I never thought the ASCII graphics were a big problem in Dwarf Fortress; once you get used to it using a bunch of symbols as decoration, almost all the weird stuff ends up being things you placed yourself. On the other hand, the complete lack of UX consistency - whether a given submenu will use primary/secondary cursor keys, nested menus, or a pile of hotkeys - is a lot harder to deal with.
In addition to DF I also play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a venerable (and actively developed!) roguelike with the classic ASCII look, and I'd like to present a counterpoint: once it became possible to play DCSS online using the graphical tiles interface rather than the ASCII look, new players overwhelmingly prefer the graphical. Stats that I have seen indicate >95% choose the graphical tiles.
I myself still play both DCSS and DF in ASCII mode, but it seem reasonable to presume that the reason that old hands like us are fine with the ASCII look is because everyone who wasn't fine with it has self-selected themselves out of the sample. If their goal with the DF Steam release is to bring in new players (and compete with the likes of e.g. Rimworld, whose players are accustomed to graphics), then I see this as a sound decision.
(And of course, seconded that DF's nonsensical command UI is going to continue to stymie their efforts here.)
Similarly, Cogmind's success is partially because it learned all the hard-won lessons on good game UI of the last decades, plus the importance of a fancy tile-set:
I think there's a big diference - in DCSS, it's extremely important to know whether that 'g' you're looking at just some random gnoll, or crazy Yiuf. In dwarf fotress, it's pretty rare that it really matters. The ascii graphics are also a bit nicer - especially when it comes to stuff like drawing walls.
I play DCSS in tiles mode and DF in ASCII mode. It's not that I think graphics are a bad usability feature, I just think they're over-emphasized because they're the first thing people see.
Adding graphics to DF means more new players give it a try, but most of them are going to bounce off of the wildly inconsistent menus. It's an acquisition funnel thing; the total players will be incoming players times the percent that are okay with the graphics times the percent that are okay with the menus. My assertion is just that in DF's case the menus have room for a bigger lift, because they're really that bad.
Maybe because they're not used to ASCII look? What are the stats for old players? The tiles version has laughably low information density, I can't imagine playing it for any extended period of time.
Well, the stats for old players are subject to survivor bias.
> The tiles version has laughably low information density, I can't imagine playing it for any extended period of time.
I cannot speak for DF specifically, because perhaps the tiles do indeed have bad distinguishability, but from purely an HCI point of view images can contain a lot more visual information than a single character glyph + a color can, so that does not hold up generally.
What may apply to you is that you have already learned to "read" the ASCII mode, and therefore have to spend less conscious effort to make sense of it than of the tiles version, and that it therefore is indeed easier for you to play in.
>images can contain a lot more visual information than a single character glyph + a color can
In any tiled implementation of roguelike, Tiles are way larger than equivalent characters, so clearly in practice they don't.
Humans are very good at recognizing different letters. Images that differ by a few pixels, not so much. At the resolution at which the letters are displayed it's impossible to have an equivalent image that is recognizable in any way.
The fact is that in ascii mode I can see a large chunk of the level, including the entirety of my character's field of view. In tiles version, my screen is not large enough. I have to scroll just to see what my character is currently seeing. How is this better, or playable at all?
I've not liked nethack for over 20 years because of the ASCII look.
I'd say I played a lot of Pixel Dungeon on my phone compared to this.
Not everyone who grew up with DOS games has fond memories. I'm not one to chase the latest 3d graphics, but sometimes new things can be better for some people.
Anecdata, but even for Rouge in the early-mid 80s I had a version of Rogue on our Mac. It had graphical glyphs for everything. I loved that much more than the classic ASCII graphics when I'd dial into my Dad's work computer & play that way
I completely disagree. The ASCII "graphics" (if you can really call them that) are a huge reason why I've never even considered playing it. I've read all about the mechanics, and they're interesting. I just don't understand why anyone would spend so much time developing so many intricate features when the presentation is so poor.
I don't fault you, but let's be charitable to Tarn here: the austere style is deliberately because he didn't want to spend any more time than necessary on the graphics, when what interested him most is the systems and the simulations (remember that DF has been a solo passion project for well over a decade now). His experience making the precursor to Dwarf Fortress (which is technically the second game in the series) is what led him to this conclusion, so it is not borne out of ignorance.
