attention while others are completely ignored.
A simple tile/graphic system has the advantage of allowing for a broader spectrum of items, creatures, and other "things" in the game. With a limited system such as ASCII you have a smaller set of options to work within. Adding color coding to things can only increase that count by a certain set amount and it relies very heavily on color recognition in the user.
The reality behind the situation is that rogue like games are for the most part exceedingly open sourced and a hobby pursuit for coders around the world. This has created extremely efficient bits of code which perform admirably well and can make for some really great games and features. In fact, one might suggest that the underlying code behind different features of many of these games are in fact far superior to numerous commercial games that are produced.
Without the concern for the cost of the game (typically in time spent) and the fact that it is typically a "labor of love" the individual(s) involved in the rogue like can be creative and try out new concepts without concern for the "market" that their game will have. I have seen features show up in rogue like games years before a similar feature will be seen in a commercial game in fact! Some features of rogue like games, despite being incredible, may never see the light of day in the commercial game industry. Many of these games are exceedingly difficult to beat honestly and even then require a serious investment of time. This is almost completely opposite where the commercial market seems to be going with its rapidly finished games and their accompanying hint/walkthrough books.
The UI desperately needs improvement, but whether it's graphic or not, I don't give a fuck. When you have 200 dwarves it is a total bitch to find the ones you're looking for. Quick: where is my dwarf who knows how to suture? Which is that immigrant dwarf I got a little while back, who already has just a little bit of skill in using a sword (I want to recruit him into the military). Beats the hell out of me. Seriously, I can sometimes spend 10 minutes on the Units screen (alas, leaving and then trying to go back to the 'next' unit) just trying to find a particular dwarf.
I love the game early on, but at some point it switches from game to chore. And (IMHO) it's all about the size of the population. If you have less than one screenful on the Units screen, things are very nice.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...perhaps I'm getting to the point in my life where I don't want to fight with hundreds of abstract, obscure symbols in order to enjoy a game.
Oh, a question mark is an eye? That's funny, I thought it was a question mark.
I've tried Dwarf Fortress probably half a dozen times, and got insanely frustrated with the interface before deleting the directory in a rage. A shame, too, because I'm a sucker for open-ended sandboxes. i'm willing to put up with batshit-insane interfaces (See: Jeskola Buzz, Second Life, QuakeBSP), but if what I'm staring at, for entertainment, looks like a dot matrix printer exploded, im' outta here.
hookers and grits.
Seems familiar!
A friend who knew I loved minecraft brought up dwarf fortress while we were on a 2 day drive. The first thing I did (when we pulled into a truck stop) was download DF and then several graphic backs. The packs turn DF into a totally new game. Trees are trees, dwarfs are dwarfs etc.
This game is far too complicated and has too much detail for me to play without the graphic backs.
There is also a mod called Lazy newb pack which allows you to customize hundreds of settings (dwarf pop max, underwater rivers, etc) and really lets you configure.
Beats the hell out of me. Seriously, I can sometimes spend 10 minutes on the Units screen (alas, leaving and then trying to go back to the 'next' unit) just trying to find a particular dwarf. jocuri
I played text only games when text was the only option. Done the "remember every character" thing and then Doom came along and for the first time you didn't need to study the manual or even read it to make your way through the game. And I never looked back.
Now I have tried Dwarf Fortress and the retro ain't just the graphics. The fans will find excuses but the game is just to unwieldly and even crashes to be fun anymore. Yeah yeah, one guy doing all the work, yeah yeah old school charm... sorry no. That is to much like people who fondly remember kissing behind the bike shack. Fond memories but I prefer my love making on a large comfortable bad these days... or so I would if I wasn't a nerd who wasted my youth playing computer games...
Curse you ascii!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://pubvo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/dwarfy1.png
this sums up dwarf fortress' fun development.
"On a message board, one fan likened the ASCII experience in Dwarf Fortress to the immersive pleasures of reading a book: 'You can let your imagination fill in the gaps.'"
In other words, what Marshall Mcluhan called a cool medium.
... except all the people too busy finding new ways to push the limits of just how far a kitty can travel before burning to death.
This game is great, but it is not for an audience that seeks short bursts of neurotic reward for trivial actions. This game celebrates initiative, determination and of course !!SCIENCE!!
And now back to dropping goblin prisoners z130+ onto my 'floor mural' project.