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I never thought the ASCII graphics were a big problem in Dwarf Fortress; once you get used to it using a bunch of symbols as decoration, almost all the weird st
by jtolmar 7y ago
I never thought the ASCII graphics were a big problem in Dwarf Fortress; once you get used to it using a bunch of symbols as decoration, almost all the weird stuff ends up being things you placed yourself. On the other hand, the complete lack of UX consistency - whether a given submenu will use primary/secondary cursor keys, nested menus, or a pile of hotkeys - is a lot harder to deal with.
- TylerE 7y agoThe complete refusal to integrate any sort of meaningful mouse support is mind boggling.
- Lockyy 7y agoThe graphical version will have mouse support.
- danso 7y agoYeah that's the issue for me. I don't mind interpreting ASCII characters, but the UI/menu navigation feels intimidating. Rimworld will (I assume) never be the type of indepth simulation that DF is, but it spoiled me with its point-and-click GUI
- rstupek 7y agoI don't know if a point and click GUI precludes the depth of DF. If anything some things should be much easier to do with point and click. Factorio combines keyboard with point and click navigation and it has some depth to it.
- munk-a 7y agoI think good mouse support wouldn't remove the ability to navigate menus using keystrokes - but for tasks like drawing out farms, the dig squares for a residential block or dragging and dropping workshops into the right place... that's where I think it'll shine. I don't dislike the keyboard approach used right now but DF hack and it's digging templates has clearly demonstrated that folks feel the lack of good dig designation sorely.
- danso 7y agoI agree! I hope that's something the developers (eventually) builds out, as (hopefully) the Steam release brings in much deserved and new revenue. Tangentially, I remember the MoMA devoting a large chunk of a wall in its video game exhibit to the Dwarf Fortress ASCII display. The graphical tiles look great but the sheer density of ASCII definitely had retro appeal. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/164920 https://www.moma.org/collection/works/164920 https://www.flickr.com/photos/zokuga/6090624165/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/zokuga/6090624165/
- gnulinux 7y agoCompletely agree. ASCII graphics were completely fine, if not desirable. I loved playing DF but I also hated it at the same time because of the inconsistent UI. wasd vs. ijkl vs +- vs arrows vs ... almost nothing made sense to me until reading the manual. Granted, the game is fun enough that I always read the manual, but a good UI is intuitive UI. I hope this new effort fixes more than just graphics. I can't care less about ASCII vs pixel graphics, but UX needed to be improved imho.
- rstupek 7y agoI agree that the graphics (with mods) were acceptable but the inconsistent UI made it more difficult than it needed to be. Some of the AI could use some tweaks as well. It definitely is a fun game (dropping lava on an orc/troll army and watching them run was awesome)
- gnulinux 7y agoNever really advanced that much in the game to fight orcs. I just set up some good looking magma smelters, smelted whole bunch of jewels and sold them to caravan and elves and stuff. This was many years ago, I remember having a lot of fun, but also how excruciatingly tedious everything was. I remember setting dwarf tasks (allow/disallow) required a lot of micromanaging and DwarfTherapist didn't work well in linux. Regardless, amazing game, I hope devs solve the UX issue. I'd probably buy the game the day it's released.
- rstupek 7y agoPerhaps you put your fortress down in a place with no enemies... most games I would have to immediately setup a system to keep enemies out or they'd massacre everyone pretty quickly! Once I had a dragon come and lay waste to everything, burning down all of the trees outside and setting fire to all the hapless dwarves.
- gnulinux 7y agoNo, I would normally disable invasion. When I enabled invasion, I'd just lock my dwarfs in my fortress and not leave the fortress for a season and eventually goblins abandon the invasion. I just never figured out how to prepare an army and attack, so figured, I'd much rather focus on things like farming, smelting, jewelry etc.
- Supermancho 7y agoIt's a lot like languages that refuse to change syntax (Erlang vs Elixir, both still not that great on syntax) because it's a luddite adherence to cultural experience or thinking. It shows a disregard for users and a self-imposed barrier to adoption. DF is horrid for usability. Just because I can screenshot notepad, print it out, and send mail on a turtle, does suffice to say I support an e-mail feature. Military squad mechanics are as byzantine as you can get.
