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To be honest, most people play dwarf fortress with considerably plugin assistance, including the much needed Dwarf therapist. However I feel like the complainin

To be honest, most people play dwarf fortress with considerably plugin assistance, including the much needed Dwarf therapist. However I feel like the complaining over the interface is really unnecessary, any interface would struggle with the level of depth that the game exposes. I feel like most would struggle to come up with a sensible interface for such a game...

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> any interface would struggle with the level of depth that the game exposes But there are plugins that make doing certain tasks much, much easier. So a reasonable interface can be made. DF's interface doesn't struggle, it lays down and moans.
- crooked-v 10y ago
  For an example, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a game that took the complexity of content-filled roguelikes (commands for every key on the keyboard, multiple mode-switches for many commands, layered tileset mapping, etc) and added a beautiful and easy-to-understand and accessible mouse-driven UI and graphical tileset to it, without harming pure-keyboard accessibility. It's completely possible, it just takes some effort.
  - lfowles 10y ago
    It should also be noted that the DCSS devs are pretty aggressive in cutting un-fun gameplay. (Example: One character will _always_ benefit from praying over a corpse? It automatically happens now.)
  - chongli 10y ago
    To be fair, DCSS's development team have taken a hacksaw to TONS of the game's more complex and esoteric features, all in the name of streamlining. This has made it a lot simpler than a game like NetHack, for example.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Really? Like what?
      - chongli 10y ago
        A few that I missed when they removed them: * Ignite poison against poisonous monsters * Twisted Resurrection, Simulacrum on chunks, Sublimation of blood on chunks/blood * Fulsome Distillation + Evaporate * Old Nemelex deck-granting system (sacrifice different stuff for specific decks) * Mountain Dwarves * The beehive
        kannanvijayan 10y ago
        They took out the beehive? Aww. That was one of my favourite lairs. Whenever I'd get poison resistance I'd gleefully head on back to where I found the entrance and clear it, gathering up my precious honeycombs. Clearing it as a non-poison-resistant wizard with mephitic cloud (confuse, run away, pick off) was a lot of fun too. A small grind, but a fun interlude.
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Wow. Now I get what 1d4chan meant when they said the game was gutting itself with each progressive update.
  - jerrycruncher 10y ago
    As someone who has played far too much Stone Soup (going back to when it was called Linley's Dungeon Crawl), and bounced, hard, off of Dwarf Fortress a number of times, I think that you're understating how much simpler, conceptually, Crawl is. DF is many, many orders of magnitude more complex than Crawl. Many.
    - crooked-v 10y ago
      DF's gameplay is more complex, but the interface is (or easily could be) functionally identical to Crawl's. Status area that shows the currently selected thing, menu with commands and submenus, viewport with layered graphical tiles, overlay dialogs for large menus.
- cannonpr 10y ago
  True, but i'd rather the brothers kept up the excellent work with the actual simulation, and just let others focus on the interface work via plugins. StoneSense and Dwarf therapist developers are doing an excellent job at enriching dwarf fortress.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    It would be nice if they would expose an API, or even add a plugin system - if only for the UI! - instead of letting people guess randomly at which bits of the brain to prod.
Natsu 10y ago
I found using DF to be about like using vi. It's a nightmare to start using it, but once you know exactly what to do, the interface becomes invisible to you. That said, there are definitely areas that could still be improved and I do use DT to manage skills, too.

pavel_lishin 10y ago

> any interface would struggle with the level of depth that the game exposes But there are plugins that make doing certain tasks much, much easier. So a reasonable interface can be made. DF's interface doesn't struggle, it lays down and moans.

crooked-v 10y ago
For an example, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a game that took the complexity of content-filled roguelikes (commands for every key on the keyboard, multiple mode-switches for many commands, layered tileset mapping, etc) and added a beautiful and easy-to-understand and accessible mouse-driven UI and graphical tileset to it, without harming pure-keyboard accessibility. It's completely possible, it just takes some effort.
- lfowles 10y ago
  It should also be noted that the DCSS devs are pretty aggressive in cutting un-fun gameplay. (Example: One character will _always_ benefit from praying over a corpse? It automatically happens now.)
- chongli 10y ago
  To be fair, DCSS's development team have taken a hacksaw to TONS of the game's more complex and esoteric features, all in the name of streamlining. This has made it a lot simpler than a game like NetHack, for example.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Really? Like what?
    - chongli 10y ago
      A few that I missed when they removed them: * Ignite poison against poisonous monsters * Twisted Resurrection, Simulacrum on chunks, Sublimation of blood on chunks/blood * Fulsome Distillation + Evaporate * Old Nemelex deck-granting system (sacrifice different stuff for specific decks) * Mountain Dwarves * The beehive
      - kannanvijayan 10y ago
        They took out the beehive? Aww. That was one of my favourite lairs. Whenever I'd get poison resistance I'd gleefully head on back to where I found the entrance and clear it, gathering up my precious honeycombs. Clearing it as a non-poison-resistant wizard with mephitic cloud (confuse, run away, pick off) was a lot of fun too. A small grind, but a fun interlude.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Wow. Now I get what 1d4chan meant when they said the game was gutting itself with each progressive update.
- jerrycruncher 10y ago
  As someone who has played far too much Stone Soup (going back to when it was called Linley's Dungeon Crawl), and bounced, hard, off of Dwarf Fortress a number of times, I think that you're understating how much simpler, conceptually, Crawl is. DF is many, many orders of magnitude more complex than Crawl. Many.
  - crooked-v 10y ago
    DF's gameplay is more complex, but the interface is (or easily could be) functionally identical to Crawl's. Status area that shows the currently selected thing, menu with commands and submenus, viewport with layered graphical tiles, overlay dialogs for large menus.
cannonpr 10y ago
True, but i'd rather the brothers kept up the excellent work with the actual simulation, and just let others focus on the interface work via plugins. StoneSense and Dwarf therapist developers are doing an excellent job at enriching dwarf fortress.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  It would be nice if they would expose an API, or even add a plugin system - if only for the UI! - instead of letting people guess randomly at which bits of the brain to prod.

Natsu 10y ago

I found using DF to be about like using vi. It's a nightmare to start using it, but once you know exactly what to do, the interface becomes invisible to you. That said, there are definitely areas that could still be improved and I do use DT to manage skills, too.