As far as I know, the 3d graphics in the first slaves to armok was a big reason why Tarn switched to focussing on dwarf fortress as it was. I vaguely recall reading sometime that it was too much work for just the two of them and they weren't really making great progress and preferred to focus on working on the simulation and game systems without needing to worry about a graphics engine. Even the switch to sdl was done with help from the community if I remember right.
The thing is, it's really not. Granted, I always used the Lazy Newbie Pack which gave you basic tiles, but once you get used to ASCII, things tend to be a lot easier. Also, this is a detailed simulation, so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics.
Remember, each creature has a bunch of parts with individual health, each tile can get stained by various materials (that can spread disease) and everything is made of various materials with all sorts of mostly-realistic properties. I mean, DF is the sole reason you can find the solid density of Saguaro rib wood on the internet and the value came from an empirical test of a small cube of Saguaro rib wood. It's in the DF raws.
So yeah, you might enjoy DF with a tile set like the LNP if you like the mechanics. But it's a super-complicated game so it takes a while to learn to control things, to learn the requirements to make various items, etc. It's not a game for everyone, you do have to sink quite a lot of time into learning it to enjoy it.
"this is a detailed simulation, so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics"
Consider Battlefield or COD Warzone, which simulate the effects of actions by multiple players (including projectile travel) in real time and still manage upwards of 100FPS of near photorealistic graphics.
Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.
Dwarf fortress is a very interesting game and a very deep simulation, but the idea that it's such a detailed simulation that graphics would not be possible is just untrue.
Honestly the UX in dwarf fortress is generally just insanely user-hostile and graphics are only a tiny symptom of that. And I say this as someone who plays and enjoys the game - I've had forts with upwards of 100 idiots^Wdwarfs in them, magma moats, breaching multiple cavern layers, surviving necromancer seiges etc. But every time I play I have to go through that thing over again where I try to figure out how to assign a pet to a person, when I set up a military squad getting them to wear the right equipment is a total chore, minecart UX is completely baffling. Also the simulation is very detailed but kind of broken in lots of annoying ways, like female dwarfs randomly dropping their babies while working, forgetting where they put them and then freaking out, random tantrum spirals because someone went out in the rain and so just decides to murder their colleagues etc.
>Consider Battlefield or COD Warzone, which simulate the effects of actions by multiple players (including projectile travel) in real time and still manage upwards of 100FPS of near photorealistic graphics.
>Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.
Compared to DF, both of those are an incredibly simple simulation that doesn't lend itself to emergent game play. If you're trying to make the argument that they're just as complicated and still have fancy graphics, that's not the case. DF is far, far, beyond anything in those "simulations" in terms of the back end.
I lament the lack of graphics in DF not because the UI is awful... I've played worse, and in fact Fallout 4's builder interface comes to mind... but because it's incomplete. Certain things that have shown up in third party utilities like Dwarf Therapist are nearly impossible to do without, making the base game more or less unplayable after a release until the third party stuff catches up.
A lot of what you mention regarding tantrum spirals has been fixed in the new release... the issues with dwarf emotions are much more balanced now. It's still the same game, though, so I haven't gotten decades into a fort yet, but I'm hopeful it'll be worth playing beyond the point it was in the past where things spiraled into angsty dwarf death.
>Certain things that have shown up in third party utilities like Dwarf Therapist are nearly impossible to do without, making the base game more or less unplayable after a release until the third party stuff catches up.
I called this Kerbal or Skyrim Syndrome amongs friends.
Games that are no longer playable vanilla after you've had the luxuries of some of the simple convenience addons.
"so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics."
Thats why most have a GPU and that is why there are graphic engines, who do the rendering only of what is needed and produced by the simulation. So no, unless DF uses the gpu for simulating which I doubt, better graphics will not really affect simulation speed, if done right.
DF employs OpenGL for rendering, see file df_linux/g_src/renderer_opengl.hpp, so the GPU will be used if appropriate drivers are installed. "Text" tiles and graphics tiles are equally fast – they are always bitmaps under the hood, see df_linux/data/art/*.png.
There is also an ncurses renderer with plain Unicode text output for use in a terminal emulator which may be GPU accelerated, but most term software is not.
It may be trivial to you, but it is abundantly clear by circumstantial evidence that ToadyOne is not a good programmer. This is beyond his means, otherwise it would have already been added.
