It's been a while since I last played DF and I'm surprised to see that both this article and the video are a bit light on details, IIRC they used to showcase upcoming updates a lot more.
Digging a bit more it looks like the magic system will be built around deities, spheres of influence [1], and workshops/professions centered around magic leading to procedurally generated spells. I'm really excited to see how it'll turn out.
They have a history of at least trying to be transparent, especially in their Future of the Fortress posts[0]. Emphasize on trying to, as they're not exactly great at sticking to plans, though that certainly improved with the Kitfox partnership.
I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.
Qud is a gem of a game, same publisher too! I get what you are saying, and it's use of ASCII plus ASCII-like graphics makes the experience a lot friendlier imo.
Steam version is much worse than the fan UI options that were already available, sadly. Its also why I explain why DF really failed to take off after the Steam release. It's nowhere near the best, or even best looking, way to play the game.
I pretty strongly disagree. I can see some preferring some fan art style over the official one, even if I don't. But the official gui having support for rendering all the various critters, and factoring in clothing, multi-level, etc, really made the Steam version's graphics vastly better than anything else that was available at the time.
In a documentary about them putting Dwarf Fortress on Steam Tarn talked about how he had to split the $7 million first payment from Steam with his brother and it turned out the easiest way was to just use the bank app.
Yeah I love all their Arkane stuff, and the two Half Life docs they did under their whitelabel company Secret Tape company for Valve. And of course the big Disco Elysium series.
It is actually their 10th anniversary in September, so if you like their work I would highly recommend their patreon to make sure they can do another 10 years.
Their discord is actually one of my favourite places on the internet to talk about games because everyone in there has such great taste and is knowledgeable about the actual production process of games.
They also have a second channel/patreon now called noclip_2 which is focused on underground/indie games which has been a constant source of joy for me, all the best games I've played in the past year I've discovered via their videos or their discord.
Just great vibes all around.
Edit: almost forgot, they are also running a project to digitize old videogame tapes so if you want to see old interviews with carmack or footage from E3 in really nice quality they have a YouTube channel for that too
I’ve never received $7M but a few times I’ve handled large sums (when buying a house and previous startup exit) and it felt so weird to be how completely normal it was. Like just… oh yeah go ahead and write a cheque for six figures. Or do an e-transfer into your chequing account for six figures. It felt like… no there has to be a whole special world for large sums, no?
I'm sure there is special handling for large sums... but six figures isn't it. Businesses routinely write checks for half a million dollars, two million dollars... it's perfectly normal to see such amounts within the banking world. There might be some extra scrutiny on the back end that you don't see, but since it's well within the realm of normal operations that the bank sees happen every day, it's nothing special.
Now, eight or nine figures, that's probably going to pass the threshold for special attention. As in, you might be required to go to the bank in person with photo ID in order to authorize the transaction, that sort of thing. But under 10 million U.S. dollars? Many businesses will handle those amounts monthly, and the bank is used to seeing them.
It depends on the part of the system you are talking about. Under the covers, many a system will send reports higher up for 5 figure transfers, just for money laundering detection. And there will be all kinds of things blaring for anomaly detection. It's not the same if an account that normally moves large sums, and has been cleared and "explained lol moves a large amount than if it's one making nothing. See, for instance, how Notch's PayPal account was flagged when suddenly the game started to do great sales. So the special attention will vary, and there might be a human involved at some point even if they don't call you.
Oh, sure. What's normal for the bank sure isn't normal for most individuals. I see that someone misread my comment to the point of writing a presumably-angry message that got flagged (so I'm only guessing what it contained), so I wanted to clarify: that sure isn't the daily, or weekly, experience for most people. It's just the bank that sees such sums all the time.
And someone else correctly pointed out that there might indeed be extra scrutiny on such transactions, at a level you might not always see, e.g. when Notch suddenly started receiving tons of money from Minecraft sales, PayPal flagged the account for special attention. But then they figured out it was legitimate, and allowed the money to go through. Personally, having been on the receiving end of credit card fraud (which I caught early enough that the bank refunded me the two fraudulent transactions, a total of $300), I'm glad that "this looks funny" gets flagged. It causes me more inconvenience than it has saved me money: every time I try to buy airline tickets back home (I live and work overseas) it's a large enough transaction that it gets flagged, and I have to call the bank and say "Yes, that large purchase on (airline) is legit, please let it through next time when I try again". But it saves me from being on the hook for $2,500 if someone were to get hold of my CC number again.
You’re talking about businesses in a reply to someone talking about their personal finances. Can you think creatively for a moment, maybe use some empathy and think through some reasons that these are different situations?
It’s fully warranted for the exact reasons your answer exposes. They’re different situations for the individual. I highly doubt that any person here is qualified to speak on behalf of the entire global banking industry.
I won’t be interested in continuing this - you get no more from me.
At that point, there's an IB team handling the deal, an LLC holding the money, and probably several banks holding its accounts. Few banks are happy to handle that kind of concentration in a retail sight account.
I'm guessing at those sizes the bank holding that much of your stuff becomes a risk for them so they have someone you can talk to directly to smooth over any potential problems
Money should never be stored using floating point variables. That is why the Decimal type exists and why IBM Mainframes have hardware acceleration for binary coded decimal math.
Banking regulation varies from country to country, where I'm from a regular personal account isn't usually allowed to directly transfer more than a few tens of thousands of dollars per month. Anything beyond that is handled by the bank itself. Business accounts work differently.
I'm certain receiving a lump six figure sum on my personal account would trigger a review, if only because the taxman wants to know about it.
Backend-wise, it's just different sets of flags. The infrastructure is the same.
Reminds me of when a guy earned like a million off of cryptocurrency, but the cash was in a foreign account (the exchange, I presume). He couldn't just transfer it to his own account because the bank had issues with it. He opened a new account with another bank that had no issue accepting it, and transferred it from there to his main bank which suddenly also had no problem with it lol.
I think generally speaking, there's two systems; the one is a scam / self protection system that disallows large transfers but the user can disable it themselves, the other is something that works after the fact that looks for things like money laundering and tax evasion, but these processes run nightly, yearly, or maybe even once a year. I'm half expecting a tax bill for some unreported crypto assets abroad, half because it's only a few hundred worth.
