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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...
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.
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!
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.
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. ...
can be parallelized easily if old_state and input are constant
See where you go too far with assumptions? Sure, you can parallelize it easily like that - when your actors are nicely synchronous and independent. For a quick example: there are two entities that are bound to end up in the same cell at next time step, how do you resolve that step in your easily parallel fashion?
When dealing with discrete simulation, you're usually dealing with a stream of events, not independent actors. You can separate them into independent domains that can be simulated at once (and then still take care about effects taking place in proper order), but it's not "easily" and nice looking as you make it out to be.
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.
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.
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. ...
can be parallelized easily if old_state and input are constant
See where you go too far with assumptions? Sure, you can parallelize it easily like that - when your actors are nicely synchronous and independent. For a quick example: there are two entities that are bound to end up in the same cell at next time step, how do you resolve that step in your easily parallel fashion?
In dwarf fortress? They probably collide resulting in an explosion of random organs with a chance to fuse into a horrible abomination with the specific abomination depending on the entities that collided and the proximity of the collision to an open helmouth.
It's strange how so much of the world chooses pain over pleasure.