[HN Gopher] Dwarf Fortress' graphical upgrade provides a new way...
___________________________________________________________________
Dwarf Fortress' graphical upgrade provides a new way into a wildly
wonky game
Author : danso
Score : 604 points
Date : 2022-12-06 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| mikrl wrote:
| Last time I played DF I would just compulsively keep going until
| 1-3 AM despite having to go to work the next day.
|
| I had had a normal sleep schedule before that bout, and was
| otherwise a functional and responsible adult.
|
| I've been waiting for this release for ages, but I do not think
| it's going to do my mental health any favours Hah
| iKlsR wrote:
| Launching the same day my Steam Deck arrives, Christmas came
| early.
| YesBox wrote:
| For those who like this type of game, I'm working on a city
| builder heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress. Demand will be much
| more granular than traditional city builders (e.g. specific
| business/service needs and building the appropriate buildings for
| them).
|
| You'll be able to see the interior of buildings and design the
| buildings as you please, save them as blueprints, and be able to
| plop down duplicates.
|
| You can find progress updates on:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Archapolis/
|
| Or a few video logs at
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUYLstskSLNcSkFg1giTBtQ
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| I made the mistake of starting both, God Of War and a new
| Factorio run in the last few days, _despite_ knowing that DF is
| coming out, along with the Portal update and the Witcher 3
| update. I might not be the smarted person on here
| Rayhem wrote:
| Wait wait wait, portal update?? What's that about?
| sph wrote:
| Holy shit, I guess we were both living under a rock! Looks
| like there's been a graphical update with raytracing support
| Tepix wrote:
| Not yet, it's coming this week however.
| ct0 wrote:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/2012840/Portal_with_RTX/
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Is it weird that I'm more impressed by the graphical update
| to Dwarf Fortress? It feels like a much bigger deal somehow
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| It is a significantly harder task making DF accessible
| than tweaking the shaders on Portal.
| fullstop wrote:
| It's ray tracing, which is a bit more cool than shaders.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| One might argue that ray tracing is a kind of shader.
| After all you're tracing a ray for each pixel on screen,
| in parallel.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Is it weird that _I_ prefer the "before" shots in the
| video? The updated textures remind me of some much-worse
| first-person puzzle games I've attempted since Portal.
| Big turn-off. Wish they could have kept the original look
| with the updated visuals (whatever those are--I couldn't
| really tell, mostly just noticed the uglier textures).
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| It would be nice if they did an update that allowed you to
| turn off the ARG and modified ending that were used to
| promote Portal 2. The music from all the extra radios lying
| around clashes with the atmosphere and ambient soundtrack.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Wow! They really improved the UI. I find really nice that now you
| not need to use DwarfTerapist to handle it.
|
| And the new game that I just begin (it's yet early summer) and I
| got a siege of zombie elfs. and I don't have any defense... funny
| times!
| robocat wrote:
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I am humbled by the level of snark you have achieved
| robocat wrote:
| Strangely enough, I was only trying to be helpful, yet
| clearly I failed spectacularly enough to be flagged.
|
| Firstly, I think that most people subliminally discount the
| content of a comment if the writer has poor English
| language skills. ChatGPT mostly produces correct English
| (better than many people I know), even if the style is
| boring.
|
| Using ChatGPT as a teaching aide makes perfect sense to me.
| batman-farts wrote:
| Thank you for your advice! Might you have any idea when I
| will be able to use ShartGPT, so that I can restyle my
| written English to seem as though I am having a sudden,
| uncontrolled bowel movement while writing?
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Hey, I take a lot of time and effort controlling my diet to
| achieve this (while knocking years off my lifespan). I
| won't have any low effort shart writing around here.
| shanebellone wrote:
| I've never played DF and likely won't enjoy it. I'll still buy it
| because independent developers like this deserve our support.
|
| You can see the passion on their faces. That excites me. That
| deserves reward.
| derefr wrote:
| There's a certain ugliness that graphical-tile-based skins of
| over roguelikes and other TUI-iconography games have, that you
| don't tend to see with graphical-tile-based games that were
| _designed_ to be such -- i.e. where the tiles and the tileset are
| a compression mechanism for scenes originally conceptualized
| without tiles. I 'm quite sad to say that -- at least judging
| from the screenshots here -- DF's graphical skin here seems to
| share that "thin graphical skin over a TUI game" look.
|
| What I'm talking about here is best exemplified by looking at
| this image: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/12/df4-1... . There are two types of snow
| tile (full snow, and patchy snow) here, surrounded by grass
| tiles. The full-snow tiles are connected, RPG-Maker "9-cell
| brush-texture"-wise, as if they're little dug-out ponds full of
| snow. The patchy snow tiles are all individual, with no ability
| to blend into one-another, and so end up looking like a bunch of
| individual objects on a clear grid -- like ore deposits in a rock
| face in Runescape.
|
| Neither of these (square-grid connected runs, or non-tesselatable
| one-tile blocks of varying intensity) is a good choice for
| depicting snow on grass. A graphical designer who wanted to
| portray the scene of "a field patchy with snow" in a tile-based
| game engine, would not create _these_ particular visual elements
| as the primitives to depict said scene. These primitives are
| instead only used here because they are the ones that can have a
| 1:1 mapping with particular underlying DF TUI tiles.
|
| I feel like it would be quite practical, if you were building
| something like this from the ground up, to write an algorithm to
| extract from DF's raw tile data here, an "elevation map" of
| snowiness (heck, maybe it's already a pass available internally
| in the engine, before it gets quantized out as tiles!); to do
| some smoothing over said snowiness-map; and then to have
| grass/dirt/sand/etc tiles consume said "snowiness map" as a
| shader pass over their textures.
|
| (I know that all this terrain is deformable. So what?
| Regenerating a 2D snowiness-map over a slightly-past-the-viewport
| crop of the tile data [i.e. a very low-res sample grid] would
| take less time than pressing the key to dig a hole. It could be
| done every frame, even.)
|
| And you could do all sorts of other things like that -- e.g. have
| the lava in https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/12/df1-1... be a flowing mass of liquid
| rather than a bunch of particular static grid tiles.
|
| I feel like the only reason the developers of these graphical
| adaptations of TUI games don't do this, is because they are
| trying -- at least partially -- to serve the part of the existing
| player-base who _prefers_ the TUI version of the game; rather
| than focusing solely on the part of the player-base who doesn 't
| like TUIs but plays the game despite that, and the untapped
| market of people who aren't playing the game _because_ of how
| ugly and gridlike it is.
|
| (And if you're wondering, this sort of higher-level adaptation
| doesn't have to be to the detriment of gameplay. "The grid" just
| becomes a UX feature, an extra lens and maybe an always-on fade
| around the player and/or the cursor, rather than something
| evident in the design of the levels. Compare e.g. Sim City 2000
| [evident grid] with SC3000 or SC4 [UX-layer grid] for what I mean
| here.)
| philipov wrote:
| Mature Content Description: "Alcohol consumption is required for
| a dwarven fortress to run smoothly, as described in text."
| dccoolgai wrote:
| I've played it probably more than any other game over the last 10
| years. I'm really just buying it out of a sense of decency to pay
| back the guys who made it. I know I should have donated before,
| but I just didn't have time to figure it out. I may not even play
| it, just buying it to help those guys out.
| bombcar wrote:
| For those interested in directly supporting Tarn and Zach you
| can find details here (Paypal/Patreon):
| http://www.bay12games.com/support.html
| fullstop wrote:
| If there was ever a title which needed a native Linux build, this
| is it. ProtonDB does not list compatibility yet, have any of you
| tried?
| jl6 wrote:
| Works flawlessly on Ubuntu 22.04.
| eljost wrote:
| Works fine w/ steam and "Proton Experimental" under "Linux
| 5.10.154-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Nov 10 20:51:28 UTC 2022
| x86_64 GNU/Linux". I had to install the package "sdl_ttf"
| though; without it, the game just hung at the inital screen
| that says "Loading".
| dvzk wrote:
| If this update is like the old version, it has bundled
| dependencies on glibc and SDL 1.2. You can overwrite the
| outdated glibc libraries with symlinks to the system glibc.
| SDL, SDL_image, and SDL_ttf can be relinked to sdl12-compat,
| which implements the SDL1.2 ABI using the maintained SDL2
| libraries. (edit: I forgot this is a Windows-only release, so
| maybe disregard this.)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Official word on Linux and Mac support is soonish [1]. They
| didn't have any experience with packaging on those systems,
| which seems like a totally fair prioritization to me.