In the US there is ACH transfers which are free and slow and reversible and wire transfers which are expensive and fast and normally irreversible. Fednow is a new fast payment system.
In Spain, if you try to casually use your bank app to transfer a big amount, you hit a limit. If you need to do that, you can go to a bank office or do a phone call, tell them, and they will temporarily lift the limit, and then yes, you can just go to your regular everyday app and type the large amount and it will work. Doesn't it work like that where you are?
“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay.
Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything.
I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
Minecraft's early game is relatively boring. Empty busywork like punching trees, village raids and strip mining are vestigial gameplay loops that neither Mojang nor Microsoft had the confidence to fix.
I'd agree that they're a bad comparison though. Despite Notch's inspiration from DF, Minecraft has worse bosses, biomes, trading, mining, diplomacy, cooking, innkeeping and NPCs.
It also has effectively zero physics. I still remember being annoyed at how water worked in Minecraft when playing with my kid, and the fact that trees don't collapse if you cut 'em down.
I had a good number of hours in Minecraft Classic's browser version, mostly in online servers though. Solo wasn't much fun.
Modern Minecraft is still not much of an appeal to me without mods. I'm happy to see more block games like Vintage Story push the medium forward while Microsoft... wraps up post-production on A Minecraft Movie: Squared, I guess?
Yeah, I think this actually supports the idea that Dwarf Fortress is needlessly bad at onboarding players. Every time I try to get into it, I end up confused by why people enjoy it and unable to figure out how to play it. Whereas with Minecraft, exploring how to play it was actually fun, with Dwarf Fortress, it felt frustrating and unnecessarily obscure.
That's because the UX/UI is utterly awful. It's cargo cult: the game. (And BTW my complaints have nothing to do with the controls. The actual UX is just... not thought out at all).
It depends, for me it is boring and has pretty dim graphics. I wanted to love it, but it is not fun. It looks like a Sims game, it lacks what e.g. factorio has, that "spark".
DF sounds like it might have that "spark", but I'm afraid to touch it.
Even though I'm a big fan of the game and have been playing it for over a decade now, "fun and engaging from minute zero" is not how I'd describe it. I've seen a number of people (both kids and adults) become frustrated with it almost immediately, and that's with someone experienced nearby to answer questions and let them know what they can do. Without such guidance, they'd definitely have quit and never played it again.
How would you suggest someone make a good tutorial for DF that doesn't leave the player exhausted by the time they start a new game?
That's my core complaint w/ strategy games. By the time I'm done with the tutorial i have to do other things only to forget everything I learned the next time I get to sit down with it.
At best "hints" or a glossary/help menu is the best way imo.
Several people have given the opinion in this thread that DF is basically immune to having a tutorial; I am trying to figure out why. I don't see a tutorial as an end-to-end blueprint of everything the game is capable of. It's just a series of info, hints, and follow-along instructions, possibly with railroaded / simplified UI. I mean, the first time I booted up DF with no context circa 2013, it took me a few minutes to figure out that we're seeing a top-down view. I certainly would have appreciated a hint or a tutorial (though I do not necessarily fault the game for not having one; it's _not_ a game that is aimed at onboarding heaps of fresh newbies by the truckload each week).
Regardless of the difference in complexity, I think the fact that it became the bestselling videogame of all time despite the fact that it essentially "has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players" makes it a valid example for showing why tutorials and on-ramps for new players are not as important as the comment I replied to made it sound.
If you disagree, I'd like to hear your thoughts on where you think the threshold in complexity is when games should start including a tutorial and/or on-ramps for new players.
I don't know where the threshold is, but the comparison lacks in the same way that a coloring book doesn't need a tutorial, but a blank paper that has HANGMAN written on it does need one or people don't know how to play it.
You can't say because minecraft doesn't have a tutorial, dwarf fortress doesn't need one either. That's just retarded
As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.
I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system.
I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.)
I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM.
FYI, the newer versions with their mouse-driven interface solve a lot of those issues. Dwarf Therapist (the RAM reading tool you were thinking of) isn't needed any more, because there are much better in-game tools for managing what kinds of work certain dwarves do. The new menu layouts are a lot more discoverable, allowing you to find most things with just a little bit of clicking around (and the descriptions of stuff are a lot better now, so no more googling "what the heck is a quern?"). I miss the old keyboard controls sometimes, but they're gradually adding them back in the form of shortcuts. DFHack is still around, and basically necessary for automating some of the more fiddly resource chains (stuff like, "request 50 trees get cut down out of this patch of forest if our number of logs gets below 200").
I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.
No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of.
Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.
If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.
If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX.
The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
They fixed all that. Go give the free version another try; it has the updated UI but not the new sprites so it feels a lot like playing the older versions of the game but with more polish.
> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
The majority of people do not play videogames.
The majority of those do not play any roguelikes.
Citing the majority is completely useless.
Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress.
There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know.
Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.
> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.
On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game.
The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours.
The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog.
That to me is some excellent playtime.
Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
The tutorial is the wiki. I used to play Dwarf Fortress back in the 2008-2009 era, and I kept going back to the wiki when I needed to learn something. It was, and still is, comprehensive, containing not just a "getting started for beginners" tutorial page, but also a list of every building and workflow (from ore to metal to swords and armor, from seeds to plants to food and drink...). In-game tutorials are not the only way to learn about a game; a well-maintained wiki (that isn't on wikia, oops sorry they're called fandom dot com there days — but that's a whole other rant) is also an excellent resource. And certain types of games seem to lend themselves to having well-maintained wikis: Dwarf Fortress's wiki is perhaps the best I've ever seen, narrowly beating Minecraft's also-excellent wiki.
You may prefer a game like 'Going Medieval' which is a similar concept to Dwarf Fortress but is heavily simplified, almost as though someone played Dwarf Fortress then decided to make a version for their kids.
The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. It's the opposite of the approach taken by AI games that want to generalise based on simple prompts.
