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Fun to note DF is a massive voxel simulation that displays a 2D slice as ascii. There's some neat third party visualizers that can hook into it's memory to sho
by jplur 11y ago
Fun to note DF is a massive voxel simulation that displays a 2D slice as ascii. There's some neat third party visualizers that can hook into it's memory to show more. http://i.imgur.com/PTj1QpL.jpg http://i.imgur.com/PTj1QpL.jpg
- scotty79 11y agoWow. I'd definitely play it with that UI. I often wonder why games almost never have swappable (or even just scriptable) UI-s that could allow player to use shorthands through UI drudgery.
- kbenson 11y agoFor many popular roguelike games different tilesets are common. Search for "dwarf fortress tileset".
- wagglycocks 11y agoI'd recommend installing the Lazy Newb Pack instead. It has all the tools and tileset you need preconfigured: http://lazynewbpack.com/ http://lazynewbpack.com/
- Raphmedia 11y agoNow that's what I needed to try this game. Last time I tried, I spent hours and hours downloading tools and never ever got to play the actual game!
- qznc 11y agoAlso read some introductions. Some tips like "no aquifer" for your first settlement really ease it. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_guide http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_gui...
- zyxley 11y ago> Wow. I'd definitely play it with that UI. You may want to take a look at Gnomoria (http://gnomoria.com http://gnomoria.com), which is basically "DF clone with sensible voxel graphics". For example: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/450671764424647409/AD6816CC9BDA03ED26D67C933BC596AC7C70737F/ http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/45067176442464... It's not a scriptable interface, but it is much saner than DF's, with a limited set of consistent hotkeys/toolbars/panels.
- bduerst 11y agoGnomoria is to Dwarf Fortress as Nano is to Vim. It's much easier to learn to play and fun, but it's about 1/10 the magnitude.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoDF badly needs that for the key combinations. They're complete nonsense, and in all the time I've spent playing, I've always needed a cheat-sheet for even the things I didn't do all that rarely. But I'm guessing that's not trivial to implement if you haven't already started doing it that way, and for something like Dwarf Fortress, it would probably be a lot of effort for not a significant amount of result - after all, everyone's already got their cheat sheet...
- coldpie 11y agoNitpick: It's not ASCII. It's simple 2D bitmaps. You can't play DF in a character console.
- Filligree 11y agoYou can, actually. I'm pretty sure the text output mode should still work. I wouldn't recommend it, because it's noticeably slower than the SDL or OpenGL renderers, but you can.
- stepvhen 11y agoI usually play it on a tty, partly because silly decisions, but also I can ssh into a my system that has it installed. I haven't seen a 'noticeable' slow down, but then again most of my forts barely make it to 80 dwarves.
- coldpie 11y agoHuh, I didn't know that, thanks. But still, the DF that most people recognize as DF is not an ASCII/text game, even though it looks kinda like it.
- rsync 11y agoHmmm.... that's always been my chief complaint about DF - that it isn't text/console based ... I don't want to run DF on my local system - I want my DF world running on a server in a rack somewhere and I connect over screen/SSH when I need to. Is that a sane use-case with recent DF releases ?
- dpedu 11y agoFrom my experience a few releases ago, the game is completely playable in text mode, over SSH. Like others have said, it's a little slower. I think some key combinations work differently too.
- jplur 11y agoI believe it was originally displaying extended ASCII in a nCurses console, and switched to bitmaps with SDL. The majority of the world is still visualized by those character codes and two colors, but entities can be assigned arbitrary sprites http://i.imgur.com/zuMdqbv.jpg http://i.imgur.com/zuMdqbv.jpg