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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
What Dwarf Fortress has going for it is that the simulation is so much deeper than Rimworld that it has a much more expressive range of emergent behavior that allows it to tell other stories, too.
Feels a little harsh tbh. I think you get at least 100 hours in to the game before you start to have exhausted all the scenarios. That's well over the amount of gameplay you get out of most games.
My defense against artillery is to take my 200+% movespeed sanguophage royal to meet them with an aerodrone salvo, then longjump back to base, suit up, and prepare to man the doors in the killbox, while my other colonists unload excessive amounts of minigun fire at the raiders.
There are plenty of ways to solve each challenge the game throws at you.
There are no supply lines! Raiders are defying thermodynamics, throwing more bodies at you than the depopulated desolate planet with the nearest settlement days of caravaning away ever had. You can't destroy them where they live, you can't make regions safe, you can't see their raiding parties coming. They just spawn out of thin air because you made a nice statue.
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.
> 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.
Yes, the charm about DF to me was about how the game really made very few concessions to things like "reasonable difficulty level", "balance" or "progression". If you settle on a place with no flux stone, you don't get steel (except through trade or other interactions with the world). If the procedural generation says there should be undead whales, there will be undead whales, and it's up to you to come up with an answer to that - the game in no way guarantees there will be one.
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.
> 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.
> Been there, done that. Then my pawns hit their own damn traps and get raided while they're in the hospital minus a leg
The StarCraft player in me wants to say: work on your micro!
That being said, I myself am more of an "A.)" player. I got bored with RimWorld after I realized it's more of a puzzle game than a story game. It fooled me longer than others, but eventually, the stateless RNG nature of it becomes apparent.
I never installed mods related to weapons or pathfinding, and yet I had this happen to me. I believe this tends to happen when the only viable path the pawn can take leads straight through the trap.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
For those curious, I recommend you do not buy the "Ultimate ADOM" release. It is pretty but was not even nearly half-baked before being abandoned. Go for the original one, "ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)", which has ~unlimited replayability.
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.
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
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.
> 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!
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.
That's way too much. It should take 3-4 hours tops. The most difficult thing is the ridiculous UI (press b then d then c, etc.) It's basically just a slightly more complicated AoE)
Nah, OP was right, it is stupid. I like hard games, but if you’re not getting any enjoyment out of it just give it. There are a million other things to do.
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.
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.)
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:
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.
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.
>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.)
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.
I feel like I'm one of those people that believes that a good game is one where you can learn and play the game well without ever having to leave the game itself.
For me games are an escape from reality and the moment I have to context switch and go look up something in an FAQ or read a guide just to be able to play a damn game I completely lose interest. I hate the idea that I'm having to study or work for the purposes of entertainment. Zero interest in memorizing inconsequential fictional information that only applies to a game. If I'm going to study it's going to be some thing that's applicable to the real world around me, Not some bull crap crafting recipes.
Games should always aspire to be self contained with the appropriate levels of guided discovery within the system itself.
You're looking for games for people who are already burned out from other work.
There are people who either don't work full time, don't work at all, or the games are their paid job who are completely fine to put as much effort in as a regular job. And there are people who want to watch these people play the game to a level of ability difficult for most to achieve.
I have a mentally very taxing job and often feel exhausted after work. I have my own projects I would love to work on in my spare time but I can rarely find the energy to do so. I've tried pushing myself, but that only results in migraines.
Instead, I watch TV or play games to relax. Dwarf Fortress is one of those games. It may sound counterintuitive but immersing myself in something like that, or a puzzle game, clears my mind and helps me wind down.
Not necessarily. DF could easily show you what the ore you found is for, what workshop a work order requires, warn you to create a pen before a meeting area so your cattle doesn't stand in your tavern until they starve, etc.
This is not necessarily about the richness of the game, it's about how you present information, and not merely accepting that a player will have to have an external wiki open or memorized and dwarf therapist running at all times to play the game.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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 402°C), 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 510°C and get Sour Gas. Then you freeze it to -162°C (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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!
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
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.
It's a proper UI and it includes in game tutorials and help pages to explain the basics of the game as well as making the game much prettier than any existing tilesets IMO.
DF is also not as 'hard' as most people think, if you start your fort in an easy location you can quickly build a self sufficient colony inside a hill or underground and make it inaccessible to most threats once you understand the basics of production in the game. And with the UI upgrades managing your dwarfs' moods is a lot easier too.
The only thing that has been preventing me from being an annoying df evangelist for years has been the horrible UI :D
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s been the top seller all day on steam. I dunno if it has the possibility to be for the month because I think we’ve got a couple other super high profile games coming out before month close.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Instead of the silent protagonist they have a Marvel movie-esque protagonist who keeps doing "well THAT just happened" lines after every joke so none of them actually land.
Hah, for a second I thought you were talking about Dwarf Fortress! I would have understood that too actually, I prefer to play Cogmind[0] in ASCII mode instead of sprite mode too for example.