I would pose that's a matter of holding it wrong. Like, integrating generative AI as a prompt to an API endpoint exposed to the user is one of the worst, most naive and bland ways to use it as a game subsystem that I can think of.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with trying to use generative AI as a subsystem for a game, problems which exist at a conceptual level. But all the games I've seen that integrate AI as a subsystem don't even come remotely close to hitting that ceiling. I think it's ultimately up to the fact that an interesting usage of generative AI basically requires a level of technical competency and theory that's well beyond that of the layman. The people making games that utilize AI generally seem to lack the chops to make a good game or do interesting things with AI. The people with the chops and manhours to make a good game with AI:
- Don't want the backlash of having a generative model in their game, because no matter the context that's a lot of very bad press for something that's very difficult and time consuming to implement.
- See the immediate problems and difficulty that arise from a decently integrated concept and execution, and even without the bad press, understand that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That it's always going to be an immensely stupid gimmick in the end, one that's trying way too hard.
That won't stop us from having 10,000 pieces of shovelware getting churned out that have the worst, most uninspired integrations imaginable mind you. We clearly already have those. For those that could do something better with the tech, there's too many good reasons to not touch it.
I had the muscle memory for the full keyboard control on pre-steam releases and the loss of some complete keyboard controls and things just changing made it so I never really got into the Steam release, which was pretty disappointing. I get it though.
I'm in a similar, but less extreme boat. The new interface has its perks, especially in terms of discoverability, but for tasks that need to be done repeatedly (request 10 beds be made before you have a manager, for example), you really miss the ability to rock some chords.
It took me some time to remap the muscle memory but it felt so worth it. The Steam version is not just a new AI, it introduced a lot of gameplay changes which really improved the underlying systems a lot.
The version available for free on their website is the same exact program as the one you purchase on Steam. It simply includes a different set of graphics for the UI. These graphics are designed to look as if they are made up of text characters, but in reality they are still just sprites. The sprites that come with the version you buy from Steam are designed to look like a normal but stylized gui.
Dwarf Fortress's Steam UI is by far, my least favorite thing about the game. Does anyone else agree?
After playing with the Lazy Newb's Pack and other similar tools for years, I found the Steam version to be a maaaaasive downgrade. The mouse was tied to the framerate, everything felt sluggish and hard to control.
It really irks me because I had been telling everyone for years to play this game, and finally it gets an "official" release and I found it to be... the worst version of the game I'd tried yet.
Maybe its improved since I last tried it. But it would be hard to outdo what the fans had done with the UI, IMO. Even features like seasonal color schemes felt almost vital to me. Not to mention customizing your own preferred sprites...
I almost wish Tarn and Zach had kept to building core gameplay and let the fans handle the UI, with some sort of official team-up to bring it to Steam.
I'd recommended Lazy Newb Pack to almost anyone but I don't think I'd recommend the Steam version, at least the version I tried.
I actually think this type of suggestion/thinking is not good for the game. the mystique of dwarf fortress is that it's a game that plays in your imagination, not on the screen. the point of the ascii visuals is to give a player enough context to understand the state of the world, but it's intentionally obtuse so fun arrises from your brain having to color in all the details. any suggestion that tries to add more polish to the graphics brings you farther away from where the fun lives
Going to have to agree to disagree here. Graphical polish would make it much more enjoyable for me, and I spent enough time with the ascii version back in the day to get used to it.
Granted I haven't played the steam version in awhile, I didn't have a ton of issues with it, and the non-steam version was just not for me.
Additionally, I believe they hired another dev who was cleaning up a lot of things, so maybe better now?
Has anything changed where the original version of the game no longer receives updates? I understood that the whole reason for the initial release of the steam version was to get more people exposed to the game and to allow the creators to actually start making money from their efforts.
If anything, I would recommend purchasing the steam version to support the creators. Continue to play the game any way that you like afterward.
I also experienced performance issues when it came out on Steam, but that seems to be resolved now, and they've fixed a huge number of bugs related to things like squads, crossbows, etc. I'd give it another shot.
I’ve been tinkering with a game engine where magic is made of first principles for a very long time. Cannot wait to see the gameplay and mechanics here!
Only working on the magic system itself, unfortunately making the game around the mechanics is not something I enjoy, so I have been implementing different approaches with some minimal debugging UI. Did not reach the need for an actual game engine
What ive generally heard is that this is more of a refactor and base functionality improvement, rather than building out all the actual magic systems to start with.
2-10 updates in the future will have much more fleshed out magic
this game will be updated until the creators die, its a passion project and is a genre defining masterpiece if you are into procedurally generated narrative driven world sims.
Historically, they did a big update every year or two. Since the Steam release, they've sped up significantly, with medium sized updates every 2-3 months.
I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI.
Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how much they were receiving. Tens of thousands of $ a month, mind you. For monthly contributions at that level for many, many years I would expect at least a nod - instead they straight-up told everyone they'd abandon keyboard users, a decision later recanted.
That said, Dwarf Fortress holds a special place in my heart. Only regret I have is that I didn't track how many hours I put in. In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
It makes me sad to think about. I would love to get into the new UI, but the immersion just won't come back. My muscle memory, hands firmly on the keyboard, is too persistent, and playing with the new UI feels like stumbling around and misclicking.
I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds.
Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit (from their perspective) shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.
I was under the impression that the classic keyboard-only version was kept up to date with the Steam version? They're both on patch 53.16[1][2] which was released simultaneously on 8/5, so it doesn't look to me like keyboard-only is forgotten or left behind unless I'm missing something.
Sadly no – the current 'classic' is just the Steam game without the steam features AIUI – i.e. still the mouse-oriented UI. 0.47.05 is the last keyboard version AFAIK.
Ah I see, I misunderstood. I just tried the latest classic version and it was all mouse. I agree then that it's disappointing as someone who has played both versions
So, the developer updates both the free version and the paid version with the latest features (the only difference is the free version is sans GUI), and continues to serve the older free keyboard only 0.47 version on his website, and I'm supposed to be upset by this? Because he dropped the keyboard UI feature?