This was not written by the game's author, ToadyOne, but someone else. ToadyOne complains that he cannot understand the code anymore. For this reason, he will not open the source code again until he is dead.
I can get the same thing with Rimworld. The dude devs the thing for free and he can do what he wants. But I'm not going to pick troll husbandry or dwarven venereal disease over a usable user interface when it comes to what I spend time gaming on.
> I just don't understand why anyone would spend so much time developing so many intricate features when the presentation is so poor.
Why do you think they had time to develop those features in the first place?
I'm itching to know how they are going to come up with graphical representations for all the randomly generated forgotten beasts. A character is abstract, but when you have a drawing, it conveys more meaning. I wouldn't be happy with a dragon picture or similar, while the forgotten beast was a corrosive gaseous entity.
The presentation may be a bit busy at times (if you embark on a forest, for instance), but it is otherwise fine.
To me this is like saying you don't like books because they're black and white. With ASCII I've some textual description of what an object looks like (say, dwarf), but most of it is filled in by my imagination, and it does a much better job than any artist, and it's more dynamic, adapting to my mood and what I'm experiecing. Talk about high-tech. A tileset puts a great constraint on that. If there's a choice between ASCII and tiles, I'll always choose ASCII.
In a book, I don't have to make the words do anything. Also, I've spent my whole life learning English vocabulary.
I could spend some more time learning the DF glyphs, but a picture is worth a thousand words.
I killed the Balrog in uMoria* back in the day, so I'm not a stranger to ASCII graphics. The difference between rogue-likes and DF is the extremely huge variability in the glyphs.
Edit: To continue the comparison to books, Dwarf Fortress is like an interactive textbook, Roguelikes compare to genre fiction.
*I'm a dirty save-scummer, but I still put in a bunch of time.
I also found the presentation distracting and the mechanics interesting, and I am quite accustomed to games that are text only. Simultaneously decoding glyphs and figuring out mechanics felt like more effort than it was worth.
While I cannot speak for the developer, I can understand why they would go that route. Unless you have an interest in computer graphics, implementing them can be dreadfully dull. Unless you have an eye for design, creating the various graphical elements can lead to some interesting results.
I would normally agree,
But hard to understand visuals (not intuitive) might discourage new players from trying the game. Those that do try the game will have a large cognitive load just to understand what is going on, and therefore will be unable to focus as much on the gameplay (that df is know for). So potential players and new players would be most affected.
Can confirm this assertion. I spent years building pretty games, but often our games are trounced by a rival with by with crappier graphics and better gameplay.
> I just don't understand why anyone would spend so much time developing so many intricate features when the presentation is so poor.
I think this is a general feature of software that is very 'techy' for a lack of a better term. Dwarf Fortress is a pretty niche, hardcore game and people who build this sort of stuff don't always have the best sense of what a UX design ought to look like that appeals to the general user. A lot of Linux desktop software is like that too.
Some people play games for the gameplay, and the ASCII graphics allow them to project their imagination and obtain any fantasy world they want.
The rest of the people play Call of Duty and FIFA, and would be hard-pressed to ever leave their comfort zone.
Completely agree. ASCII graphics were completely fine, if not desirable. I loved playing DF but I also hated it at the same time because of the inconsistent UI. wasd vs. ijkl vs +- vs arrows vs ... almost nothing made sense to me until reading the manual. Granted, the game is fun enough that I always read the manual, but a good UI is intuitive UI. I hope this new effort fixes more than just graphics. I can't care less about ASCII vs pixel graphics, but UX needed to be improved imho.
I agree that the graphics (with mods) were acceptable but the inconsistent UI made it more difficult than it needed to be. Some of the AI could use some tweaks as well. It definitely is a fun game (dropping lava on an orc/troll army and watching them run was awesome)
Never really advanced that much in the game to fight orcs. I just set up some good looking magma smelters, smelted whole bunch of jewels and sold them to caravan and elves and stuff. This was many years ago, I remember having a lot of fun, but also how excruciatingly tedious everything was. I remember setting dwarf tasks (allow/disallow) required a lot of micromanaging and DwarfTherapist didn't work well in linux. Regardless, amazing game, I hope devs solve the UX issue. I'd probably buy the game the day it's released.