And I get what you mean, it's one thing to add new lighting effects, but they also swapped out textures which changes the feeling a lot more, and not necessarily for the better.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I know this will probably get downvoted into oblivion, but still, I can't be the only one... I've tried the graphically updated DF, and honestly it doesn't feel like much of an improvement, it just feels like DF with a graphics pack and not an impressive one. Like yeah, it's good that there's mouse support and clickable menus, but they feel like they were an afterthought, like they're not yet finished.
I don't know, maybe it's my fault for expecting too much from it, but I was legit hoping for a UI and UX experience equivalent or at least close to that of RimWorld or Amazing Cultivation Simulator.
I hope that It'll improve as time passes or that the community will develop something amazing.
Game is too hard for me to figure out, so I bought it and got my 12 year old into playing it today. Then he can teach it to me. Such is the way of the Generations.
I must strongly recommend against this game. Specifically, do not buy it if you have a programmer personality. Definitely do not buy it if you were planning to get any work done in the next week(s).
If you choose to disregard this warning: At least buy it when you definitely have the free time, and don't mind losing a lot of sleep. ;-)
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.
Edit: I find it interesting that the replies are so negatively snarky. Now I have to doubt myself: was I was subconsciously being snarky? How do I become more helpful? How do I discourage selecting for snarky replies? One non-judgemental and helpful resource I will use will be to ask for help from ChatGPT, ironically enough, as soon as it returns from being presently offline!
My snark was more directed about the hand wringing over ChatGPT, and the debates over whether its "fair" or not. To be honest, posts like that don't always do well on HN, I just thought ShartGPT was funny (I have young kids, I've been forced to find the funny in poop jokes). Your post being flagged may have saved mine, or blocked those precious internet-points from flowing my way - it's hard to tell.
For your specific post, I don't think grammar corrections do that well on HN in the first place - at best break even. I don't think they are usually actively flagged though. I don't personally care about grammar as long as I understand the point - but I generally don't downvote grammar corrections, they usually fall to the bottom anyways.
I would guess the extra adverse reaction to it was due to the over-abundance of ChatGPT everywhere and it invading every comment thread.
Beyond that, while its not exactly what you said, the idea of everyone who doesn't have perfect grammar filtering their thoughts through ChatGPT sounds a bit dystopian.
Cheers. I thought the ShartGPT comment was funny, and I tried to reprocess their comment as a two year old child, but fortunately ChatGPT was ignoring me. Unfortunately now it is working (lightly edited second result): "Dew yoo no wen [fart] I can use ShartGPT so I can make my writin [ptooie] sound like I'm pooping [tooot] while writin [rip]?"
Dystopian? Only if some dark social pressure forced us all to do it, a là Black Mirror. We accept language translation tools, and I see this as similarly useful for anybody who doesn't speak English natively. English is my first language, and it works better than googling for a wide variety of language tasks, and zero adverts!
Zardoz84 seemed to be learning English, and ChatGPT used intelligently can help the autodidact: certainly cheaper and probably far better than many professionals would I think (I loathe traditional language teaching methods).
Maybe the type of person to read a gaming thread is more likely to be immured in 4chan style communications, and be sensitive to sarcasm and snark? Mr GPT said (slightly edited) "Users may say that the reply was snarky because it comes across as condescending and critical of the original comment, suggesting that the writer needs to improve their written English. Additionally, the suggestion to avoid the words "fun" and "funny" may be seen as overly prescriptive and dismissive of the writer's language choices.". Fair call, well said Mr GPT.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)?
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.
Play safe. You can ignore everything that goes on outside if you go underground but don't breach the caverns. Have a walled off trading area you can let traders and migrants into without them coming all the way into your fort. Grow simple plants and cook / brew them. You'll end up with a ton of food and drink and the time and safety to experiment from.
In DF random things will happen (sieges, monsters, etc) but they don't cheat to get to you, with one glaring exception. If you have a path from your stuff (people or objects) to an enemy the enemy immediately knows it, scouting out the most-hidden paths instantly. To be locked down you need to have a raised drawbridge that actually blocks access.
Turn on seasonal saves and replay when you lose, until you think you've lost in a cool and epic enough way that you'd rather remember it that way than restoring. But play out the fails for a while - often it's easier to recover than you'd think.
This new release has added some additional difficulty settings that makes embarking on a peaceful adventure much easier. In particular, there are explicit difficulty settings that can be changed while in-game, and you can do things like disable different kinds of attacks.
It is possible to turn off all attacks on your fort.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm happy about this, though I might give the original Dwarf Fortress a shot again - I tried playing it (the original) before, but I simply couldn't make sense of what was going on on the screen.
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.
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.)
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.)
> There's a certain ugliness that graphical-tile-based skins of over roguelikes and other TUI-iconography games have
Yes. Your snow example is a good one.