This DFHack command just toggles the 'enable keyboard cursor' feature. The issue is that the new keyboard cursor only works under specific scenarios, like designating digging sites. I don't think there's a way to use the keyboard cursor for everything like in 0.47.
(I agree with your broader point that it's not reasonable to be angry at Bay12 for dropping this feature.)
I think die hard fans may be frustrated because they paid to support but that way triggered the timeline where devs drop features they like in favor of friendliness to noobs. Economics kicks in, there's more money to be made from noobs.
What you are asking for is completely unreasonable. There’s no way that one programmer can maintain two completely separate UIs. Keep in mind that they could not simply “add graphics” to the existing interface, they had to write a completely new one that was not based around fixed–size character cells.
Wasn't the graphical interface 95% outsourced to others? And originally the graphic version was suppose to be layered on top and leave the underlying version of the game barely touched from the player's side. It was even touted as an excuse at the time to fix some of the keyboard shortcuts that were inconsistent among different submenus, and certainly not to eliminate or supersede keyboard interfaces.
Programmers and artists at Kitfox helped, but no, 95% of the work on the UI was not outsourced. Perhaps if you add in all of the countless time spent drawing sprites for all of the creatures in the game.
And your understanding of “layering” is simply wrong. The _game_ is the same underneath the UI, aside from the new features that have been added and the bugs that have been fixed, but the UI was ripped out and rewritten. It could not be any other way. You are correct that the goal was not to eliminate keyboard–driven interfaces, but the rewrite did completely replace the entire UI with something new. And that new UI does not have the same structure as the old UI.
For example, in the old UI you used to have to first enter the “designations” menu and then choose “dig”. So digging had the keyboard shortcut ‘d d’. To place buildings you typed ‘d b’ to “designate buildings”, and to “designate stockpiles” was ‘d p’.
But now these three things are all at the top level of the menu, so simply typing ‘m’ for digging, ‘b’ for buildings, or ‘p’ for stockpiles is all you need to do. (Digging cannot be on ‘d’ because the view is now moved using the WASD keys.) There is no designate menu any more. The old keyboard shortcuts are simply meaningless.
If you prefer different keyboard shortcuts then you can customize them. One of the features of the rewritten UI is that there is also a new UI for customizing the key bindings.
Is it really that bad? I haven't played since the GUI update but was thinking about getting into it again because I still have years of muscle memory from it. But if I am forced to use the mouse im not sure I even want to bother. There is absolutely no way I could play the game at the same speed I use to if I have to resort to mouse-only features.
IMO, the steam release is not very good. Especially if you had been used to using the top mods that existed before the steam release for ease of control.
You dont want to know your hours. Perhaps my greatest shame is the number of hours i have spent on factorio. I was afk for much of that (letting the factory run) but ... i would not want other people to see the number.
I have to agree. Sure, the new GUI is a some kind of accessibility improvement over the old, but is seriously underpowered for e.g. any kind of repetitive tasks (which are not atypical in DF). Most annoying is the fact that even though a fair number of keyboard shortcuts exist, a full pipeline often does not. It's barely more efficient to use the keyboard since you'll still have to switch over to the mouse every second action.
I know that the keyboard features are coming at some point, but I doubt it's a very high priority. My hopes rest on the modding improvements; once the UI becomes moddable, the old one is recreated in an instant. Until that, I'll stick to the trusty 0.47. (I have bought the "new" game to show support and thank for all the earlier work, of course.)
It wasn’t “tens of thousands a month” outside of some exceptional months. IIRC usually it was in the single digits which is not fantastic for a two people in the US
Dwarf Fortress used ASCII graphics & KB controls because that's what was cheap and fast to implement. Tarn & Zach always wanted proper graphics & mouse support, and has always been the vision from day one.
>Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either -
You clicked on a button that said "support", where it was explicitly pretty much a tip jar, and now you feel entitled to keyboard controls ? You're full of shit.
Adding a G to the UI is 'giving the finger' to their old players? When they include support for ASCII-like tilesets so you can play the exact same way? "Gamers" are the most entitled people on earth, I swear
The new GUI is... not great. But the UX old UI was downright awful. There were like 5 different paradigms how to use individual screens, not just layouts, completely different ways to navigate and interact with controls.
After couple tens of hours you memorized the arcane keyboard invocations to do what you wanted, but it never felt intuitive.
Does any other game have true procedural generated magic systems like DF talks about? I have always been curious how and if they'll pull it off and if it will just end up being all pretty much the same
They can make a simulation of magic based on the fabric of a procedural universe work, but even they failed to make a simulation of economics work. Fantasy magic makes more sense than modern economic theory.
For this one, I loved playing Dofus when I was younger. It was (hopefully still) a quite popular french turn-by-turn 2D MMORPG.
The main goal is PoE or PvP, but actually I ended up fully playing for the economy.
You can get a job with its own leveling system, like a farmer, cutting crops, collaborate with a baker who will make you a cut so that he can get baker xp, and then sell the bread in an auction based local marketplace for player to buy and heal.
You can as well just arbitrage: buy something cheaper in one town, and sell it in an another where it was more popular.
I ended up with a tone of paper notes, just calculating the margin of different product, e.g jewellery, so that I can buy the materials, calculating the risk of loss during the building process, partner with someone for some materials, and then finding where to sell the end product
You might really enjoy Caravaneer 2 (the original was a flash game, RIP, but the sequel requires no knowledge of the original). Whole game is traveling around a wasteland, hauling trade goods between towns that have their own industries, and thus varying supply and demand for various goods.
It’s not that economics is hard to understand, it’s that it requires the participants to reason about their actions.
First problem was the coins. To buy something the dwarves had to haul the coins to the seller, one at a time of course. And then when given change they had to haul the change back to their room. One at a time. And the merchant had to haul their new coins, one at a time, to their room. But that was an easy problem compared to the real difficulty.
The other problem was balancing incomes with expenses. Everything was just assigned arbitrary numbers, and those numbers were fixed. So in one player’s fort they were building a huge mega construction out of glass blocks and so the glassmakers become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice simply because so many glass blocks needed to be created. But the weaponsmith was only ever asked to create ten battleaxes for the single squad of military dwarves so he went broke. After all, everyone had to rent a room and eat. Prices need to depend on scarcity and the need to eat as much as on the labor needed to create an individual item. The weaponsmith might have earned more income for a sword than the glassmaker did for a glass block, but that didn’t help him in the long run.