Perhaps you put your fortress down in a place with no enemies... most games I would have to immediately setup a system to keep enemies out or they'd massacre everyone pretty quickly! Once I had a dragon come and lay waste to everything, burning down all of the trees outside and setting fire to all the hapless dwarves.
No, I would normally disable invasion. When I enabled invasion, I'd just lock my dwarfs in my fortress and not leave the fortress for a season and eventually goblins abandon the invasion. I just never figured out how to prepare an army and attack, so figured, I'd much rather focus on things like farming, smelting, jewelry etc.
You can just put down stone traps and it will kill 85% of invasions. The rest you can create a drawbridge or something and pull it up if you see an enemy you can't deal with. Closing yourself off also means you can't trade, generally, so it's good to leave your fortress semi-open.
The problem with traps that kill, when I've used them, is the cleanup aftermath where your dwarves will go crazy from having to cleanup the remains and reset the traps!
Yeah that's the issue for me. I don't mind interpreting ASCII characters, but the UI/menu navigation feels intimidating. Rimworld will (I assume) never be the type of indepth simulation that DF is, but it spoiled me with its point-and-click GUI
I don't know if a point and click GUI precludes the depth of DF. If anything some things should be much easier to do with point and click. Factorio combines keyboard with point and click navigation and it has some depth to it.
I agree! I hope that's something the developers (eventually) builds out, as (hopefully) the Steam release brings in much deserved and new revenue.
Tangentially, I remember the MoMA devoting a large chunk of a wall in its video game exhibit to the Dwarf Fortress ASCII display. The graphical tiles look great but the sheer density of ASCII definitely had retro appeal.
I think good mouse support wouldn't remove the ability to navigate menus using keystrokes - but for tasks like drawing out farms, the dig squares for a residential block or dragging and dropping workshops into the right place... that's where I think it'll shine.
I don't dislike the keyboard approach used right now but DF hack and it's digging templates has clearly demonstrated that folks feel the lack of good dig designation sorely.
It's a lot like languages that refuse to change syntax (Erlang vs Elixir, both still not that great on syntax) because it's a luddite adherence to cultural experience or thinking.
It shows a disregard for users and a self-imposed barrier to adoption. DF is horrid for usability. Just because I can screenshot notepad, print it out, and send mail on a turtle, does suffice to say I support an e-mail feature. Military squad mechanics are as byzantine as you can get.
The 3D package "Blender" bit the bullet and revamped their entire UI over the course of many years/releases to (1) bring it in line with other applications (ctrl-c, ctrl-v should work everywhere) and (2) make more options visible in the UI, so that they were discoverable. It's been wildly successful.
I hope Dwarf Fortress will have a similar refit over time.
I personally agree. A lot of those disagreeing with you find the ASCII graphics to be a barrier to initial entry, which is true, but it is a barrier that you can overcome quickly and feel quite comfortable with. On the other hand, having spent many hours with the game, the UX issues you mention are what block me from building fluid muscle memory and being able to really get into the game.
There are other issues that are much more important. Like the jobs interface. I don't want to have to run Dwarf Therapist alongside it, when games like Rimworld and ONI manage just fine.
I've been playing for some time using dfhack's "autolabor" feature, and it streamlines things immensely.
Granted, it ends up essentially just turning on every profession for every dwarf, but it's still possible to restrict workshops to certain dwarves. For example, you might have a carpentry workshop set to produce endless amounts of wooden shields, but only allow skilled carpenters access to it.
Yeah Rimworld does pretty well. I wish it had Z-levels, so I could, like, master the technology of "the basement", but in terms of user interface it's pretty good. There are some mods that improve on vanilla's interface, but the default UX is still solid.
Fair enough-- for me a lot of the joy of the game is in using it as a collaborative story teller and filling in the gaps it gives me. Having underspecified graphics gives me more freedom with my mind's eye, but I can understand that not everyone approaches it the same way and wouldn't get the same out of it even with a lot of effort.
Came here to say the same thing. I know that ASCII is repuslive to a lot of people, but personally the UX inconsistency is kill the game for me. Every single thing in the game seem designed with a completely different UX idea, to the point it's almost impossible to build muscle memory.
My only problem with the default ASCII is the tile size. The 8x16 is just not that great for a game with as much information on the screen as dwarf fortress. My favourite are 16x16 mostly ASCII symbols. I think it's the guybrush tiles from the dwarf fortress wiki.
