28 ms·

How Dwarf Fortress is built

1130 points by andreareina 5y ago

reidjs 5y ago
I read everything about this game I can get my hands on. I don’t fully understand why I find dwarf fortress so intriguing. It’s such a pure passion project… that actually made it.
- dexwiz 5y ago
  It's the programming equivalent to the people who turn their houses into model train worlds. People dabble in it, or make a few toys of their own, but its rare to commit so hard.
- petercooper 5y ago
  Do you actually play it? I'm a bit the same about reading about it, yet I have never once played it for myself!
  - reidjs 5y ago
    I tried playing it like a decade or two ago. Couldn’t get past the ridiculous learning curve.
    - tastyfreeze 5y ago
      Its worth the effort and likely easier now than before. The myriad ways that a fortress can die amazes me. Its easy to get a fort that can survive invaders but ultimately your fortress will die. The number of times I have been nonplused by a new fortress failure is amazing. Those crazy dwarves keep finding new ways to destroy themselves.
    - tstrimple 5y ago
      This image is a reasonable estimation of the learning curve. https://i.stack.imgur.com/iECXl.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/iECXl.jpg
    - LeegleechN 5y ago
      They're working on a Steam release with a more accessible interface, including mouse support. I suggest trying it again when that comes out.
      - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
        Is there any timeline for the stream release? The release date on the store page just says, “Time is subjective.”
    - andi999 5y ago
      I just saw that O'Reilly published a book to help with that: https://www.amazon.de/Getting-Started-Dwarf-Fortress-complex/dp/1449314945 https://www.amazon.de/Getting-Started-Dwarf-Fortress-complex...
  - Arrath 5y ago
    Hah, this is like EVE Online for me. I love reading about the espionage and cloak and dagger and pure insanity, but other than a brief toe-dip...oh no I will not play it. DF lives in my blood, however.
    - eigenvalue 5y ago
      Totally agree on reading about EVE Online. This is a real classic if you haven’t seen it before, and actually contains a lot of very important notions for identifying Ponzi schemes: http://web.archive.org/web/20091026234156/http://geocities.com/currintrading/ http://web.archive.org/web/20091026234156/http://geocities.c...
      - willis936 5y ago
        "I put the isk in risk!"
        chupasaurus 5y ago
        The ultimate "Safety off" button is Undock.
      - setr 5y ago
        Use this date instead — the epilogue link fails in 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20080408110250/http://www.geocities.com/currintrading/ http://web.archive.org/web/20080408110250/http://www.geociti...
      - danuker 5y ago
        Thank you. I spent an hour reading this, and am probably better off financially in the real world because of it. There are lots of scams out there.
  - prepend 5y ago
    I love reading about it, but have played for maybe 30 minutes. The game doesn’t intrigue me, but the building of it does. Same for Minecraft and similar. Figuring out the software and the cool way it came into existence is the problem to solve, actually playing it is (perhaps incorrectly) predictable details and so boring.
  - minsc__and__boo 5y ago
    I've put in probably over a thousand hours on it, and have played it over the years as new releases come out. I've gotten to the point where I usually hit FPS death (too large a fortress that it overloads the CPU) even on the harder starts and with dfhack to help. The draw for me was the steep learning curve that rewards you with logical complexity when you finally understand it. The lore that your fortress generates, as well as the random stories, is just icing on the cake. It's definitely not for everyone though since the UI requires additional programs like DF Therapist and DF Hack to be manageable still.
    - outworlder 5y ago
      For me, the reason I have stopped playing is that I have issues managing migrants. There are just too many dwarves to care for. Even DF Therapist doesn't (or didn't?) really help micromanaging jobs. It becomes tedious quickly. I remember seeing something about auto-allocating jobs, but it didn't work for me.
      - praptak 5y ago
        Most hardcore players set limits on the number of dwarves. This helps both with the micromanagement and with FPS.
      - curtainsforus 5y ago
        That's why many players had methods for 'taking care of' migrants
  - AndyMcConachie 5y ago
    If DF is too daunting try RimWorld. It's based mostly on DF, but has graphics and is considerably more approachable. It's also heavily modded and with mods can get just as complicated as DF can.