Try the game again, the performance has improved significantly. One major problem that was affecting most players were the line–of–sight calculations. Every person and animal in the game has an opinion of every other, and can get mood changes simply from seeing people (or animals) that they like or dislike. And that opinion is both based on the history of interactions between them as well as other factors like consanguinity. So every time someone moves the game has to check who they can see, and for every person (or animal) that they can see it has to check to see if they are related, and if so to what degree. Guests, invaders, monsters, zombies, ghosts, sneaks, villains, etc all have their effects.
The fundamental O(n²) behavior remains, but caching has greatly improved performance for typical forts. They also improved cache locality and refined the exact set of conditions that affect mood. They also parallelized this specific part of the code, though I believe you have to enable that in the options.
You can also improve performance by making changes to your fort. Primary amongst these is simply to reduce the number of people and animals on the map. Don’t keep 50 sheep and 100 cats and 100 dogs and so on. Cut those numbers severely. In the mean time use cages. Caged animals in small rooms behind closed doors don’t see very many people in any given frame, so the cost goes down. Plus you can sell the cages with the animals in them, which is nicer than simply butchering all of your puppies and kittens. Kick out some of the guests too. If you have public taverns, libraries, and/or temples with guests in them then either close them down or make them smaller. Focus on quality over quantity. (Actually for taverns and I guess temples I still recommend having a large room with a big square area with a nice floor and no furniture so that everyone can dance. If you haven’t seem them dance then you have been missing out!)
You can also consider changing the layout of your fortress. I don’t recommend going too far down this road, but even small changes can have large effects. Long corridors full of people are the most expensive, so try breaking line of sight using doors or corners. Put things on different floors instead of along a single long corridor. Naturally some players experimented with zig–zag corridors so that nobody can see more than a tile or two in any direction, which works, but of course that results in completely alien fortresses that feel terrible to the player.
So what we're saying here is that personal computers can run open weights models that can literally code earlier versions of Dwarf Fortress all by themselves, but handling lines of sight for a 101st dwarf in a mountain fortress remains past the frontier of computer science. I love this so much.
O(n²) scaling is brutal. If n=100, then that is 100×100=10,000 mood checks. When n=101, that grows to 101² = 10201. 102² is 10404. You see how fast it is growing¹? Every person you add causes far more mood checks than the last person you added. There is nothing that computer science can do to reduce this growth. The whole study of computer science is the study of the limits of computing, and these are the limits. No amount of brain sweat can reduce the the rate at which the problem scales.
Of course we could redefine the problem; make each mood check simpler, for example. We could simply leave some of the current factors out of the calculation, so that the calculations are cheaper to do. For example we could make the mood check ignore consanguinity. A dwarf’s reaction would depend only on whether they saw a friend or not, but not on whether they saw a cousin or a sister. That will allow us to scale to higher population counts, but we still face the fact that there will be _some_ population limit.
Or we could reduce n somehow. For example, we could arbitrarily decide that some of the population doesn’t participate in line of sight checks. Maybe livestock are never checked at all, so the 50 cats don’t make n bigger. But then your cats won’t run away from zombie invaders, because they don’t check line of sight to see what is around them. Is that acceptable? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s disappointing to to the game designer but they go ahead with the change because the players will still have fun.
The third thing to do is to optimize the mood checks so that they use the processor more efficiently. This is hard but doable, and can be done without changing the problem. And in fact it has already been done, to one extent or another. But modern processors are actually pretty hard to optimize for, and all the low–hanging fruit has been picked. For example, I have a 16–core CPU, and until a few years ago the game could only use one of those cores to run the line of sight checks on. The other 15 would be idle. That obviously leaves a lot of performance on the table. Now that the game uses all 16 cores equally you’ll find that n has gone up quite a lot. But it didn’t go from 100 to 1600, it went from 100 to about 400. 100²=10,000 line of sight mood checks, and 400²=160,000 mood checks. But once spread over 16 cores that’s still 10,000 per core! So now it can do the line of sight mood checks for a population of 400 in the same time as it could do them for a population of 100, only a 4× improvement. And if your CPU only has 8 cores then the new limit for you is really a population of about 283.
But there is still more processing power in our CPUs that is going untapped by DF, and language models are actually really good at making use of that power. A modern CPU can run SIMD, or Single Instruction Multiple Data, instructions that can operate on many values at once. It can multiply two numbers together, or it can multiply a vector of 4, 8, 16, or even 32 numbers together all at once. And multiplying the vectors takes the same amount of time as multiplying two ordinary numbers! All a language model is doing is repeated matrix multiplication, which boils down to multiplying lots of individual numbers together. An LLM is _only_ doing vector instructions on 32 half–width floats at a time, over and over again, but DF doesn’t have that luxury. Most of what DF does just cannot be done using vector math in any useful fashion. The graphics could be (sprite compositing), but DF sends all of the graphics over to the GPU instead. So LLMs are not an apples–to–apples comparison for Dwarf Fortress.
This is a fantastic comment that I don't deserve for making fun of the complexity of Dwarf Fortress in comparison to the space alien technology we're building elsewhere. I come from a place of love (and fear --- I refuse to install it again) with DF!
I appreciate your reply and effort, but for me, personally, the experience was extremely frustrating and I don't intend to try again. I feel like it's a game design flaw, at least from my personal perspective as a player and how I expected to have fun playing the game: I didn't even know this problem existed at all before facing it, at the very least I would have liked to have been warned; and maybe game mechanics to avoid that. But on the other hand I do realize a lot of other people still can benefit from other aspects of a very creative game, even with these problems. Just not for me.
Obs: That experience was recent, at most 1y ago, and at the time I tried all fixes I could find including all "optimizations" and dfhack stuff.
I haven't played since the GUI release, but in the past you definitely had to set a fortress population limit to prevent FPS death.