|
| I was personally able to download on Linux (Pop!OS) and run it
| without enabling proton experimental or installing anything
| else. Worldbuilding didn't seem noticably longer than classic.
|
| [1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/11/dwarf-fortress-
| release...
| mempko wrote:
| Works flawless for me using proton experimental (didn't try
| other versions). I wouldn't hesitate to buy it at this point,
| has platinum rating on ProtonDB.
| fullstop wrote:
| Wow, from "Not Enough Info" to "Platinum" over the course of
| three hours. Nice!
| tstrimple wrote:
| Proton fails to launch. I was able to get it running in Lutris
| with the caffe runner in a couple minutes though.
| fullstop wrote:
| Thanks! I'll look into Lutris.
| tstrimple wrote:
| It's a bit annoying to setup initially. Caffe is the
| default runner for Bottles and plays more games out of the
| box than any other runner I've tested. However I hate the
| Bottles interface so I downloaded the Caffe runner
| separately.
|
| https://github.com/bottlesdevs/wine/releases/tag/caffe-7.20
|
| Then you can drop that into the default folder in Lutris
| and choose it as the runner. Lutris also integrates with
| Steam so it'll see your entire steam library and you can
| choose a different wine runner and wine options on a per-
| game basis.
| 8jy89hui wrote:
| The game worked perfect for me on Proton Next (7.0-5). Manjaro
| Linux x86 (5.15), Nvidia GPU, Intel CPU, x11 (I do not think I
| have `sdl_ttf` installed though I might be wrong.)
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| And the soundtrack is fantastic.
|
| https://youtu.be/Ekq3TDPznGI
| pelasaco wrote:
| "this is our life's work and we are never gonna stop":
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
| Tomte wrote:
| I've tried DF ages ago, but it was simply too hard for me. I
| never really got into digging a fortress, already the first few
| minutes bounced me off.
|
| Even read a DF book. No help.
|
| I just bought it on Steam.
|
| Probably I will never play it, but it's one of those purchases
| that are... aspirational. I'd like to be a person who plays DF. I
| know it's stupid.
|
| But graphics and better onboarding are a real argument for me.
|
| What tipped me finally over the edge towards buying was the
| background about the creator's health problems. I like that he's
| doing DF single-mindedly and I can afford the game without
| thinking twice.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| The trick is to follow along with a YouTube tutorial/series.
| Really, that's all it takes.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I'm like you, and I will buy it this evening although I never
| buy a game fullprice and I will probably never have the
| patience to play it
| thealienthing wrote:
| I'm currently in the phase of trying to figure out DF. Many
| hours of tinkering and reading has led me to digging tunnels
| and deep underground but I just get stuck trying to assign jobs
| and set up rooms and burrows. It's very difficult. I WISH that
| they would make an interactive tutorial. That would
| significantly reduce the friction of onboarding new players.
| Apparently the steam version has one or is adding one. In my
| mind, this should have been a high ticket feature worked on and
| added years ago.
| bombcar wrote:
| * Learn the basics with in-game tutorials
|
| The steam version has added tutorials in-game for the first
| time. In the past many people used "guides" or such, but
| unless you started with the exact same seed/location, you'd
| often have to figure out things as you went.
|
| https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/getting-started-
| with/97... was a decently well done guide for it's time.
| dvzk wrote:
| Burrows are not something you need as a beginner unless
| you're doing something unusual. It's best to forget about the
| feature. For jobs, press (u)nits -> (z)oom -> (p)references
| -> (l)abors on your dwarves and adjust their professions,
| then queue up tasks at workshops.
| ryanstorm wrote:
| For those that can't play it but would still like to experience
| the joys of its flavor of generative art, there's a YT channel
| that interprets it and puts a story and illustration to his
| playthroughs:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXX7Rp0iXj0nPwER_CwBD...
| mikedelago wrote:
| Even without clicking, I knew it was Kruggsmash.
|
| He's a fantastic artist, storyteller, and content creator.
| criley2 wrote:
| The only success I've had is playing closely alongside a guide
| which is basically telling you every large scale and medium
| scale decision you should be making for years of in game time.
| Reminds me of Minecraft mods that get so complex that you need
| an entire questbook mod included just to teach players how to
| progress.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| > I'd like to be a person who plays DF. I know it's stupid
|
| Not stupid. The feeling of mastering a properly hard game is a
| good reason to try it.
|
| I've used the same "strategy" for most technically challenging
| games: play in long stretches, trying to make any kind of
| progress. Have the wiki open and read it any time you are
| confused. Just keep trying to do _something_.
|
| Eventually it will either click and you'll have a bunch of fun,
| or you'll tire out. If you tire out, just don't play the game
| again for a couple days, or whenever you regain your energy.
|
| Once it clicks once, it will instantly start being fun. The
| interesting part is that the click happens multiple times with
| challenging games. I've been playing EVE for more than a year
| now and the combat system _still_ gives me huge revelations.
| Same with DF, once you learn how to get your fortress rolling
| you can very quickly learn to build a fully defensible mega
| castle. Then the next click is realizing that makes the game
| boring and allowing some danger by fulfilling self placed
| challenges.
|
| edit: I just bought it and played it for a bit -- the updated
| graphics/UI are a great improvement! Obviously bit hard to
| judge but now there's proper icons indicating common actions
| (mine, cut trees), a tutorial.. give it a try!
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| Let me confirm the long stretches thing.
|
| I learned DF by setting aside two weeks and playing ~16 hours
| a day. Was a piece of cake.
|
| It's not the kind of game you can pick up with an hour here
| or there.
| dpedu wrote:
| I learned like this too, though not quite so extreme. I was
| going to be somewhere with my laptop but no internet for
| about a week so I printed off an at-the-time popular
| strategy guide called something along the lines of "the
| absolute beginners guide to dwarf fortress". This was
| before the wiki existed! Anyhow, it worked out, as my build
| order still is vaguely reminiscent of what was in that
| guide, more than 10 years ago.
| binkHN wrote:
| > I learned DF by setting aside two weeks and playing ~16
| hours a day.
|
| Now that's commitment.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| > _I 've tried DF ages ago, but it was simply too hard for me._
|
| I still dig and irrigate farm chambers if there's a nearby
| river as though out of reflexive PTSD from that one time where
| the game required you to moisten soil before you can grow
| crops. (That hasn't been the case for a looong time,
| fortunately.)
| bombcar wrote:
| I still (and probably always will) design fortresses with
| anti-"bug" features to prevent "unexpected fun". Grills on
| water inputs, preventing diagonals, all those things.
| modo_mario wrote:
| It's development has been stopped a long time ago but have a
| look into gnomoria perhaps.
| klohto wrote:
| And the open source fork ingnomia
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I've played 3 4+ hour sessions over the last five years. Twice
| I hit bugs that caused save data lose and caused me to quit.
| Once I had a ton of fun and then some small issue caused my
| fortress to become unstable and all my dwarfs to die.
|
| Hopefully its a bit more stable now. Would love to lose many
| more hours to this game.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> I just bought it on Steam.
|
| > Probably I will never play it_
|
| Even if you never end up playing it, it's worth buying it to
| support DF. We need more works of art that are a product of
| passion and vision and fewer that are just a clumsy, accidental
| byproduct of profit-seeking by way of mindless, manipulative
| psychological tactics.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Exactly this - I've bought a whole bunch of games I'm never
| likely to get more than a couple of hours into or even play
| at all but supporting the authors with a purchase gives a
| strong "I appreciate what you're doing" signal and,
| hopefully, encourages more of that kind of stuff (which only
| really works on indies, I know, but then those tend to be the
| people making interesting games.)
| binkHN wrote:
| > We need more works of art that are a product of passion and
| vision...
|
| Can't agree more--look forward to the day when something
| better replaces capitalism.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Once during a job interview, when asked about an accomplishment
| I was personally proud of, I mentioned defeating Morgoth in
| Angband (the classic roguelike). I'll admit, not quite as hard
| as beating NetHack but it still required a lot of self control,
| because Cocky -> Lazy -> Stupid -> Dead.
| schiem wrote:
| The assessment of Cocky -> Lazy -> Stupid -> Dead is spot on.
| I haven't gotten super far, but my last run ended because I
| saw a bunch of 'C' in the next room and didn't bother
| checking what they were - turns out gravity hounds have a
| pretty good stun lock. Out of curiosity, what class were you
| playing?
