Slashdot Mirror
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...
Yes... From what I gather, the developer ("Toady") is an autodidact that doesn't use any sort of version control and no multithreading. Although the simulation might be difficult to run in multiple threads, I think the path finding is one of the biggest CPU drains and that should be embarrassingly parallel. Also, he is really giving the community a tough time by having a monolithic game engine + GUI instead of some sort of modular system, which would allow the many programming-savvy fans to build tools much more easily (tools such as dfhack and therapist now use direct memory hacking, which is annoying (therapist needs root access, dfhack encapsulates df itself) but also unstable.
It still is, because Toady still doesn't know how to multi-thread. As an example, generating a big world with 1000 years takes forever. By 500 years, the game begins to hang (because the UI only updates after every year has been simulated) for several seconds at a time. I left it around three hours and it still wasn't done. And following the logic, I couldn't even see the year it was on. I would have had to wait until a year had been simulated to have the UI update. I just killed the process.
Then again, this is the first release after this dev cycle. Bugs are expected. Toady said that he was going to optimize things.
Hopefully he'll learn how to multi-thread sometime within the next... ten years.
Who the hell calls 'go' 'weiqi' ?
The type of person who has waited for months to come up with a slightly on-topic post to show off that he uses the term "weiqi" and thoughtfully provide a link to the Wikipedia article on "Go" to show how smart he is.
For one unit, sure. The CPU problem in DF (as far as I understand) is that there are 200 dwarves, 100 goblins and 400 kittens all trying to pathfind at the same time. Unless I miss something, each of these units van pathfind in parallel since they don't "know" about the other's paths.
s/van/can/... I want an edit button on /., even if only for the first 5 minutes after posting...
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.
Gnomoria is also inspired by DF, and arguably is much closer to the spirit of DF than Minecraft is, and the graphics and interface are (IMHO) far superior to OotB Dwarf Fortress.
If you enjoyed Minecraft but don't yet feel ready for the mind-bogglingly insane brilliance of DF then Gnomoria is a good stepping stone. I became aware of it during Aavak's (also a DF player) Let's Play and picked it up soon after, whilst it doesn't have anywhere near the depth of DF (traps/mechanisms are much more limited for example) if you only have a few hours it's much easier to dip in and out of, whereas with DF I usually have to play for days at a time... ;)
FWIW when I play DF I do so with a tileset and all the rest of the gubbins one might find in the Lazy Newb Pack. It's a sublime game but the complexity and inconsistency of its interface can be one of its biggest frustrations.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
In Chinese. But when speaking about the game in English, people use 'go'.
More of a Progress Quest fan. No sense learning all those commands when the game can do it for you.
In terms of replay value and intricacy, 'computer games' are arguably several largely different things that all just happen to be amenable to running on computers and being sold in software boxes:
The trivial analog to simple games is (of course) those games implemented on a computer. Being the trivial case, this is mostly a wiseass cop-out; but it's worth mentioning because computer implementations have made a substantial difference in what games are considered 'solved' and how strongly. Some games are so simple that children can solve them by hand (tic-tac-toe, most notably, since people do actually play it; but it's simple enough that most players eventually solve it and lose interest); but solving checkers, or the partial solutions for chess and go, are exercises that require ingenuity and cunning; but a lot of brute force.
The slightly less trivial analog is extensions of classic games that would be impossible or impractical to fabricate as board games. Mostly 2d games adapted to 3 or more dimensions(or 3d puzzles, like Rubik's cubes adapted to 4 or more dimensions). These usually have some improvised implementation that doesn't need a computer (multiple chess/checkers boards with rules for pieces moving between them in the extra dimension, that sort of thing); but computers make them easier and less knock-over-and-abandon-in-frustration prone.
Then there are computer games that are really, in terms of playability and intricacy, basically team sports, rather than anything analogous to deterministic games of perfect information like chess, checkers, go, etc. Something like Counter-Strike is replayable much like soccer or football are (ignoring the fact that operating systems and Glide/OpenGL/DirectX tend to break backward compatibility more often than 'grass' does, so a single, specific, implementation may not remain playable in the long term without porting, though games with robust port support are in decent shape). There is strategy and teamwork; along with individual expertise in implementation, so most of the 'churn' in these games is either abandonment of older engines in favor of nicer ones, or iterative tweaking of weapons and balance. Specific 'games' in the sense of 'Program X sold under name Y' tend to come and go; but the overall dynamic is similar to regional variations, changes in equipment, occasional rule tweaks, and the like in traditional sports, except that traditional sports tend to treat variants as all being flavors of A Sport, while the trademark and SKU-focused game market tends to treat each variant as a separate game.
Then there are the 'games' that really shade into choose-your-own-adventure books with pictures, or movies with reflex tests: I enjoy these myself, and they are a perfectly valid form of entertainment; but they are about as dissimilar from classic 'games' as something called a 'game' can be. Single-player FPSes, relatively 'closed world' RPGs, that sort of thing. Hardly identical to a film(in all but the worst excesses of the early days of "Wow, we have a whole CD to fill with shitty, overcompressed FMV!" era), the tests of reflexes, RPG party management, or whatever are genuinely part of the experience; but they aren't terribly replayable because, sooner or later, you run up against the fact that there is only so much manually-generated, written, and voice-acted plot to uncover. Likely good for more than one playthrough, unless brutally linear; but each 'branch' costs so much dev and artist time that there aren't going to be too many of them.
There may also be a category for the games (the Civilization series being the most prominent example that comes to mind) that could have been implemented as board games; but would be near insanity if you had to keep track of teeny plastic wheat counters for every single square. If these are single player, they often wear out their welcome sooner or later because the AI opponents just aren'
Sure but with a little cleverness I think the problem can be simplified since the same paths are going to be used a lot with significant overlap and repetition. It could even lead to more realistic behaviour. Real creatures don't do mathametical best path finding from a real map, they choose from amongst routes they know weighted by some hueristics, then if one of them fails, try to adjust. Its potentially a much simpler problem. It would mean less efficiency in situations where a prefered path ends up not being accessible....but thats normal isn't it? I have that problem all the time when streets get closed for maintenance.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.