Also, assuming DFhack still exists, you can try using it to clean up the messes and splatter which can bring it down a decent amount.
Fortress design may also have an impact on FPS from pathfinding according to some, but I had limited success in improving FPS through more optimized pathfinding designs, and the number of entities on the map still seemed like the biggest factor.
Dfhack still exists and also works with the steam version.
They got one of the DFHack contributors Putnam on as programmer to do some multi threading and moddabilty (exposing stuff for lua scripting), I'm not sure she is currently working on DF but she worked on it a bunch for the past 3 years, and also did some indepth talks about it on BlindIRLs channel:
I remember finding this game back in the summer before 8th grade. right after the z-axis was added. talk about a spirtual wakening. I remember printing off the wiki and reading it in my science class. This game is probably the main reason I became an engineer honestly.
Why? Dwarf Fortress only exists because it was given away for free for decades, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars in donations, and eventually leading to a fandom popular enough to bring others onboard with the project to produce a GUI and paid steam release version.
If something you build brings in a lot of critique, it is likely something of great value. Because something that doesn't have value won't bring much critique at all.
Their donation revenue was alright for a pretty significant chunk of that time. For the first decade it was ~$5k/month, which jumped up to ~$10k/month for the second decade before the Steam release.
Toady wasn't exactly raking in the cash, but he didn't need another job.
It’s 2011, you’re laying awake after midnight and can’t quite seem to switch off. You put on the latest episode of DFTalk and listen to Toadie1 and Rainseeker talking about their road map for the magic release but first they’ll have to do night creatures and armies and a completely redo the whole world gen, and you gently fall asleep to Tarn’s classic guitar melody.
Super neat. So instead of just randomizing a map and generating random geography like Minecraft, it's going to randomize the fundamental rules of the universe. Brave new world!!
Some of the effort that folks have put into recording their dwarf fortress experiences, and captureing that special something that emerges out of the game is wonderful.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 20.6 ms ] threadDigging a bit more it looks like the magic system will be built around deities, spheres of influence [1], and workshops/professions centered around magic leading to procedurally generated spells. I'm really excited to see how it'll turn out.
[1] https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Sphere
[0]: https://bay12games.com/dwarves/
there is a novelty to ascii, but its a barrier to entry and major eye strain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwLSgaYPKA0&list=PL-THgg8Qnv...
It is actually their 10th anniversary in September, so if you like their work I would highly recommend their patreon to make sure they can do another 10 years.
Their discord is actually one of my favourite places on the internet to talk about games because everyone in there has such great taste and is knowledgeable about the actual production process of games.
They also have a second channel/patreon now called noclip_2 which is focused on underground/indie games which has been a constant source of joy for me, all the best games I've played in the past year I've discovered via their videos or their discord.
Just great vibes all around.
Edit: almost forgot, they are also running a project to digitize old videogame tapes so if you want to see old interviews with carmack or footage from E3 in really nice quality they have a YouTube channel for that too
https://youtube.com/@nocliparchive
1. The Origins of Dwarf Fortress: https://youtu.be/MxV24so-dw8
2. How Dwarf Fortress Evolved over 16 Years of Development: https://youtu.be/PiNeDarPzeI
3. How Dwarf Fortress Coming to Steam Changed Everything: https://youtu.be/TX65XCk2-6U anecdote about the money starts @ 18:40
4. Life After the Success of Dwarf Fortress: https://youtu.be/I5zgBXp4e8A
Now, eight or nine figures, that's probably going to pass the threshold for special attention. As in, you might be required to go to the bank in person with photo ID in order to authorize the transaction, that sort of thing. But under 10 million U.S. dollars? Many businesses will handle those amounts monthly, and the bank is used to seeing them.
And someone else correctly pointed out that there might indeed be extra scrutiny on such transactions, at a level you might not always see, e.g. when Notch suddenly started receiving tons of money from Minecraft sales, PayPal flagged the account for special attention. But then they figured out it was legitimate, and allowed the money to go through. Personally, having been on the receiving end of credit card fraud (which I caught early enough that the bank refunded me the two fraudulent transactions, a total of $300), I'm glad that "this looks funny" gets flagged. It causes me more inconvenience than it has saved me money: every time I try to buy airline tickets back home (I live and work overseas) it's a large enough transaction that it gets flagged, and I have to call the bank and say "Yes, that large purchase on (airline) is legit, please let it through next time when I try again". But it saves me from being on the hook for $2,500 if someone were to get hold of my CC number again.
And reading some lack of empathy into a comment about the banking system is wholly unwrannted.
I won’t be interested in continuing this - you get no more from me.
You're the one who started this tangent..
I'm certain receiving a lump six figure sum on my personal account would trigger a review, if only because the taxman wants to know about it.
Backend-wise, it's just different sets of flags. The infrastructure is the same.
I think generally speaking, there's two systems; the one is a scam / self protection system that disallows large transfers but the user can disable it themselves, the other is something that works after the fact that looks for things like money laundering and tax evasion, but these processes run nightly, yearly, or maybe even once a year. I'm half expecting a tax bill for some unreported crypto assets abroad, half because it's only a few hundred worth.
I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay.
I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way.
the wow wiki was from 04, the minecraft wiki is from 09.
... and wow was very documentation based for people pre-quest-helpers.
I'd agree that they're a bad comparison though. Despite Notch's inspiration from DF, Minecraft has worse bosses, biomes, trading, mining, diplomacy, cooking, innkeeping and NPCs.
(Yes, yes, mods exist.)
Modern Minecraft is still not much of an appeal to me without mods. I'm happy to see more block games like Vintage Story push the medium forward while Microsoft... wraps up post-production on A Minecraft Movie: Squared, I guess?
It depends, for me it is boring and has pretty dim graphics. I wanted to love it, but it is not fun. It looks like a Sims game, it lacks what e.g. factorio has, that "spark".
DF sounds like it might have that "spark", but I'm afraid to touch it.
That's my core complaint w/ strategy games. By the time I'm done with the tutorial i have to do other things only to forget everything I learned the next time I get to sit down with it.
At best "hints" or a glossary/help menu is the best way imo.