I've never liked any of the full graphical tilesets. I find it a lot harder to keep track of everything on the screen, even when I figure out what the different tiles are supposed to be. The black background with clear discernible symbols of the ASCII and mostly ASCII tiles make it a lot easier to get information from a screen at a quick glance while you're scrolling around the map.
That being said, I do like firing up stonesense and taking a look at the fortress from that perspective just because it's awesome and I still hope for the day some enterprising miracle worker creates a real time 3d renderer for dwarf fortress.
I'm torn here. I really agree with you about UI consistency as a priority but the restriction to typically a few dozen symbols in such software is ultimately too much and I think just adding graphics is the practical way forward.
The graphics serve the game, that's critical. If there was a choice between a fantastically complicated ASCII-only Dwarf Fortress and a graphical version with half the features, that's a clear win for ASCII DF. But here the only downside to graphics is that they're very slightly more effort on some systems and the pay off is that the game is better in practice even if only slightly.
In these present circumstances Board Game Arena https://boardgamearena.com/ is getting lots of extra attention because those of us used to playing board games socially can't go to someone's house to get infected with this virus and incidentally play board games. So we have to find another way (to do the latter obviously).
Sites like Tabletopia virtualize the physical environment of a board game. A game that comes with forty wooden pieces now has forty 3D objects. Can you stack this cow on a house? Tabletopia doesn't know what rules are, so sure, just grab the cow 3D object and balance it on the house. This is amusing for a few minutes, then you realise it's every disadvantage of playing a "real" board game, but without any advantages. Who got most settlements in this game of Clans of Caledonia? Well, let's painstakingly count the 3D pieces, then argue about it. Over at BGA there's no problem, the machine is implementing the actual game (not just providing a generic 3D simulation) and so it shows exactly how many settlements you have at all times.
The trade offs are different than for being there in person, but since we cannot be there in person it's an easy win right now for Board Game Arena in the opinion of myself (and apparently thousands of other people since they're having to do emergency scaling to handle several times more players at once in their lobbies).
I always find this topic interesting, because it shows such a diversity of... aesthetic instinct? If you ask a dozen people why they don't like something that's known for being divisive, you can easily get a dozen different, incompatible answers.
People talk about the subjectivity of beauty, but I've never felt like the sheer polarity of opinion gets enough emphasis...
(For the record: Dwarf Fortress's controls never bothered me, and I've never been able to play without a tileset. The same for NetHack and other ASCII games.)
Personally, I grew up playing Angband and Nethack with ASCII graphics.
I still play DF (and DCSS, for that matter) with graphics. It's just so much easier to parse, doesn't require me to spend months "getting used to" the ASCII display (in addition to the rest of DF's arduous learning curve), and it's prettier to boot.
Eagerly awaiting the graphical version to finally be available on Steam so that I can buy it and throw some money their way.
I know the regular version has been available for free forever, but the ASCII graphics have always been a turn-off. I'm not opposed to MUD-style graphics in general, Dwarf Fortress is just so dense with stuff that I found I spent most of my time just trying to figure out what was going on.
If it's encouraging at all - after some hours into the game the ASCII actually starts looking like what they represent, enough that even when you see a new character given its context you can figure out what it's meant to represent without really thinking about it.
It's a bit like the Matrix. At first it's an overwhelming amount of mostly tiny green symbols and after a while things make more sense.
I'm definitely looking forward to this graphical version, though. And hoping that one day the game will even support multiple threads, but that's probably wishful thinking.
IMO trying to decipher those glyphs is near trivial compared to trying to manage what your dwarves are doing in a moderately sized fortress without Dwarf Therapist. In order to play it (which I haven't done in a few years TBH) you either need to be willing to push through some abstruse UI choices or use third-party tools. Those ASCII graphics just serve as a warning of what's to come.
Sloth, admittedly. I could probably look up how to do it, but the guys explicitly announced they were going to put the game on Steam and add a proper graphical overlay so that they could start charging for the game (IIRC they announced this decision because a family member has medical bills they need to pay, or something).
So, I'm just waiting for them to fulfill their end of the bargain. Then I will pay.
Don't let Dwarf Fortress put you off ASCII graphic games if Dwarf Fortress is the first you've played. I tried DF a while back but didn't have the time available to get comfortable with it.