|
| For what it's worth, if someone told me they beat Morgoth in
| an interview I'd probably hire them.
| mihaifm wrote:
| Nice one, how did the interviewer react?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I knew my play failed when the interviewer asked me what
| that was? and i got a blank stare when i said it was like
| Nethack.
| trhr wrote:
| You didn't want to work there anyway.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| i could have used the job, but no i wouldn't have been
| happy there
| lemoncookiechip wrote:
| Less than an hour to go, I can't wait to get my hands on it.
| birracerveza wrote:
| Awesome game, awesome update.
| hacknewslogin wrote:
| I just got an email from steam, it's now available for purchase!
| $29.99. I can't wait to go home and add it to my wishlist and buy
| it in three or four years. And then maybe play it!
| hacknewslogin wrote:
| Plot twist, a friend just bought it for me. Now to see how
| playable it is on a steamdeck.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| Not bad, apparently
|
| https://steamcommunity.com/app/975370/discussions/0/37093075.
| ..
| grenoire wrote:
| In terms of usability, I still just find Dwarf Fortress to be a
| decade behind Rimworld. The fact that we had to use Dwarf
| Therapist for years... Rimworld just has it all on the screen
| within four clicks, with clear indications on how to resolve
| issues like mood modifiers.
|
| Dwarf Fortress in all its complexity, embraces fuzziness in how
| things work, and focuses on a bit of a higher-level focus
| (fortresses reach many more dwarves than a Rimworld colony).
| However, this complexity makes the game a lot less accessible
| too. I hope the UI changes help bring ease of use and clarity!
| bee_rider wrote:
| IMO there's a spectrum that has Dwarf Fortress on one end, and,
| I dunno, like Factorio or Mindustry or other automation games
| on the other. Rimworld would be somewhere in the middle. On the
| Factorio side, most of the enjoyment comes from working out a
| really optimal base and looking at every detail.
|
| In Dwarf Fortress, there are just too many details to look at
| them all, and the reward isn't so great anyway. IMO it is much
| more enjoyable to just embrace the fact that there will always
| be too many details and, as you say, it is better to just focus
| on the higher level. The details aren't really there to look at
| all of them or play with all of them, they are there to
| interact with each other and with the things you do, to result
| in emergent phenomena that (within the limitations of the
| simulation) "make sense."
|
| Or at least when you are picking over the rubble of your base,
| after one of those phenomena really emerged all over the place,
| you can piece together where it all went wrong.
|
| Rimworld in my limited play time, seemed like I'd really want
| to optimize everything fairly well, and like that was actually
| do-able. So it while the games are pretty similar mechanically,
| the actual feel of playing is pretty different, and I can't
| really compare them.
| mlindner wrote:
| I've tried Rimworld a couple times and it always came off as
| just bland, flat, and uninteresting compared to Dwarf Fortress.
| Once you played it a bit you could see "through" the game and
| into the random number generation beneath it. Also I didn't
| like the sci-fi aspect personally as I like fantasy more.
|
| Perhaps it's gotten better in the few intervening years since I
| last tried it.
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| I love fantasy too! Do you know if any games that are like
| RimWorld but fantasy? I saw Amazing Cultivation Simulation
| but you need a master's degree to play that, at least that's
| how it felt to me...
| philipov wrote:
| > _like RimWorld but fantasy?_
|
| Dwarf Fortress ;)
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| The problem is/was the learning curve. And of course the
| UI. I really hope the Steam version is done well and not
| just one of those graphics packs that you can install on
| Dwarf Fortress.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| I want the opposite. I like the complexity of Dwarf
| Fortress, but the fantasy element makes it not as immersive
| as Rimworld for me.
| Slippery_John wrote:
| There are DF overhaul mods that make it scifi. I think
| the big one is called The Long Night or something like
| that. DF has steam workshop integration so you might see
| it there soon
| programd wrote:
| You need Rimworld with mods. To see what's possible see for
| example "The Wizards of the Black Death" playthrough by
| Rhadamant:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIkNXqlIIas
|
| And here is the list of mods for Rimworld which creates
| this world:
|
| https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2780
| 9...
|
| Rhadamant shows a ton of different Rimworld scenarios in
| his Youtube channel, and does marathon Twitch streams of
| the game as well. Many of them heavily modded to do all
| sorts of fantasy and sci-fi scenarios. You can get many
| ideas for your own scenarios from them.
|
| To bring it back slightly on-topic, I strongly suspect that
| while Dwarf Fortress influenced Rimworld, Rimworld had some
| influence on the Steam version of DF in terms of the
| graphical user interface.
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| I've actually played with mods and Zetrith's multiplayer
| mod is a must! No honestly, stop what you're doing and go
| check it out. Especially if you have at least one friend!
| I manage to even make it work with many many mods.
|
| It's been a couple of years since I last played using
| this mod, so it's probably even better now. The only down
| side at the time was that it would desync sometimes, so
| you'd have to wait a bit a resync, but it's still so
| worth it because the experience is just so amazing! I
| would probably pay the price of the game again just to
| have an official version of multiplayer.
|
| This is co-op multiplayer, at least how I played it.
|
| Highly recommended to anyone who likes RimWorld and has
| at least one friend!
| Slippery_John wrote:
| Clanfolk, though it's more medieval than fantasy.
| TillE wrote:
| RimWorld has tons of interesting features, it's a game I
| really _want_ to love. But their much-hyped "story
| generator" is really just a very basic random event system,
| without even much variety to pad it out. The only "AI" thing
| it does is take into account the status of your colony
| (wealth, etc).
|
| It's frustrating because it's the system which really drives
| the whole game, and it's so simple, and so arbitrary. Without
| Dwarf Fortress' depth of simulation, it needs some stronger
| glue to tie the game together.
| mlindner wrote:
| Yes you did a much better job of describing my feelings on
| the game. The systems are very simple and show it leaves
| nothing more than randomness and an almost complete lack of
| emergent behavior that happens in Dwarf Fortress.
| kibwen wrote:
| I won't let myself play until this weekend, but I hear that the
| new UI actually incorporates some elements of Dwarf Therapist,
| making e.g. assigning jobs an order of magnitude easier.
| Vespasian wrote:
| For me Dwarf Fortress demonstrates why good and accessible UI /
| UX is required and is an art of itself.
|
| I repeatedly tried DF and despite having spent hours in similar
| games, this one eluded me to this day due to it's borderline
| unusable UI (for me at least) and art style.
|
| I'll be happy to give it another go since the mechanics seem to
| be supremely refined.
| mabbo wrote:
| Dwarf fortress should be in the UX hall of fame as an example
| of how an incredible product can be made completely
| inaccessible to 95% of it's target audience purely through
| bad UX.
|
| And I say that as one of the 5% who still played and loved
| it.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Same, I was a big fan of character-based roguelikes (and at
| the time, in the late 2000s, that was the format of most
| roguelikes), and while I was unfazed at the time by the
| character-based interface, the inconsistent menus and
| micronamanagement tired me out of Dwarf Fortress.
|
| It needed various external tools to alleviate the
| painstaking manual labor that went into managing the
| colony, like macro generators for floor plans and the
| memory hacking of Dwarf Therapist to have high-level
| management of the colony, and all that with wacky menus.
| tranxen wrote:
| I wish the enemies would be able to destroy walls in DF like
| they do in Rimworld.
|
| I really love DF but at some point, I know that I can surrender
| my fortress with walls and only let a small entrance with a
| labyrinth of traps that the pathfinding will lead enemies to.
|
| In Rimworld such strategy is not very effective since some
| enemies will dig into your base walls.
| bombcar wrote:
| I believe DF now has creatures that can destroy/deconstruct
| built walls. I don't know if sappers yet exist (creatures
| that can dig after you).