If you disagree, I'd like to hear your thoughts on where you think the threshold in complexity is when games should start including a tutorial and/or on-ramps for new players.
You can't say because minecraft doesn't have a tutorial, dwarf fortress doesn't need one either. That's just retarded
I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system.
I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.)
I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM.
It sucks, but it's so good.
I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.
Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.
If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.
If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
nobody is making you play it, and the people who enjoy playing it don't really care if it you liked it or not.
The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
The majority of people do not play videogames. The majority of those do not play any roguelikes. Citing the majority is completely useless.
Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know. Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.
> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.
On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game. The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours. The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog. That to me is some excellent playtime. Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
I like the narrative element and enjoy delegating random shit and seeing what happens.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with trying to use generative AI as a subsystem for a game, problems which exist at a conceptual level. But all the games I've seen that integrate AI as a subsystem don't even come remotely close to hitting that ceiling. I think it's ultimately up to the fact that an interesting usage of generative AI basically requires a level of technical competency and theory that's well beyond that of the layman. The people making games that utilize AI generally seem to lack the chops to make a good game or do interesting things with AI. The people with the chops and manhours to make a good game with AI:
- Don't want the backlash of having a generative model in their game, because no matter the context that's a lot of very bad press for something that's very difficult and time consuming to implement.
- See the immediate problems and difficulty that arise from a decently integrated concept and execution, and even without the bad press, understand that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That it's always going to be an immensely stupid gimmick in the end, one that's trying way too hard.
That won't stop us from having 10,000 pieces of shovelware getting churned out that have the worst, most uninspired integrations imaginable mind you. We clearly already have those. For those that could do something better with the tech, there's too many good reasons to not touch it.
if you are a fan of the original I would encourage you to give it another shot.
After playing with the Lazy Newb's Pack and other similar tools for years, I found the Steam version to be a maaaaasive downgrade. The mouse was tied to the framerate, everything felt sluggish and hard to control.
It really irks me because I had been telling everyone for years to play this game, and finally it gets an "official" release and I found it to be... the worst version of the game I'd tried yet.
Maybe its improved since I last tried it. But it would be hard to outdo what the fans had done with the UI, IMO. Even features like seasonal color schemes felt almost vital to me. Not to mention customizing your own preferred sprites...
I almost wish Tarn and Zach had kept to building core gameplay and let the fans handle the UI, with some sort of official team-up to bring it to Steam.
I'd recommended Lazy Newb Pack to almost anyone but I don't think I'd recommend the Steam version, at least the version I tried.
I really wish they'd put some actual effort into the graphics of the game. Even some minimal animations would be nice.
Good thing is they can and do have both styles.
If anything, I would recommend purchasing the steam version to support the creators. Continue to play the game any way that you like afterward.
have you found yourself constrained with engine boilerplate or do you feel like you are making good progress on the magic system?
2-10 updates in the future will have much more fleshed out magic
Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how much they were receiving. Tens of thousands of $ a month, mind you. For monthly contributions at that level for many, many years I would expect at least a nod - instead they straight-up told everyone they'd abandon keyboard users, a decision later recanted.
That said, Dwarf Fortress holds a special place in my heart. Only regret I have is that I didn't track how many hours I put in. In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit (from their perspective) shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.
Also sounds like they added back the keyboard support so there’s literally no issue?
> In excess of 10k, I'm sure.
Sure sounds like you got your moneys worth.
[1] https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
[2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
When he asked whether long time supporters would want to pay $30 bucks for the game I don't think that was implied? Seems fair to be annoyed.
https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ https://steamdb.info/app/975370/history/
DFHack already added back the keyboard cursor, anyway: https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/tools/toggle-kbd-curs...
(I agree with your broader point that it's not reasonable to be angry at Bay12 for dropping this feature.)
And your understanding of “layering” is simply wrong. The _game_ is the same underneath the UI, aside from the new features that have been added and the bugs that have been fixed, but the UI was ripped out and rewritten. It could not be any other way. You are correct that the goal was not to eliminate keyboard–driven interfaces, but the rewrite did completely replace the entire UI with something new. And that new UI does not have the same structure as the old UI.
For example, in the old UI you used to have to first enter the “designations” menu and then choose “dig”. So digging had the keyboard shortcut ‘d d’. To place buildings you typed ‘d b’ to “designate buildings”, and to “designate stockpiles” was ‘d p’.
But now these three things are all at the top level of the menu, so simply typing ‘m’ for digging, ‘b’ for buildings, or ‘p’ for stockpiles is all you need to do. (Digging cannot be on ‘d’ because the view is now moved using the WASD keys.) There is no designate menu any more. The old keyboard shortcuts are simply meaningless.
If you prefer different keyboard shortcuts then you can customize them. One of the features of the rewritten UI is that there is also a new UI for customizing the key bindings.
I know that the keyboard features are coming at some point, but I doubt it's a very high priority. My hopes rest on the modding improvements; once the UI becomes moddable, the old one is recreated in an instant. Until that, I'll stick to the trusty 0.47. (I have bought the "new" game to show support and thank for all the earlier work, of course.)
>Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either -
You clicked on a button that said "support", where it was explicitly pretty much a tip jar, and now you feel entitled to keyboard controls ? You're full of shit.
I didn't want to say it at around the time it came out, because I wanted it to succeed... but they dropped the ball in a big, big way.
Lazy Newb Pack and other fan mods are still the best way to play.
After couple tens of hours you memorized the arcane keyboard invocations to do what you wanted, but it never felt intuitive.
The main goal is PoE or PvP, but actually I ended up fully playing for the economy.
You can get a job with its own leveling system, like a farmer, cutting crops, collaborate with a baker who will make you a cut so that he can get baker xp, and then sell the bread in an auction based local marketplace for player to buy and heal.
You can as well just arbitrage: buy something cheaper in one town, and sell it in an another where it was more popular.
I ended up with a tone of paper notes, just calculating the margin of different product, e.g jewellery, so that I can buy the materials, calculating the risk of loss during the building process, partner with someone for some materials, and then finding where to sell the end product
First problem was the coins. To buy something the dwarves had to haul the coins to the seller, one at a time of course. And then when given change they had to haul the change back to their room. One at a time. And the merchant had to haul their new coins, one at a time, to their room. But that was an easy problem compared to the real difficulty.