- xsmasher 7y agoThe 3D package "Blender" bit the bullet and revamped their entire UI over the course of many years/releases to (1) bring it in line with other applications (ctrl-c, ctrl-v should work everywhere) and (2) make more options visible in the UI, so that they were discoverable. It's been wildly successful. I hope Dwarf Fortress will have a similar refit over time.
- macintux 7y agoErlang has a very concise syntax that takes about a half hour to teach. “Not that great” is a very subjective observation.
- zionic 7y agoI completely disagree. The ASCII "graphics" (if you can really call them that) are a huge reason why I've never even considered playing it. I've read all about the mechanics, and they're interesting. I just don't understand why anyone would spend so much time developing so many intricate features when the presentation is so poor.
- VonGuard 7y agoBecause gameplay matters 10X as much as graphics.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- OscarTheGrinch 7y agoCan confirm this assertion. I spent years building pretty games, but often our games are trounced by a rival with by with crappier graphics and better gameplay.
- jers 7y agoI would normally agree, But hard to understand visuals (not intuitive) might discourage new players from trying the game. Those that do try the game will have a large cognitive load just to understand what is going on, and therefore will be unable to focus as much on the gameplay (that df is know for). So potential players and new players would be most affected.
- fishmaster 7y agoGameplay only starts to matter once UI and graphics are appropriate.
- kibwen 7y agoI don't fault you, but let's be charitable to Tarn here: the austere style is deliberately because he didn't want to spend any more time than necessary on the graphics, when what interested him most is the systems and the simulations (remember that DF has been a solo passion project for well over a decade now). His experience making the precursor to Dwarf Fortress (which is technically the second game in the series) is what led him to this conclusion, so it is not borne out of ignorance.
- kibwen 7y agoIn addition to DF I also play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a venerable (and actively developed!) roguelike with the classic ASCII look, and I'd like to present a counterpoint: once it became possible to play DCSS online using the graphical tiles interface rather than the ASCII look, new players overwhelmingly prefer the graphical. Stats that I have seen indicate >95% choose the graphical tiles. I myself still play both DCSS and DF in ASCII mode, but it seem reasonable to presume that the reason that old hands like us are fine with the ASCII look is because everyone who wasn't fine with it has self-selected themselves out of the sample. If their goal with the DF Steam release is to bring in new players (and compete with the likes of e.g. Rimworld, whose players are accustomed to graphics), then I see this as a sound decision. (And of course, seconded that DF's nonsensical command UI is going to continue to stymie their efforts here.)
- crooked-v 7y agoNot to mention the lack of mouse support.
- tetris11 7y agoNative yes, but I think DFHack enables that... or DwarfTherapist
- vanderZwan 7y agoSimilarly, Cogmind's success is partially because it learned all the hard-won lessons on good game UI of the last decades, plus the importance of a fancy tile-set: https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/ It does, however, also have the fanciest abstract ASCII graphics I've ever seen. (the other reason is that it's just a damn good game)
- VectorLock 7y agoNever knew this game existed. Love the aesthetic.
- pasabagi 7y ago
- robohamburger 7y agoI like how the ascii graphics look better but the fact that they are not square drives me crazy. I used tilesets when I was learning the game which I would recommend since it can be a lot to take in all at once.
- bmn__ 7y agohttp://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Tileset_repository#Square_tilesets http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Tileset_repository#Sq...
- whatsmyusername 7y agoPresentation still matters. It's why I have 1100+ hours in Rimworld and about 8 seconds in Dwarf Fortress.
- QuesnayJr 7y agoI don't mind ASCII graphics in general -- I used to play a lot of Rogue, Angband, and Nethack -- but DF is just so dense that I found it bewildering.
- cjhveal 7y agoI personally agree. A lot of those disagreeing with you find the ASCII graphics to be a barrier to initial entry, which is true, but it is a barrier that you can overcome quickly and feel quite comfortable with. On the other hand, having spent many hours with the game, the UX issues you mention are what block me from building fluid muscle memory and being able to really get into the game.
- fishmaster 7y agoNope, I tried it several times and I just can't stand ASCII graphics. I'd rather play Dota or anything else instead.