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| They experimented with tunneling enemies a while ago (it was
| before my time, and I started playing about a decade ago).
| But for walls and moats, enemies do try and scale up/swim
| through them now.
| copx wrote:
| In normal Rimworld raids enemies only attack walls if you do
| not leave an open path for them.
|
| That is why meta players always leave one door open. The AI
| will brainlessly walk in .. right into your kill box.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Rimworld has multiple different raids that defeat that
| defense, though. Drop pods, sieges, sappers, and breachers
| - most all in both human & mech variants.
|
| The open-door killbox is still super strong, but you can't
| survive with only that defense.
| bombcar wrote:
| This works in DF also, and with the addition of burrows you
| don't even have to worry about dwarves accidentally going
| outside when they shouldn't.
| winReInstall wrote:
| These "open source games" are the most brutal attack ont the
| gaming industry imagineable, eating the most rare ressource ever.
| Playtime and players.
|
| Minecraft already took a huge chunk out of the industry. Which
| they then tried to solve by encoperating this and selling
| additions.
|
| Now another game appears, that offers endless replay ability with
| fascinating stuff. If the onslought would be kept up, all those
| monetization schemes could collapse over time, by virtue of
| simply being boring compared to what the "indy" dev scene has to
| offer.
|
| One starts to wonder, what could happen if a concentrated efforst
| started churning out ever better world generators and "deep"
| games, allowing others non "deep" players to join the world just
| as "action" heroes or adventurers.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Please, there's been "deep" games with random world generation
| since the beginning of gaming... The whole roguelike genre is
| called that because of the original, Rogue. Civilization games
| also fit the bill. And while Minecraft and Roblox have been
| hits, other genres are still doing just fine.
|
| Also I think you're confused as to what open-source means...
| sbergot wrote:
| This is not a zero sum game. Minecraft has lots of
| merchandising (including other video games) and has launched
| many youtube careers. It has created a big marketing cohort and
| businesses loves those.
|
| Now dwarf fortress is a more interesting beast to me. It
| belongs to a niche where the ratio of players to developers is
| very small. Those games are in perpetual betas. The biggest
| ones are financed by patreon and by side jobs. The meat of
| those games is found in the complex systems that the players
| can interact with. The graphics are often dry and unappealing
| to the mainstream audience.
|
| I recommend the grid sage games blog as an example of the
| dedication that those people put in their craft:
| www.gridsagegames.com/blog/
|
| I don't think the big publishers are interested in this niche.
| Mostly designers will look at those game to study their
| innovations and try to replicate that in more polished games.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| In what sense do you mean "open source"?
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| I think they just mean indie rather than open source.
| winReInstall wrote:
| Yeah, sorry, the border betweeen indy and open source
| comunities are very blurry. Often times games released on
| steams might be even available in less polished versions on
| github or just stolen gpl versions of them, that nobody
| persecutes.
|
| Its really not that clear of a distinctions as it used to
| be.
| lunarplague wrote:
| I'm sorry, how is Indie and Open Source even a comparable
| trait? They're two different ways of defining something.
|
| Do you have an example of this happening short of blatant
| asset flips?
| willismichael wrote:
| I'm baffled by this usage of "open source" ... neither Dwarf
| Fortress nor Minecraft are open source.
| kahrl wrote:
| These are not open source games.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Would be a great comment if it ended with '/s'
| slothtrop wrote:
| The DF demographic doesn't have the reach that Minecraft did.
| That was a veritable phenomenon. Notwithstanding that DF isn't
| new in the least.
| winReInstall wrote:
| But DF has the same thing minecraft did. A story to tell.
| slothtrop wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. My limited experience with
| Minecraft is that it's like "virtual legos".
| fullstop wrote:
| I don't see DF overtaking any meaningful amount of the
| Minecraft player base. Children have grown up with Minecraft in
| ways that Dwarf Fortress will never reach due to the difficulty
| of the game.
| totetsu wrote:
| DF source is only open in that museum where it's on display.
| And it appeared a very long time ago. This comment is so almost
| wrong it seems like GPT
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| I a fair bit of time playing Dwarf Fortress a year or two ago.
| Once I grasped that I wasn't supposed to directly tell the
| dwarves what to do, I started picking up the mechanics much more
| quickly. The depth of the simulation is amazing, but it's not
| particularly legible unless you spend a lot of time manually
| poring over descriptive text in menus. DFHack and its various
| plug-ins[1] (especially labormanager) and Dwarf Therapist
| _greatly_ ease the management process and can help avoid
| confusion when your dwarves just won 't do what you want.
|
| It's still a lot of fun to play around with for a while. I would
| love to see what could be done with a larger development team
| working on it, but I suppose it would be hard to keep the concept
| focused.
|
| [1] https://docs.dfhack.org/en/0.47.05-r2/docs/Plugins.html
| SCLeo wrote:
| Is there a way to play Dwarf Fortress that involves less losing?
| (maybe mods or some settings?) I know the slogan is "losing is
| fun", but to me it really isn't.
|
| In RimWorld, you can install some slightly (read: extremely)
| overpowered turret mods, plus a moderate amount of save scumming,
| I can make my colony last pretty much forever (until I am bored
| hundreds of hours later). Are there techniques enabling similar
| playstyles with Dwarf Fortress?
| hristov wrote:
| Yes. Once you get the hang of it, you will figure out where the
| dangers are and how to avoid them, and you can have a safe and
| prosperous fortress for ages. And without any cheating or
| exploits.
|
| The great thing about DF is that after the initial difficulty
| of figuring out the complex interactions, it is actually an
| easy game in many respects. If you look at the ratio of the
| amount of work you have to dedicate for necessities in
| comparison to the total work your fortress is capable of
| producing, well this ratio is actually the lowest for any city
| builder I am aware of.
|
| Even if your fortress reaches 200 dwarves (the usual maximum),
| you can still feed it with 2-3 farmers, 1-2 cooks and 1-2
| brewers once you get them all experienced. You can have one
| experienced dwarf working on trade goods that will produce
| enough wealth to get you anything you wish to buy from the
| caravans. One clothier can make all the clothes your fortress
| needs.
|
| You do not have to fight invaders or monsters if you really do
| not want to. There is a way to seal off your fortress and make
| it impenetrable ... and then you just wait for the invaders to
| leave. But it is not that difficult to create a well armed,
| armored and trained military to head off any invading force.
|
| There is a complex stress system, but really it is not that
| difficult to keep your dwarves happy and free of stress.
|
| So once you have figured out all the possible pitfalls and how
| to avoid them you end up with this fortress that has massive
| amounts of spare production capacity.
|
| So you start doing fun stuff: building megaprojects, or trying
| to make the most beautiful and expensive objects and pampering
| your dwarves with every possible luxury, or making a powerful
| military and seeking out and fighting the monsters, etc.
|
| When they say losing is fun, losing happens in a couple of
| stages. First, when you are newbie you just kind of hit all the
| possible pitfalls that the game has for you. Ware-wolves, (or
| ware-tapirs), vampires, goblins, dwarves in strange moods going
| mad, goblins, underground monsters, necromancers, ghosts,
| drunken guests in your tavern, etc.
|
| And then you learn about them and how to deal with them. So
| then you get to the second stage of losing is fun. This is when
| you have a safe and prosperous fortress and get kind of bored
| so you embark on a grand and ambitious project, that turns out
| a little too ambitious and your entire fortress ends up flooded
| with lava.
|
| Or you get a military so powerful that you decide in hubris
| that you can face off any challenge and go to a place where
| really no mortal dwarf has any business going.
|
| But this second stage of fun losing is entirely optional. You
| can have a happy and prosperous fortress for as long as you
| want, once you have figured out the game.
| snowram wrote:
| A fortress with a drawbridge in a peaceful biome guarantees you
| an easier time. With time, you'll learn that DF isn't meant to
| be a balanced game and that you can use that at your advantage.
| ruste wrote:
| Lower your population cap in the config file (I like 10-15) and
| don't pierce the cavern layers. This was a total gamechanger
| for me in terms of fun and fps :)
| bombcar wrote:
| You can limit the number of dwarves in your config file to 25
| or so, this will make "large fortress death" pretty much
| avoidable.
|
| You can pick extremely peaceful biomes to settle in.
|
| You can learn how to use traps and drawbridges (completely
| overpowered).
|
| You can learn how to make perfectly self-sufficient farms and
| trading crafts.
|
| Once those are in place I've never lost a fortress to anything
| but boredom.
| [deleted]
| Filligree wrote:
| To name some:
|
| - Fill a tunnel with traps.
|
| - Embark in a location with no enemies. But maybe instead with
| undead.
|
| - Set up a lava chamber above your entrance hall, and a
| remotely triggered floodgate...
|
| - Close the doors on your enemies, and have archers on walls
| above them.
|
| - Create a "danger room", make an OP army.
|
| There's no shortage of ways to survive, once you dig into a few
| of the tools.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| Early on (maybe before you get to a stone layer) you want
| your entrance to have something tougher than a door. A tunnel
| leading to stairs up and a floor hatch is good, or be ready
| to wall off the tunnel by stockpiling blocks nearby.