The other problem was balancing incomes with expenses. Everything was just assigned arbitrary numbers, and those numbers were fixed. So in one player’s fort they were building a huge mega construction out of glass blocks and so the glassmakers become wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice simply because so many glass blocks needed to be created. But the weaponsmith was only ever asked to create ten battleaxes for the single squad of military dwarves so he went broke. After all, everyone had to rent a room and eat. Prices need to depend on scarcity and the need to eat as much as on the labor needed to create an individual item. The weaponsmith might have earned more income for a sword than the glassmaker did for a glass block, but that didn’t help him in the long run.
The fundamental O(n²) behavior remains, but caching has greatly improved performance for typical forts. They also improved cache locality and refined the exact set of conditions that affect mood. They also parallelized this specific part of the code, though I believe you have to enable that in the options.
You can also improve performance by making changes to your fort. Primary amongst these is simply to reduce the number of people and animals on the map. Don’t keep 50 sheep and 100 cats and 100 dogs and so on. Cut those numbers severely. In the mean time use cages. Caged animals in small rooms behind closed doors don’t see very many people in any given frame, so the cost goes down. Plus you can sell the cages with the animals in them, which is nicer than simply butchering all of your puppies and kittens. Kick out some of the guests too. If you have public taverns, libraries, and/or temples with guests in them then either close them down or make them smaller. Focus on quality over quantity. (Actually for taverns and I guess temples I still recommend having a large room with a big square area with a nice floor and no furniture so that everyone can dance. If you haven’t seem them dance then you have been missing out!)
You can also consider changing the layout of your fortress. I don’t recommend going too far down this road, but even small changes can have large effects. Long corridors full of people are the most expensive, so try breaking line of sight using doors or corners. Put things on different floors instead of along a single long corridor. Naturally some players experimented with zig–zag corridors so that nobody can see more than a tile or two in any direction, which works, but of course that results in completely alien fortresses that feel terrible to the player.
Of course we could redefine the problem; make each mood check simpler, for example. We could simply leave some of the current factors out of the calculation, so that the calculations are cheaper to do. For example we could make the mood check ignore consanguinity. A dwarf’s reaction would depend only on whether they saw a friend or not, but not on whether they saw a cousin or a sister. That will allow us to scale to higher population counts, but we still face the fact that there will be _some_ population limit.
Or we could reduce n somehow. For example, we could arbitrarily decide that some of the population doesn’t participate in line of sight checks. Maybe livestock are never checked at all, so the 50 cats don’t make n bigger. But then your cats won’t run away from zombie invaders, because they don’t check line of sight to see what is around them. Is that acceptable? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it’s disappointing to to the game designer but they go ahead with the change because the players will still have fun.
The third thing to do is to optimize the mood checks so that they use the processor more efficiently. This is hard but doable, and can be done without changing the problem. And in fact it has already been done, to one extent or another. But modern processors are actually pretty hard to optimize for, and all the low–hanging fruit has been picked. For example, I have a 16–core CPU, and until a few years ago the game could only use one of those cores to run the line of sight checks on. The other 15 would be idle. That obviously leaves a lot of performance on the table. Now that the game uses all 16 cores equally you’ll find that n has gone up quite a lot. But it didn’t go from 100 to 1600, it went from 100 to about 400. 100²=10,000 line of sight mood checks, and 400²=160,000 mood checks. But once spread over 16 cores that’s still 10,000 per core! So now it can do the line of sight mood checks for a population of 400 in the same time as it could do them for a population of 100, only a 4× improvement. And if your CPU only has 8 cores then the new limit for you is really a population of about 283.
But there is still more processing power in our CPUs that is going untapped by DF, and language models are actually really good at making use of that power. A modern CPU can run SIMD, or Single Instruction Multiple Data, instructions that can operate on many values at once. It can multiply two numbers together, or it can multiply a vector of 4, 8, 16, or even 32 numbers together all at once. And multiplying the vectors takes the same amount of time as multiplying two ordinary numbers! All a language model is doing is repeated matrix multiplication, which boils down to multiplying lots of individual numbers together. An LLM is _only_ doing vector instructions on 32 half–width floats at a time, over and over again, but DF doesn’t have that luxury. Most of what DF does just cannot be done using vector math in any useful fashion. The graphics could be (sprite compositing), but DF sends all of the graphics over to the GPU instead. So LLMs are not an apples–to–apples comparison for Dwarf Fortress.
Obs: That experience was recent, at most 1y ago, and at the time I tried all fixes I could find including all "optimizations" and dfhack stuff.
Also, assuming DFhack still exists, you can try using it to clean up the messes and splatter which can bring it down a decent amount.
Fortress design may also have an impact on FPS from pathfinding according to some, but I had limited success in improving FPS through more optimized pathfinding designs, and the number of entities on the map still seemed like the biggest factor.
They got one of the DFHack contributors Putnam on as programmer to do some multi threading and moddabilty (exposing stuff for lua scripting), I'm not sure she is currently working on DF but she worked on it a bunch for the past 3 years, and also did some indepth talks about it on BlindIRLs channel:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcOt9GXNrkghcg_YOaX3FbF4K...
and if you find yourself blessed enough to be in that position does the road, then "reading HN" is a problem that solves itself ;)
If something you build brings in a lot of critique, it is likely something of great value. Because something that doesn't have value won't bring much critique at all.
Toady wasn't exactly raking in the cash, but he didn't need another job.
Something that keeps the world consistent while the user experiences a generated adventure
Given new AI tooling, what seemed unsurmountable before is getting into reach.
DF the world system and core engine.
A long read, but makes me laugh every time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatmurdered
https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/Introducti...
I humbly also submit the illustrated stories of Bronzemurder and Oilfurnace https://www.olddog.games/Oilfurnace https://www.olddog.games/Bronzemurder
and the story of Glasedcoast https://glazedcoast.neocities.org/
Love to hear of more. Even if im not actively playing, i always love a read.