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Dwarf Fortress Gets Biggest Update In Years
An anonymous reader writes Dwarf Fortress, the epic, ASCII text-based, roguelike citybuilding game, just released its biggest update in years. The game is notable for its incredible depth, and the new release only extends it. Here are the release notes — they won't make much sense if you don't play the game, but they'll give you a sense of how massively complex Dwarf Fortress is. It's also worth noting the a team of modders has recently released a new version Stonesense utility, which renders the game in 3-D from an isometric point of view. "[T]he utility relies on DFHack, a community-made library that reads the game's memory and can be parsed, thus allowing for additional utilities to render things while bypassing the initial ASCII output." If you're unfamiliar with the game, here's an illustrated depiction of an amazing story generated by the game.
Where else can you drain the ocean, trap whales in lead cages, load them into lead minecarts, and send them careening down the steep, steep slope to hell as a kinetic anti-demon weapon?
Oh, and if it weren't for DF, there would be absolutely no source for the solid density of Saguaro wood online (it's 430 kg/m^3 for anyone wondering).
If you even have a passing interest in playing dwarf fortress... make sure you get PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack. In this pack you'll find useful tools such as "Dwarf Therapist", which make the game so much easier to play. Other addons also give amazing atmospheric music and sound effects! (Currently a lot of this only works the the previous version, but that will be fixed soon)
Another one to watch:
http://www.ultimaratioregum.co...
http://www.ultimaratioregum.co...
"It's an incredibly exciting project that could end up in the same rarefied sphere as Dwarf Fortress - a complex simulation of ASCII worlds that have history, detail and depth. The current release is capable of generating a world and the basic history of the cultures that have evolved upon it, but there isn't a huge amount to do beyond the procedural riddle puzzles contained in scattered ziggurats. A typical early feature of many games, eh?
As for the rest, it's all detailed in the development plan and a new announcement suggests it'll be on the road to completion sooner than expected. Developer Mark Johnson will be working on the game full-time for a year from September. And there isn't a Kickstarter in sight."
http://www.rockpapershotgun.co...
Right now, the thing crashes like crazy. I'm waiting for some patches before trying out the cool new upgrades.
lol, never. Linux Windows and Mac builds. No steam, no console ports. It has hundreds of keyboard controls, a gamepad would never be able to play this.
Are you kidding? A gamepad would improve the controls greatly; the menus would be much more consistent. Not that I'll expect a console port in my lifetime...
I slap my ballsack in protest.
Last time I heard about it, it basically only used one thread and the UI code was a mess that also used the same thread. This all meant that it starts to seriously slow down when fortress grows even on relatively strong hardware.
Yes, I know the objects in the game react to each others in many subtle ways which causes lots of syncing challenges but really.
//dwarf
The thing that always amazes me is while simple games like chess, weiqi, checkers, etc., all seem to have unlimited playability and intricacy, computer games generally don't.
Taking Weiqi as an example, literally you can spend 40 years of your life playing, and there will always be room to get better and add difficulty, and always more interesting. Compare that to the latest FPS you beat and abandon after a few days/weeks/months.
I really have to wonder if 100 years from now, some games like Nethack and DF will end up becoming "classics" in a similar vein as board games...
I used to play Crossfire on DEC Ultrix boxes 20 years ago. http://crossfire.real-time.com... Not as in depth as Dwarf Fortress seems to be, but a good hack and slash game, that is still being worked on.
Minecraft is pretty much a ripoff of Dwarf Fortress, the creator has openly admitted this. But he made it colorful and dumbed it down a lot, so naturally he's rich now. Dwarf Fortress regularly gets negative coverage from game reviewers who offer such sparkling insights as "What the hell is this? It looks like a dot-matrix printer exploded on my screen." So just play Minecraft to get the same experience.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Time to play the old version until modders have support for new version.
You think I'm scrolling through those awfully constructed menus by hand? The hell you think I am, someone with patience?
It is like the menus were constructed by the dorfs themselves! A oddly skinny one!