| theonemind wrote:
| What's the "winning" condition? I've barely played, but I
| gather that even the most successful fortress ends up with all
| of the dwarves dead eventually.
|
| I think you just have to set your own goals. Maybe you want to
| get a population of 1000 before death, or maybe you want a
| fortress to last 100 years.
|
| If you're not very good, then your goals can be very small, and
| get larger.
|
| To mix some metaphors, the house always wins, but can you make
| par for the course, or "justify your seed" (to use the tennis
| term I picked up from Infinite Jest)?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's an open ended sandbox so there's no dedicated "you win"
| condition, but becoming a mountainhome is the narrative end
| goal.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Choosing world gen settings and where you start your fortress
| is the difficulty select.
|
| During world gen, you can set the number of sites, (which
| includes goblin camps and the like), the natural savagery, and
| the number of beasts to very low, and set mineral abundance as
| high as possible
|
| As a beginner, you want the threat to be as low as possible
| (serene or calm), the climate to be warm, NO AQUIFER, and make
| sure that there's iron-bearing ore and coal. In such a
| situation, the worst you need worry about are some of the late
| game !!FUN!! sources, which are only really relevant if you
| delve too greedily and too deep.
| theptip wrote:
| I'm probably not going to play this, because I don't want to sink
| hundreds of hours into it (again). But it's an instant release-
| day Steam buy for me; these guys are legends, and deserve some
| cash and recognition for their original work on DF, and also for
| what looks to be a well-executed graphical overhaul.
|
| "Better UI" was the #1 DF feature for as long as I played it; it
| will be interesting to see how many more players they get in this
| incarnation.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I never made it past reading about Dwarf Fortress. I'd like to
| try it, but I simply do not have the time or patience to learn
| what looked like a very arcane UI and gameplay.
|
| I'm really hoping this graphical update will lower the barrier to
| entry for me.
| depingus wrote:
| Looks like the initial ProtonDB reports from Linux players is
| looking promising!
|
| https://www.protondb.com/app/975370
| mempko wrote:
| I bought it and tried it on my linux box. Proton works
| perfectly from what I can tell. No issues that I have seen yet!
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| Does anyone know why it took so long for this game to get
| graphics?
| throw_me_5555 wrote:
| It had optional graphical tilesets for a decade or so, this
| release is more about overhauling whole GUI. Some stuff was
| just plain annoying like having to manually create bedrooms
| from furniture. Some stuff was fixed by DF-hack project, for
| more sensible experience.
| bombcar wrote:
| The Tarn attempted to make a graphical game (he and his brother
| have always had The Game(tm) in their minds, and have
| approached it various times) and it was a complete wash; Tarn
| didn't know enough about graphics to do that part, and
| considered it as a distraction. That was Slaves to Armok I -
| which is why DF's official title is _Slaves to Armok: God of
| Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress_.
|
| He chose to skip all the graphics entirely, use ASCII to render
| the simulation, and focus on the "story-telling simulation"
| instead.
|
| And though he added support for tile sets and some rendering,
| that's mainly how it worked since. It's taken about 2+ years
| for this Steam release to happen, and that's with a lot of
| support; during those years DF has basically been "stalled" and
| not much new has happened in the simulation. This has to be a
| bit disappointing to Tarn, as that's what he enjoys most.
| trhr wrote:
| It's about time. I've been waiting to give these people my money
| for a decade.
| causality0 wrote:
| I wonder if it's mod-friendly. All the sprites drawn to be
| looking to the lower left while moving right is much more
| distracting than I expected.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's enabled on the workshop but IIRC tileset changes may have
| to come in a bit later.
| causality0 wrote:
| It seems like such a bizarre decision to not draw them facing
| "outward" if they're not going to change appearance based on
| direction of movement.
| bombcar wrote:
| I suspect much of it comes from the original ASCII for a
| dwarf: @
|
| Which kinda looks like it's facing right ... (depending on
| the font)
| INTPenis wrote:
| I waited for it and as soon as it came out I went offline.
|
| I played DF a lot around 09-11. I knew all the commands by heart,
| experienced so many fun situations that it absolutely holds a
| special place in my heart.
|
| Then life happened, I didn't play it for a long time and after
| that trying to get back into it just felt like such a time sink.
| Played rimworld more during this time.
|
| But now it's back and I am not disappointed. I would have payed
| 70 euro for this no problem.
|
| Also I'm so happy Toady and Three are getting some money out of
| all this. At least I hope they are.
| hrnnnnnn wrote:
| They're going to rake it in. I heard it's been the most
| wishlisted game on Steam for a while now.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Oh snap, I had no idea. I assumed it was still kinda sub-
| culture nerdy. I'm so happy.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| My hypothesis is that its market is dwarfed (pun intended)
| by those of big AAA games like God of War and Assassin's
| Creed, but its audience skews toward systems-oriented
| people who are more prone to engage with the wishlist
| process.
|
| I can see how its crowd might be disproportionately
| represented in the wishlist system.
| artemonster wrote:
| Dwarf Fortress is Emacs of games. Would have taken over the world
| by now if it was not made by some strange nerds that have their
| own subjective beauty standards that absolutely no one shares.
| taftster wrote:
| But would it have taken over the world, if not made by some
| strange nerds?? I think Dwarf Fortress would not had been
| successful, in terms of depth/richness of gameplay, had the
| nerds "sold out" too soon.
|
| The beauty of DF is the subjective standards you refer. DF
| would have just been yet-another-world-generated-game.
| incomingpain wrote:
| It's out! $38
| Tomte wrote:
| 30 Euros.
| deelowe wrote:
| It's showing $29.99 for me.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| $16.44 for me in south east asia. I love regional pricing.
| swozey wrote:
| I'm not sure where they're getting the number but 23 minutes
| left according to https://www.twitch.tv/gremlinformayor
| sph wrote:
| Less than an hour, it says on Steam.
| incomingpain wrote:
| Been saying less than an hour for more than an hour for me.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I feel like this[1] should be the theme song of that game. Never
| played it myself, I hear it's epic hard but this song plays in my
| head every time I hear the name.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34CZjsEI1yU
| danso wrote:
| I've put hundreds of hours into Rimworld and tried to get back
| into it recently. The DLC are pretty good and the mod community
| is just superb. But after putting a few hours into any colony,
| what ends up killing the vibe for me is the inevitable
| realization that the game is basically just a random challenge
| generator -- e.g. as your colony becomes prosperous, a bunch of
| seeming arbitrary disasters are thrown your way. I wish there
| were a way to have the game be more like an emergent simulation,
| but maybe it requires the complexity of DF for it to feel right.
| nicopappl wrote:
| I know I shouldn't recommend it because it is extremely
| addictive, but try Oxygen Not Included. To me it is like
| Rimworld, but without the feeling of arbitrary nonsense
| sometimes literally falling on your colonists' head. There is a
| lot of challenges, and all of them are natural consequences of
| the simulation. It's much more "emergent simulation" although
| since the simulation is much more focused on physics than
| humans, it might feel a bit too technical.
| mdaniel wrote:
| My heartburn with ONI is that it seems to fall into that
| category of game that is all about "it's all about the
| journey, and discovery!11" which makes debugging _anything_
| incredibly hard. Why is water not flowing? Who knows, the
| computer won 't help me
|
| Life also doesn't come with an instruction manual nor any
| handy mouse-overs, but in life I can use my existing years of
| experience and non-2D view of the world to deduce what's
| wrong. In a game, I only have access to the information the
| game chooses to share with me
|
| I tried to get a refund, but Steam was all "nope"
| Fradow wrote:
| I feel you, but unless you really want to experience the
| game without any outside resource (in which case, good
| luck, and I understand being turned off), I really
| encourage you to try again while using guides, the wiki,
| and asking questions on forums/discord.
|
| The community is overall very welcoming, and it's an old
| game by now, with most things figured out.
| mdaniel wrote:
| > I really encourage you to try again while using guides,
| the wiki, and asking questions on forums/discord.