I found Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead much easier to get into. As a new Cataclysm DDA player I spent most of my time learning how to survive in the early days of a zombie apocalypse. Finding food, learning how to craft weapons, what the zombies are capable of.
In one game I found a large mansion in the woods. There were a few zombies inside but not too many to prevent me from clearing it out. I set up camp in one of the bedrooms. The mansion had loads of food, water, materials for crafting. Good times!
That's my thought but for Eve Online. I've read and heard about it, and the idea of it fascinates me. However I just dont have the time required to dedicate to it.
The biggest single thing DF can do after graphical improvements is fixing the performance, perhaps make it not single threaded. I've been able to get past the graphics, and work through using the keyboard menus, but having the fortress come to a screeching crawl when there's a ton of things going on is when I stopped playing.
I picked up dwarf fortress 7-8 years ago when I was in eighth grade, and have been playing it on and off since. Performance is always what kills the game for me.
The game is supposed to be hard, but if you at all know what you're doing it's very easy to keep your fort well, and the only real risk of losing your fort is from you intentionally doing stuff that puts your fort at risk. You literally can defeat entire enemy armies by capturing them all with cage traps, for example.
This I can forgive.
Dwarf fortress is all about the crazy stupid ideas you can come up with after all. Want to build any interesting structures? Prepare for your dwarfs to get stuck every conceivable way one could possibly get stuck trying to build a simple wall. It can be incredibly tedious to accomplish something that ideally shouldn't take more than a few simple commands.
All of this I could live with. The performance without fail is what eventually kills my will to play. Want to do cool stuff with magma? Watch the game slow to a crawl. Want to run a big society? Watch the game slow to a crawl. Want to do anything remotely interesting? Watch the game slow to a crawl.
People go to obscene lengths to keep their performance, such as generating atom smashers that will 'delete' unwanted stuff from their fort completely, so the game stops wasting energy rendering 5000 rocks and how each dwarf is reminded about their childhood traumas as every rock reminds them of how their father died from a falling rock.
This game is so close to being great but falls short at the very last mile because the basic gameplay is fundamentally flawed. This is a simulator first, game second and it shows :(
Concerning it being a simulator first and a game second, that's definitely true, but it makes me wonder if the very old 2D versions (before there was a Z-axis or fancy worldgen) was more enjoyable as a game. I didn't start playing until after those versions, but I get the impression there was a lot more consistent narrative as to what you discover while tunneling into the mountain, as opposed to so much depending on the worldgen.
Yeah trying to build structures where the dwarf decides he can't build it because a rock is in the spot he's supposed to build on and that rock is assigned to be used on another section of wall is very frustrating. Having to continually revisit builds was laborious.
It seems like factorio is very well optimized and is single threaded (as per devs). Even when you make a ginormous factory, everything works mildly fine on a good laptop. I think dwarffortress mechanics is a bit more complex than factorio's in terms of computation, so maybe some parallelism can be utilized there. But it seems like as long as you optimize well, single thread goes a long way.
I think this is only possible because factorio has a team of very dedicated programmers who care about performance. Tarn is one guy, and I don't think he's going to be able to pull out a comparative level of performance.
I mean, the pipe performance fix took one factorio dev half a year. I feel like having no forward motion apart from performance for that long might demotivate tarn, and that was just for one subsystem. In a game which already invested in multithreaded performance.
Maybe something to do with the pure voxel nature of DF. Pathing, liquid flows, etc. Factorio has a lot of pathing requirements, but everything is so much simpler when it's strictly 2D
I personally limit my fort to 60 dwarves (not including children) in the config file. Makes managing a lot easier as well and I find 60 is enough for 2 squads and most of the professions.
Being able to run mid-/end-game in grand strategy games (Crusader Kings 2, EU4, Stellaris, Civilization) at a fast speed single-handedly got me to finally build a desktop PC.
End-game Crusader Kings 2 takes two seconds to simulate each day on my 2017 Macbook Pro. My desktop PC can simulate half a year in that time. I can also play on the largest Stellaris galaxies.
Sooo much more enjoyable when you can run a simulation as fast as you want. Now I can actually finish games instead of bailing at mid-game when things start to slow down.
I spent significant time in DF in the early part of 2010s, but in the end found that it's just too much to micromanage - the game (at the time, at least) didn't offer much help with it, and after awhile, all the clutter really got in the way.