- cjhveal 7y agoFair enough-- for me a lot of the joy of the game is in using it as a collaborative story teller and filling in the gaps it gives me. Having underspecified graphics gives me more freedom with my mind's eye, but I can understand that not everyone approaches it the same way and wouldn't get the same out of it even with a lot of effort.
- outworlder 7y agoGraphics is not the main issue here. There are other issues that are much more important. Like the jobs interface. I don't want to have to run Dwarf Therapist alongside it, when games like Rimworld and ONI manage just fine.
- Octopodes 7y agoI've been playing for some time using dfhack's "autolabor" feature, and it streamlines things immensely. Granted, it ends up essentially just turning on every profession for every dwarf, but it's still possible to restrict workshops to certain dwarves. For example, you might have a carpentry workshop set to produce endless amounts of wooden shields, but only allow skilled carpenters access to it.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
- danaris 7y agoPersonally, I grew up playing Angband and Nethack with ASCII graphics. I still play DF (and DCSS, for that matter) with graphics. It's just so much easier to parse, doesn't require me to spend months "getting used to" the ASCII display (in addition to the rest of DF's arduous learning curve), and it's prettier to boot.
- wmil 7y agoWell there's that moment of panic where you aren't sure if it's a group of goblins or goats.
- yew 7y agoI always find this topic interesting, because it shows such a diversity of... aesthetic instinct? If you ask a dozen people why they don't like something that's known for being divisive, you can easily get a dozen different, incompatible answers. People talk about the subjectivity of beauty, but I've never felt like the sheer polarity of opinion gets enough emphasis... (For the record: Dwarf Fortress's controls never bothered me, and I've never been able to play without a tileset. The same for NetHack and other ASCII games.)
- dpc_pw 7y agoCame here to say the same thing. I know that ASCII is repuslive to a lot of people, but personally the UX inconsistency is kill the game for me. Every single thing in the game seem designed with a completely different UX idea, to the point it's almost impossible to build muscle memory.
- tialaramex 7y agoI'm torn here. I really agree with you about UI consistency as a priority but the restriction to typically a few dozen symbols in such software is ultimately too much and I think just adding graphics is the practical way forward. The graphics serve the game, that's critical. If there was a choice between a fantastically complicated ASCII-only Dwarf Fortress and a graphical version with half the features, that's a clear win for ASCII DF. But here the only downside to graphics is that they're very slightly more effort on some systems and the pay off is that the game is better in practice even if only slightly. In these present circumstances Board Game Arena https://boardgamearena.com/ https://boardgamearena.com/ is getting lots of extra attention because those of us used to playing board games socially can't go to someone's house to get infected with this virus and incidentally play board games. So we have to find another way (to do the latter obviously). Sites like Tabletopia virtualize the physical environment of a board game. A game that comes with forty wooden pieces now has forty 3D objects. Can you stack this cow on a house? Tabletopia doesn't know what rules are, so sure, just grab the cow 3D object and balance it on the house. This is amusing for a few minutes, then you realise it's every disadvantage of playing a "real" board game, but without any advantages. Who got most settlements in this game of Clans of Caledonia? Well, let's painstakingly count the 3D pieces, then argue about it. Over at BGA there's no problem, the machine is implementing the actual game (not just providing a generic 3D simulation) and so it shows exactly how many settlements you have at all times. The trade offs are different than for being there in person, but since we cannot be there in person it's an easy win right now for Board Game Arena in the opinion of myself (and apparently thousands of other people since they're having to do emergency scaling to handle several times more players at once in their lobbies).
- pnathan 7y agoBig same. Having a consistent menu system would be frickin' fabuluous. Art does very little here.
- grawprog 7y agoMy only problem with the default ASCII is the tile size. The 8x16 is just not that great for a game with as much information on the screen as dwarf fortress. My favourite are 16x16 mostly ASCII symbols. I think it's the guybrush tiles from the dwarf fortress wiki. I've never liked any of the full graphical tilesets. I find it a lot harder to keep track of everything on the screen, even when I figure out what the different tiles are supposed to be. The black background with clear discernible symbols of the ASCII and mostly ASCII tiles make it a lot easier to get information from a screen at a quick glance while you're scrolling around the map. That being said, I do like firing up stonesense and taking a look at the fortress from that perspective just because it's awesome and I still hope for the day some enterprising miracle worker creates a real time 3d renderer for dwarf fortress.