|
| Some people talk about hating Shenzen I/O and TIS-100 for
| being "too close to my day job," but for me having to
| troll through wikis, forums, and (heavenforbid) chat
| channels in order to debug a computer problem caused by
| someone not caring about my experience is too close to my
| day job. I got an adrenaline jolt just reading your
| sentence because my experience with those things is so
| incredibly enraging
|
| I just chalk it up to "yet another game that's not for
| me," similar to my prior contact with Dwarf Fortress. I
| had actually considered buying the graphical version if
| it was a "reasonable price" but I'm not paying $25 for
| masochism
| billfruit wrote:
| Oxygen Not Included has also much gaminess to it, like gating
| things behind having to build a Science Workbench Grade 1,
| Science Workbench Grade 2 etc which seem rather arbitrary.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Oxygen Not Included is a ton of fun, the thing that makes me
| abandon my playthroughs is that, after learning so much of
| fake-plumbing, fake-hvac and fake-electrical installation
| mechanics, embarking on ever more ambitious projects that
| demand more planning and player-labor (harnessing that
| natural gas vent!) feels like a bit of a waste of time. It's
| so much of a job that I feel like I could be preparing to be
| an actual HVAC technician in real life with the amount of
| time and effort spent into keeping gases flowing through
| pipes at the right temperature in a simulation.
| theptip wrote:
| I'd agree with this one. On one hand, small tasks like
| wiring up a new volcano tamer can be a good bite-sized
| puzzle for a session. But last run I played I just ran out
| of steam at the prospect of building a petroleum boiler
| again. It's fiddly, error-prone, and to do it optimally you
| really need to prototype in debug mode. Sounds too much
| like a chore!
|
| That said I got many, many hours of fun mastering the
| simulation up to that point, so it's still a strong
| recommend for me.
| pm90 wrote:
| And debugging when something goes wrong can be really
| tedious if you're currently focused on another project.
|
| That's what gets me ultimately. I get a good colony going,
| but end up trying to do something just a little bit
| ambitious, but there's something that starts breaking and
| requires so much effort to fix, after a while I just give
| up.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Power management is a lot of work.
|
| Adding one new station machine can result in you having
| to redesign the whole plan of your power distribution
| network.
|
| Want to make those cool atmo suits? The noob trap is
| refining metal with the crusher and running out of easily
| accessible copper and iron.
|
| The more long-term sustainable way is using the electric
| refinery.
|
| It wasn't the only piece of infrastructure that led to
| it, but in my last base I had to redesign the whole power
| grid to have segregated electric networks of high-voltage
| wire leading to various power regulators that acted as
| substations delivering power to separate lower-voltage
| networks.
|
| It was a cute puzzle but I didn't feel like I
| accomplished something from all that work, damn. I guess
| it's an analogue as to how it works in the real world,
| but I don't know enough about how it works in the real
| world as to tell how simplified and fake the game version
| is, what did I learn really?
|
| And now you have to deal with all the heat dissipation
| from all this, time to learn the mock version of another
| infrastructure-related profession.
| imtringued wrote:
| Do you really think a video game is comparable to a 40 hour
| work week?
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Do you really think that's what I think?
|
| No, I said that ONI crosses a threshold for me where I
| feel like I'm investing too much time into learning a
| simulation of a real-world trade to be worth it, it feels
| a bit hollow after a while that I'm devoting so much time
| to it and not learning the real thing.
|
| I guess that Guitar Hero and Farm Simulator wouldn't be
| games for me either, I feel some guilt of not learning
| the actual thing after a while.
|
| Edit: But to the credit of ONI, that's after ten hours of
| fun, and I go back to it once a year or so. My bases
| won't extend to the hundreds of hours and explore all the
| game mechanics, but I've still gotten a lot of enjoyment
| from the game.
| slothtrop wrote:
| It doesn't need to be to feel like work, when it should
| be fun.
| danso wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion! ONI has been in my backlog --
| absolutely love Klei, the developer -- but haven't found time
| or energy to try it out, but hadn't known it was more
| emergent in style.
| Fradow wrote:
| It definitely is more emergent than most games once you get
| past the early stage.
|
| A few examples to make that clear:
|
| - to get petroleum, you have to refine crude oil. There is
| a building that does that, but you only get 50% of the mass
| out. On the other hand, if you boil it yourself (raise its
| temperature to 402degC), you get 100% of the mass. Cue
| furious designing of an efficient boiler. Then you gotta
| figure how to efficiently burn it to get water out to
| produce more crude oil.
|
| - if you think that's cute, you can instead continue the
| boiling to 510degC and get Sour Gas. Then you freeze it to
| -162degC (not an easy task) and get Methane. Heat it up
| again and you get Natural Gas that you can burn for power.
| That comes out to 6X the power of the previous petroleum
| boiling.
|
| - you have some salt water provided by a geyser (an
| infinite source at a fixed output). You can use a building
| to get water out. But that means Dupes have to operate it.
| What if instead you boil that salt water to get steam, then
| cool that steam back to get water in a fully automated
| setup? Turns out it can be more power-efficient too!
|
| Oxygen Not Included is filled with unexpected behaviors,
| way more than meet the eye (there is a dedicated wiki page,
| which is lengthy but still far from complete) that enables
| to make all sort of crazy contraptions.
|
| I prefer to consider Oxygen Not Included as 2 separate
| games : the survival game you get at the beginning, and the
| engineering game you get once you overcome the survival
| issues. Unfortunately, many people drop off before reaching
| the engineering stage, or don't expect it and drop off
| because they only wanted the survival part.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I have only ever played casually, but have dozens of
| hours into ONI. The thing that kills my enjoyment is how
| long it can take to get some tasks completed. Like I have
| a goal to get a natural gas generator going. Except, I
| only have one smurf who can drill through the ultra hard
| rock, and he is busy on the other side of the map. Then
| it turns out we are short on igneous, so I'm stuck
| waiting for a fetcher to deliver some, so on and so
| forth. Maybe at the end game you can automate more tasks
| and free up more workers (instead of losing so many to
| maintenance activities like food production), but getting
| there is a slog. Coupled with how big the map can be, it
| feels like you lose a huge amount of time just getting
| the right guys into position.
| NeveHanter wrote:
| There are mods that make map smaller, make dupes move
| faster or add tiles that allow them to move faster. You
| can also train the dupes' athletics skill by forcing them
| to use the manual generators.
|
| The Spaced Out DLC also has smaller asteroids, it changed
| the game so it now requires more "inter-planetary"
| automation. I highly recommend trying the game with the
| DLC, but I'm not sure if Steam allows refunds for DLCs.
| avtolik wrote:
| I agree with everything you said. Except the DLCs - while they
| add content, they feel like somebody is copying from a Game
| Design book. Here is a cool new thing, but we will make it
| miserable and hard to use in these ways. Have fun. Also in
| general Rimworld is pretty linear somehow. I play a few
| colonies, I get bored, then take a break for half an year. And
| repeat.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| This, to me, is why Factorio is so incredible.
|
| It's blananced to a point it always feels incredibly fair, and
| there are sliders and fine-tuned adjustments you can do if you
| wan to make it "just a little more chaotic", or "a slower
| start", etc.
|
| It's brilliant.
| coletonodonnell wrote:
| Although not exactly like Dwarf Fortress, I've been playing Songs
| of Syx[1] recently and it's incredibly good. It is made by a
| single developer and it is super fun. It's more of an Empire
| building game, and it checks a lot of the boxes I want out of
| these sorts of games. I can see it becoming even more impressive
| and as time goes on. Demo is unlimited and free, it's just 3-6
| months behind the paid version with features, so if you like it
| definitely support the dev.
|
| [1] https://songsofsyx.com/
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Yesss! I haven't learned how to play the game nearly as much as
| I want but it's so unique in it's scope.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| Still remember my last game from years ago. Concentric moats of
| lava with long drawbridges that raised to the outer side rather
| than inner. Goblin invasion. Waited till all of them were on the
| draw bridges. Raised the drawbridges and laughed as the goblins
| were catapulted away from my fortress, either into the lava or
| completely out of the local map.
| arglebargle123 wrote:
| Speaking of RimWorld - is the engine extensible enough to
| implement the dwarf fortress ruleset? That's the graphical
| upgrade I really want.
| deliriumchn wrote:
| to some extent, but it will be a very small extent lol
|
| DF is too complex in terms of world simulation (dwarfes have
| actual organs/limbs etc, liquids have different behavior)
| throw_me_5555 wrote:
| Limbs/organs are bad example since that is actually
| implemented in vanilla RimWorld, including organ _trading_.