If you like this kind of game, but would want something not as demanding, try Rimworld. Out of all dwarffortresslikes (I don't think that calling them Dward Fortress clones is fair), it's got a good amount of polish, reasonable 2d graphics (nothing too fancy, but looks nice) and most importantly, you don't feel as if you have to manually tweak every little thing. You still can, you just don't have to.
Seconding this. Out of all games in that general category Rimworld is scratching my DF itch, without me having to dig all the way back into full DF complexity.
I've spent more time with Rimworld than any other game I've ever played. Between the vibrant mod community and the recent re-engagement of the original developers, it continues to grow and change, offering new experiences alongside the classic ones. Every colony I build is different. I will forever treasure this game.
Unsure if RimWorld is getting multiplayer or if they're planning on developing a new multi-player game, but they're advertising for a role that inc's multi-player experience at the moment.
There is already a pretty excellent 3D isometric front end for Dwarf Fortress. The name eludes me but it's well known within the community.
However - I found that many parts of Dwarf Fortress disappointed me (and I was hyped as heck to play it - given that I'm a fan of Nethack, DCSS, Cataclysm, and basically any rougelike or rougelite). The game just feels extremely unfinished. Adventure mode is a total joke. Performance is totally garbage. The creator refuses to open source his game (no one will laugh at you man!). The documentation is horrific (no one quite knows how some of the BASIC SKILLS work or what they do)
It's got the potential to be a true gem, but right now, it's like an uncut diamond in the rough.
Might as well just play Rimworld. Rimworld solved every single problem that Dwarf Fortress had and its world is more compelling to me.
DF is a bit rough as a casual gamer (me), but don’t many game designers consider it the greatest game ever made? The complexity of the underlying system of simulation is mind-boggling, especially for a two-person project.
Seems like simply upgrading some of the characters to equivalent emoji would have been a big improvement. I know many people don't like emoji, but for the most part they are pretty universal and easy to understand.
This is not really needed. The game doesn't actually use ascii output, it renders the text (windows terminals would probably be too slow), and it supports graphic packs than can show the dwarves as actual pictures of dwarves. The biggest problem is when a glyph is reused for multiple things, as in that case the graphic has to pick one of them or stay generic.
Nice to see the classic getting some modern graphics. I love text based games, but something as complex as DF really benefits from graphics that can make it easier to determine what is going on on the screen.
My main DF consumption is through Kruggsmash playthroughs/stories on Youtube [1], so I don't live it, but I know I would would enjoy watching the game more if I knew which of the more than 30 creatures the "C" that I'm looking at represents [2].
It might feel like that but you have to learn how to see the matrix. You have 256 characters and 256 colors to encode each and every entity in DF using only CP437 characters. That's more than enough to be able to tell all the things apart with a single glance.
Having curiously perused the source for one of Tarn's earlier games, Liberal Crime Squad [0], and running away in horror, I'm really curious what the source for DF looks like... especially considering for how long they've plugged away at it.
Looking at LCS source was a lesson in how unimportant good programming can be when it comes to making a fun game. But I still can't bring myself to shed all my hygienic programming practices whenever I sit down to hack on a toy. It's really kind of frustrating, since it does add significant time to the development process from waffling about good names and clean abstractions.
I think the problem is not the ASCII. It is the UX. I've been playing DF for years and what made the game for me from horrifying (not the complexity, but the UX!) to bearable is DFHack! It fixes a lot of the UX issues (not all of them of course) and obviates the need to use 3rd party tools like Dwarf Therapist. I also enabled TWBT and added a nice color theme. Take a look [here](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/469471886598995968/55...). I think the graphical tileset is kinda...empty and it doesn't hold that much information as the ASCII.
I didn't know they were doing a graphics update, this looks great!
It will be interesting to see what they do with the interface. I've thought before that a complete mapping and redesign of all Dwarf Fortress screens and actions would be material enough for an entire thesis on UX.
I wonder how this will affect the performance; last time I played DF it was pretty much single-threaded and the performance would tank noticeably once your colony grew to around 100+ dwarves.
Granted, it's been about 10 years since I played it.
No, but they are presumably going to add a little extra time per frame over the very basic display it uses now. It's certainly not going to make it any faster.