Go write a gamepad script using AutoHotKey and try and play the game, tell me how that works out. it's not like no-one has ever tried.
Although the simulation might be difficult to run in multiple threads
Actually, simulations are basically made for multithreading. DF performance should scale up linearly with the number of threads, as long as it doesn't need huge amounts of conflict resolution in the simulation.
new_state(i, n) = f(old_state(i, n-1), input(i, n))
can be parallelized easily if old_state and input are constant. Start a number of worker threads and have each pick the next unprocessed simulated entity. (i: index of simulated entity, n: simulation step)
I played this game for years. For those of you that haven't I thought I'd provide some perspective...
The game is so difficult, that even using the DFHACK utility to completely cheat and make my dwarves invincible, I still died every time. It's likely the most complex game ever created by a long shot.
More of a Progress Quest fan. No sense learning all those commands when the game can do it for you.
I still like Exile 3 by Spiderweb software better. It's a super ultra mega classic RPG and its map makes Skyrim look small. I think it was released in 1994 or something but it still runs on Windows 7 32 bit today.
does it still crash on linux if you zoom in? I could not play it at all, and it looks like the developer just ignores that bug, even though it was reported long time ago.
I really had high hopes for Dwarf Fortress; I kind of like complex strategy games with steep learning curves, and I could even get used to the wacky interface. I remember the precise moment I just decided to stop playing it, though; when dwarves started complaining about their clothing being ragged. You have to have an entire economy. To make clothes. For your dwarves.
And this isn't some accident, it's by design. For me, they've gone so far into the micromanagement that the game just isn't fun at all, it's tedious. And that's really a shame because I think if they hit the right spot with the complexity, it could be really great. I had been looking forward to making some really big complex dungeons, but making clothes for dwarves and getting the idiots to actually put the new clothes on, all the time? Fuck it.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Riight... and look I have a sheet of paper with a lot of pencilled scribbles on it - you can look at those scribbles for centuries and not learn a damn thing. Now that is depth...
Yeah, you don't even have to install or run any programs. Just go here...
and this was the result
It's open source unlike minecraft and dwarf fortress, and hasn't let the game's performance bog down to the same levels as Minecraft or DF have.
Mind you there's plenty of room for improvement, both in gameplay and speed, but unlike the latter, YOU could have code/involvement/input on the future of it to a level the others avoid since they are by and large commercial enterprises.
Will make an awesome BACKEND for potentially a generation of other games. Or a sociology simulation.
But as a game it's already become too bloated and tedious to be truly enjoyable. For me, it's mostly due to single threading, but I have run across many of the usability quirks that make it a non-starter for the less technically inclined.
Sadly Tarn has made it quite clear that DF will not be open sourced any time in the near future, unless on a whim he suddenly grows bored of it, so as to avoid 'the game going in directions which he doesn't envision' (this was said in one of the forums years ago and I'm paraphrasing) which sadly limits the full potential of what he's creating, as well as infuriating a lot of potential either donators or developers who might otherwise help make it a game to kill (most other) games, given the sheer level of replayability and intricacy woven into it's backend elements.
As far as the front-end is concerned however, it shows why both Sim branded games, as well as Minecraft are so popular instead. Hell, even just regarding ASCII based games, I find NETHACK easier to deal with, TOMENET less visually noisy, LORE and Arrowbridge downright simplistic, and I'm sure there are others out there that people could make a similiar agreement about (LOD anyone?).
While I can appreciate the level of detail placed into Dwarf Fortress' mapping and other management interfaces, there are some limitations that simply can't be easily overcome in DOS-Era ASCII characters (Unicode+ANSI or XTERM color might be another matter.) That said, it's rapidly approaching a point where a 3d interface could provide noticable advantages to visualizing your part of the world. I do however agree that implementing them should be saved for a finished backend and not hobble the work being done. But without them I wonder how long the DF development donations will last, nevermind how long Tarn will be able to physically keep up programming without it taking a toll on his health.