| db48x wrote:
| It's an odd comparison: both DF and RimWorld are more
| complex than each other here :)
|
| RimWorld simulates organs in a more complete way than Dwarf
| Fortress does, and lets you surgically remove and replace
| those organs. That's pretty cool, and a lot fun. Each part
| has hit points, and each can be lost in combat. A character
| without body parts suffers from infirmities or death,
| depending on how critical the part is. A character who is
| missing a leg can still function, but moves around more
| slowly. RimWorld tracks similar information about the body
| parts of animals and robots, which makes combat against
| them a lot of fun. Herbivores run away from pain, and
| robots still have organs like cameras and chemical reactors
| that can be destroyed to incapacitate them.
|
| Dwarf Fortress simulates body parts in a more complete way
| than RimWorld does. Each body part (limb, torso, head,
| etc), has hair, skin, fat, muscle, and bone layers each
| with their own properties. These parts also have sensory
| and motor nerves as well as blood vessels. DF keeps track
| of the color of the skin and hair, the depth of the fat and
| muscle (and those are related to the Dwarf's stats), and
| what type of damage each layer has taken (bruises, cuts,
| tears, etc). Damage to some layers can heal naturally, be
| surgically treated, get infected, leave a scar, etc.
| Others, like nerves, often won't heal. This sometimes
| leaves characters unable to use body parts that they
| haven't completely lost. It keeps track of some organs,
| such as the brain and the gonads, but not others like
| stomachs, hearts, lungs, etc. Surgical options are much
| more limited, as befits the setting. You can clean a wound
| (with or without soap), set bones, suture cuts and tears,
| and use casts or traction tables to immobilize broken
| limbs. A character who is missing a leg cannot walk
| normally, but the game will try its hardest to allow them
| some mobility using other parts, or you can give them
| crutches. Like RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress tracks the overall
| body plan for all species in the game (thousands upon
| thousands of them), as well as the unique information about
| each individual. Dwarf Fortress gains many of the same
| combat and storytelling benefits as RimWorld from its in-
| depth simulation.
|
| Dwarf Fortress goes a step beyond RimWorld though, when it
| comes to Forgotten Beasts and the Undead.
|
| Forgotten Beasts are horrific monsters left over from the
| chaotic creation of the world. They have _randomized_ body
| plans. Sometimes they will be a combination of two or more
| creatures, like a giant feathered iguana with bat wings and
| a fiery breath. Other times they will be a standard body
| plan (such as a colossal troll) made from an unusual
| substance (such as quartz, or fire, or iron). And it knows
| the material properties of quartz and fire and iron, and it
| can simulate how your weapons will do against them!
|
| The Undead are a similar kind of fun. These are ordinary
| creatures (such as your own fallen dwarves) who have been
| reanimated by arcane forces. The Undead of course do not
| feel pain, do not need blood or intact nerves to use their
| body parts, and ignore all damage. And remember how a
| crippled character will still try to crawl if they are
| missing a leg? You don't know fear until your dwarves are
| being chased by an undead skull that is pushing itself
| along by its eyebrows, biting anything that comes near.
| Your old nightmares will fade into irrelevance once one of
| your dwarves butchers a cow and the bloody skin and hair
| are reanimated to terrorize the innocent.
| plopz wrote:
| Also rimworld is 2d and df is 3d
| sph wrote:
| Oh man, I can't wait. I got burned out with RimWorld recently
| (it's cool but it's not fun for me; I have been following and
| supporting the project since Early Access) and I've waited for
| accessible Dwarf Fortress for ages.
|
| I enjoy ASCII games (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead [1] is
| surprisingly easy to get into in ASCII mode), but the obtuse UI
| of Dwarf Fortress was a little too much effort to learn. I hope
| the Adams brothers get some well-earned financial stability with
| this incredible endeavour. They are some old-school software
| craftsmen, devoted to the art of excellent game design for the
| sake of it, money be damned.
|
| And I can't wait for the next Kruggsmash [2] series, now with
| actual, beautiful sprites to pair with his beautiful drawings.
|
| EDIT: Kruggsmash is currently streaming his first look at this
| new version! https://youtu.be/sByxI7UX5-g
|
| --
|
| 1: https://cataclysmdda.org/
|
| 2: https://youtube.com/@kruggsmash
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I wonder if CaptnDuck will stream something. I remember both
| enjoying his tutorial videos back in the day, as well as being
| utterly convinced them that I need not ever bother with
| actually trying to play Dwarf Fortress myself
|
| https://www.youtube.com/user/captnduck
| inetknght wrote:
| > _I got burned out with RimWorld recently_
|
| Yeah. I like RimWorld but it constantly throws ridiculously
| powered raids against my startup village no matter what
| difficulty settings I use. It's a story generator... but the
| stories aren't really that varied in my opinion.
| copx wrote:
| RimWorld raids are actually ridiculously easy to defeat.
|
| The problem is that there are two ways to play RimWorld which
| will lead to very different results there.
|
| A.) You do what "makes sense" to a normal human being dealing
| with a real situation.
|
| B.) You know the algorithms and minmax.
|
| If do A.) the game can be incredibly frustrating as you watch
| the colony you spent hours carefully building go down in
| flames despite the fact that you seemingly did nothing wrong.
|
| In contrast, if you do B.) the game becomes so dead easy that
| you can't even impress other players anymore by starting
| alone, naked, as a tribal, on an ice sheet - with one leg!
|
| Have you ever wondered why RimWorld likes to throw that
| "Imperial Deserter" quest at you right at the beginning of
| the game?
|
| A.) people will think "This is silly, how could I possibly
| defeat an Imperial raid right at the start?"
|
| Meanwhile B.) people are like "Sure, no problem. I can build
| a wodden trap corridor on day 1 which will kill the entire
| raid before they can even _see_ a single of my pawns. "
|
| Also note that RimWorld raids are scaled according to colony
| wealth and number of pawns in the colony. Thus if you are an
| A.) player you are probably accidentally signing your own
| death sentence by e.g building fancy bed rooms for your
| pawns. Or givign your craftspeople chairs to sit on while
| they work..
|
| I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make it a
| less frutstating experience for A.) players. Cheesey tactics
| like kill boxes which exploit the stupidity of the AI, and
| seemingly non-sensical decisions like not letting your
| colonists have chairs, should only be required at the highest
| difficulty level IMO.
| debacle wrote:
| Completely agree with everything said here. Because of the
| way Rimworld is balanced, there is really only one way to
| properly "play" the game.
| hinkley wrote:
| > starting alone, naked, as a tribal, on an ice sheet -
| with one leg!
|
| Francis John on Youtube basically did this recently. He
| talks a good bit about the math of the game, and he
| minmaxes his minmaxing. You could just spend all your time
| cheesing the game, or you can cheese it when it doesn't
| really affect whatever narrative you are trying for in your
| playthrough. There are materials in your environment that
| ding you even if you don't gather or process them. There
| are materials that ding you less once processed. Knowing
| what's what mean you don't mine a mineral formation until
| you need the material.
|
| If his camp wasn't constantly attacked by giant furry
| creatures he would have probably been toast. The RNG kept
| throwing him meat and cold weather clothing materials. He
| had to kite them but then real hunters of megafauna kind of
| do the same thing. He fed his animals meat that the humans
| would not eat (namely, the flesh of dead raiders).
|
| Anyway, I think if you want to understand Rimworld
| 'physics' more, that series is probably a decent starting
| place. But he also makes no bones about how frequently the
| game is one or two clicks away from war crimes.
|
| I've mostly just gone back to Oxygen Not Included and make
| do without narrative and variation that I kind of wish were
| there.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| Francis John is _very_ entertaining! He sets up engaging
| challenges and then plays them with energy and joy.
|
| I'm not surprised he's done so well with the minmaxing,
| he mentioned in one video his day job is a network
| engineer :)
| ed312 wrote:
| You just articulated why I kept getting really obsessed
| with, then extremely pissed off at Rimworld. It also didn't
| make much sense to my why you could build all this advanced
| future tech in-game but then needed to tame alpacas to
| leave your settlement...
| Arrath wrote:
| > I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make
| it a less frutstating experience for A.) players.
|
| It can! As the player you can fine tune just about every
| aspect of the storyteller you might want. You can disable
| events you may not like, like toxic fallout or sunspots.
| You can tweak raid sizes, disable certain types of raids,
| change the impact curves that time and/or wealth have on
| raid sizes, etc.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make
| it a less frutstating experience for A.) players.
|
| Yep. The problem is some people want to play like A but the
| game seems balanced around people playing like B.
|
| Dwarf fortress lets you opt into a lot of this madness with
| their biomes. You still survive in a friendly biome if
| you're playing like A.