My problem with reworked TUIs is that the graphics emphasize one element of the game and tend to ignore the others. Dwarf Fortress actually supports diagonal paths. With the graphics pack they look like a series of unconnected open rectangles even though a dwarf can walk down them without problems. With a "better" tileset you can see actual diagonal walls. (This screenshot doesn't have a diagonal 1-wide passage, but does have diagonal walls at the edge of rooms. https://i.imgur.com/tryTOUA.png)
The graphics are made to attract people to the game not to best represent the fiddly details of the mechanics. I prefer the text because while it's not a perfect representation either at least it isn't actively wrong.
> consume said "snowiness map" as a shader pass over their textures.
Yeah, to get good looking snow you'd have to do something like this - without the discrete blockiness. In the case of snow this would be easy because DF doesn't have actual game mechanics connected to snow depth or anything it so it would just be a graphics tweak.
> have the lava be a flowing mass of liquid rather than a bunch of particular static grid tiles.
In the case of lava and other liquids though, the simulation itself is tile based. If you made the surface continuous it would make it harder to tell what was going to happen.
> 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
I think DF is mostly the second category. Not hardcode roguelike fans but fans of the DF simulation which happens to be tile based.
> and the untapped market of people who aren't playing the game because of how ugly and gridlike it is.
I wonder how big this market is, for DF. If you want a game that looks good why go for graphical DF when you can go straight to Horizon or other graphics-first game. If you aren't interested enough in the mechanic to interact with it, will some 90s-era graphical skins make the difference?
> "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.
It would be interesting to maybe anchor building items into an easily understood and simulated grid, but where the grid was arbitrary in relation to the map and other grid-based elements. So you could point your fort in any arbitrary direction in relation to the terrain but the walls would still function properly.
DF is a tunnel digging and wall building game where they have to contain fluids or block enemies and it wouldn't be fun debugging tunnels that almost met or had flow-blocking extrusions.
> It would be interesting to maybe anchor building items into an easily understood and simulated grid, but where the grid was arbitrary in relation to the map and other grid-based elements. So you could point your fort in any arbitrary direction in relation to the terrain but the walls would still function properly.
Oh, to be clear, I didn't mean with my suggestions that you'd have a non-quantized underlying geometry. (It is interesting to think about, but it would be pretty impossible to accomplish if your goal is to sort of do an "enhanced emulation wrapper" that just reads out a TUI state from a black-box underlying game binary, and renders it graphically.) What I'm suggesting here would still be "a GUI as an interpretation of an underlying grid-structured scene data structure." It's just that things could have greebles that stick out of or into their tiles, and that the textures for tiles would be dynamically composited depending on the contents of their neighbours, and so forth.
• The underlying physics operate — in almost all passes — on a 2D grid of tile data. There's a height map, but it's very quantized, and only applies (IIRC) to the movement of cars and pollution. But graphically, you've got smoothly transitioning elevation, and even things like houses where the length of the driveway of the house changes in order to meet a sidewalk of a street that is closer or further away depending on where the house is relative to the slope of the street.
• Likewise, look at the boulevards in the image. Physics-wise, each street side of each boulevard is "one tile" wide, with a "one tile" median, making it a "three tile wide" roadway. (Thus the 3x3-tile intersection.) But if you look at what the game is doing when it draws all of this, none of it is snapped to tile boundaries. The roadways themselves are slightly wider than one tile, forcing the median to be slightly narrower than one tile; and the existence of the roadways causes sidewalks and lamp posts to spring into existence within the boundaries of other neighbouring tiles, where those tiles, and not the roadway tiles themselves, then handle the visual edge transitions around the sides and corners of the roadway (where you can think of the tiles that meet the inner corners of the crossing of the intersection, as having "the responsibility" to draw a little bit of the roadway inside them, to fill in the gap left by the curve of the curb. Though more likely what's actually happening is that the JIT-composited tile data for those tiles leaves that area transparent, and the roadway overdraws on a previous pass, which then gets mostly covered over by those tiles.)
• However, despite these render-time tweaks to how things look, the game is still "on" a 2D grid. Your city is fundamentally a grid of tile data; things can only be placed on grid positions, and there is only ever exactly one thing "in" each grid position, simulation-wise. If you have "grid visualization" on, then you get this: https://i.imgur.com/AiSuFKX.jpeg. And even when you have it off, a grid "spotlight" still displays in the immediate area around the cursor — so that you don't start drawing things on the edge/corner of a tile and then get mad that you selected the wrong tile. Even if you draw a diagonal road, that road still exists "on" a particular set of grid tiles.
The Tarn attempted to make a graphical game (he and his brother have always had The Game™ 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
What are you talking about? There are very few indie games that are open source, especially if you filter for those with any real popularity.
The biggest issue I have with the indie scene is that so many of them are solid base engines or aesthetics with a general confusion of what to do after that, and end up with something fairly mediocre — which could be fixed with fairly minor changes. But there’s a very limited appreciation for modding, and even less for open source, so they die in irrelevance.
Where are you finding all these open source games?
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.
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.
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
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1: https://cataclysmdda.org/
2: https://youtube.com/@kruggsmash