|
| And no, hand tuning every aspect of the game isn't a good
| option. By that point you've lost most of your players.
| There should be an easy default option.
| vkou wrote:
| Rimworld difficulty modes function exactly like you
| described. Raids scale 1:12, based on which of the
| default difficulty settings you pick, and can be disabled
| outright.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Biomes are key to mediating DF difficulty. The B players
| can go find haunted biomes, on which shorn animals' wool
| comes to life and tries to kill you.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _RimWorld raids are actually ridiculously easy to
| defeat._
|
| Yeah tell that to my 5 pawns with bows or _maybe_ pistols
| looted from a previous raid when they 're attacked by 50
| raiders or a mech drop or whatever...
|
| > _Meanwhile B.) people are like "Sure, no problem. I can
| build a wodden trap corridor on day 1 which will kill the
| entire raid before they can even see a single of my
| pawns."_
|
| Been there, done that. Then my pawns hit their own damn
| traps and get raided while they're in the hospital minus a
| leg
|
| > _Also note that RimWorld raids are scaled according to
| colony wealth and number of pawns in the colony. Thus if
| you are an A.) player you are probably accidentally signing
| your own death sentence by e.g building fancy bed rooms for
| your pawns. Or givign your craftspeople chairs to sit on
| while they work.._
|
| Yup, exactly.
|
| > _I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make
| it a less frutstating experience for A.) players._
|
| Yes.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, did you install any mods? In general the 'easy'
| playthru's I've done have not been like that at all.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| My pawns never set off a own trap and I started dev
| mode(cheating) to have some sort of challenge with fine
| tunes big raids.
|
| (Rivers with mountains are good to defend)
| teawrecks wrote:
| Sounds like you got lucky. Every time a unit passes over
| their own trap, there's a chance of it misfiring on them.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yeah, but in my unmodded version(s) they never walk over
| them. They avoid them.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Exactly! Route B turns into a tower-defense game, and for
| that reason I try to play by A for more enjoyment.
|
| The raids compensate for their dumb AI with sheer size. A
| smarter AI could be more challenging but use fewer soldier.
| And maybe the AI could adapt its tactics...like once they
| learn there is a big wall outside your fortress, then maybe
| they should park themselves outside and call sappers for
| support or air droppers to arrive first. Maybe the game
| could introduce _cannons_ to counter wall building. And to
| prevent cave dwelling, maybe there could be some crucial
| supplies that spoil such that it is essential to have some
| trade, and so enemy armies instead of doing a dumb assault
| could instead do proper siege warfare to conquer you by
| depriving you of crucial supplies until you die of
| starvation, thrist, disease, like was done for most of
| human warfare history.
| morsch wrote:
| I've had raids employ artillery and air drops against my
| walled compounds. Not sure if it's the computer adapting
| to my build, it's possible that it's just a late (or mid)
| game raid variation.
| philipov wrote:
| The computer isn't adapting to your build, the designer
| of the game is. The game just has a list of events it
| randomly picks from (and if you save scum, you can see
| that because it'll give you a different event). But the
| random events have been updated over time as Tynan tries
| to come up with countermeasures to the tactics players
| have developed.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _I 've had raids employ artillery and air drops against
| my walled compounds._
|
| Not only that, but the only defense against artillery is
| to build in a mountain. There isn't otherwise a defense
| against artillery except to go kill the artillery before
| it starts pounding you. And good luck doing _that_ when
| you 're outnumbered ten to one...
| Arrath wrote:
| Mods!
|
| You can have mods that warn you of incoming raids. Mods
| that add point defense laser turrets, suck it enemy
| artillery! Mods that add magic, so you can send your fire
| mage out to huck a fireball the enemy siege outpost and
| cook off their ammo, or call down a firestorm and watch
| the chaos. Mods that make tamed animals rideable so you
| can root out their artillerymen with a cavalry charge.
| Mods that add drop ships and bombing runs so you can
| counterbattery them before they even get set up, and so
| on and so forth.
| philipov wrote:
| If you build inside a mountain, however, then the bug
| infestations can target you, and they're even worse. It
| just seems that the only story the game is good at
| generating is the one where you die, and that gets
| boring. There isn't any clever emergent behavior
| happening there.
| ender341341 wrote:
| Artillery is the defense against artillery. By endgame I
| usually have at least 10 mortars and it's are for them to
| get 1 built before I've wiped out enough stuff that they
| just launch an attack instead of using artillery.
| sliken wrote:
| Follow the Ukraine model, when out numbered 10-1 attack
| supply lines and attack artillery with drones or HMMRS.
| realLatinx wrote:
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Just shoot them with artillery before they shoot you with
| artillery.
|
| The best defense is a good offense.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| >And to prevent cave dwelling
|
| There's... there's something already implemented to
| prevent cave dwelling. Some _things_ , actually. Just
| keep living in the cave, you'll meet them eventually.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Which are even easier to deal with. Even if you ignore
| baiting them to spawn in a single room which you can just
| set on fire you just need 3 well armoured melee pawns
| stacked up on a door maybe a couple more if you need to
| rotate tired pawns out.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| > seemingly non-sensical decisions like not letting your
| colonists have chairs
|
| Chairs for workers?? Everyone who's familiar with Russia's
| history knows that automatic cannons should go first (and
| they did a rather good job in my case). It is non-sensical
| to let workers have chairs unless they refuse to work
| without them. Or until all your neighbors are reduced to
| the status of Canada and Mexico.
| qudat wrote:
| I enjoy rimworld and I'm learning quite a lot here, thanks
| danuker wrote:
| You have too much wealth vs. defenses.
|
| Good and cheap defenses are intermittent walls (which have
| 75% cover).
| moffkalast wrote:
| AI Story director: "And then everyone died. I SAID EVERYONE
| DIED, THE END"
| mcv wrote:
| It's a GRR Martin story generator?
| agolio wrote:
| Some people will disagree with me, but you might enjoy the
| "save and load when you lose a fight" play-style.
|
| I played RimWorld that way and I had a thoroughly fun
| experience learning the tech-tree. It's arguably not the way
| the game is meant to be played, but for the casual player, it
| works
| inetknght wrote:
| > _you might enjoy the "save and load when you lose a
| fight" play-style._
|
| I've done that. But it gets repetitive when every fight has
| three or four or ten red pawns for every one of mine.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If you respond the same way to raids every time, it will not
| feel very dynamic. However, there are a _lot_ of defensive
| tools you unlock in the mid-to-late game that really spice up
| your combat. If you want things to feel fresh, try building a
| base around a few mortar launchers or build things out of
| stone and give everyone flamethrowers. The possibilities are
| fairly limitless.
| tribaal wrote:
| That's it, I just got a mail from Steam, it's been released
| right now!
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| TAKE MY MONEY FASTER PLEASE
| poisonarena wrote:
| ^ this is what reddit pollution looks like
| eslaught wrote:
| I don't know if you're serious, but they've been taking
| donations for (literal) decades at this point:
|
| https://www.bay12games.com/support.html
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Oh they've gotten my money that way too.
| bombcar wrote:
| Be sure to add the soundtrack so they can take more ;)
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I bought the soundtrack for all my family members. I'm
| sure they'll love it.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| CDDA is unbelievably fun and has good graphic tiles sets
| available. The crafting is incredibly deep, and the whole game
| lends itself very well to exploration and creating your own
| story.
| rdl wrote:
| My favorite Roguelike is ADOM -- similarly had problems getting
| into the DF UI, and kind of burned out on Rimworld (can only
| make so many hats...). I wish they'd waited until I finished
| end of year accounting and stuff before releasing this highly
| addictive game in a new, cracklike format, but enh, I can just
| not sleep.
| xcubic wrote:
| This seems to be for windows only. Can it be run on mac?
| bombcar wrote:
| Supposedly Mac and Linux will be coming later.
|
| The "original" DF of course supports both.
| mempko wrote:
| It works flawlessly for me on linux using proton. Just select
| properties on the game and force compatibility to have it use
| proton.
| coldpie wrote:
| No Proton on Mac :) I would guess it works well in CrossOver
| for Mac, but I haven't tried it.
| thegeekpirate wrote:
| I've been sitting in the main menu for roughly an hour now just
| listening to the phenomenal music!
| LunaSea wrote:
| Does anyone know of a book or other long form resource about how
| world generation works in Dwarf Fortress or procedural generation
| in general?
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