- milgrim 5y ago
  I am the same. I also started to play a few times, but not knowing the mechanics and not having enough time/motivation to learn them in detail is frustrating. But there’s a nice alternative: https://youtube.com/c/kruggsmash https://youtube.com/c/kruggsmash Watching someone else play Dwarf Fortress can be surprisingly entertaining. Just start one of his series from the start.
  - devenvdev 5y ago
    My favorite gaming youtuber. They are somewhat similar with Tarn, also a pure passion project that made it, with all the hand drawn pictures and down to earth approach.
    - milgrim 5y ago
      I agree. That’s why both get a bit from me on Patreon.
- setr 5y ago
  Games are interactive simulations, by nature. DF is an honest attempt at simulating things thoroughly. Therefore, DF is an honest attempt at making a thorough game. Very few games can make such a claim
  - b0rsuk 5y ago
    Your reply is somewhat self-contradictory. If games are interactive simulations by nature, why is DF so unusual? There is a trend to call many modern games "immersive sims" and somehow they don't produce such stories. In my opinion game developers have mostly stopped trying to simulate things. The focus is on clothes, rigid crafting systems, skill trees, storyline, cutscenes, vehicles, item collection. It's sandboxes, not simulations. Does Witcher 3 have emergence? Does GTA? Compare that to Bullfrog, a game company which made simulations almost exclusively. In the 90's "simulation" was a game genre.
    - setr 5y ago
      > If games are interactive simulations by nature, why is DF so unusual? It’s an honest attempt at making a thorough simulation. Most games attempt only shallow rules and simulations — nearly everything that happens in Witcher 3 is encoded precisely, with few knock-on effects (because there’s nothing underneath the immediate effect + visualization — what’s modeled is precisely what you see); leading to the lack of emergent behavior. You’re dealing with a fairly rudimentary and static system. GTA is more flexible, but ultimately nothing follows any particular logic that doesn’t revolve around the player. More notably, in both games, if the player doesn’t exist, the world can no longer reasonably operate. Simulation is inherent to game design, but very few games actively work towards it, as you’ve seen. The simulation games of the 90’s were in the right vein — they faltered for practical reasons. As a result, they often make for thorough simulations that are dishonest — the internal logic of the simulation is violated for reasons of hardware limitations, UX simplicity, fun, etc. Tornados happen because it’s fun. DF is honest in the sense that it is only compromised by Tarn’s inability to implement something (and practical impact — it’s not worth trying to model atoms when fluid dynamics will suffice). I don’t mean that DF produces a “realistic” simulation (as a climate scientist might) but that he produces a uncompromisingly logically consistent one (as a fiction author might)
- totetsu 5y ago
  I used to love falling asleep to the DFTalk podcast..
hprotagonist 5y ago
Making the item system polymorphic was ultimately a mistake, but that was a big one. Q: Why was this was a mistake? A: When you declare a class that’s a kind of item, it locks you into that structure much more tightly than if you just have member elements. It’s nice to be able to use virtual functions and that kind of thing, but the tradeoffs are just too much. I started using a “tool” item in the hierarchy, which started to get various functionality, and can now support anything from a stepladder to a beehive to a mortar (and pestle, separately, ha ha), and it just feels more flexible, and I wish every crafted item in the game were under that umbrella. We do a lot of procedural generation, and if we wanted to, say, generate an item that acts partially like one thing and partially like another, it’s just way harder to do that when you are locked down in a class hierarchy. Preach: https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part-one/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part... https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/30/wizards-and-warriors-part-two/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/30/wizards-and-warriors-part... https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/04/wizards-and-warriors-part-three/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/04/wizards-and-warriors-part... https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/07/wizards-and-warriors-part-four/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/07/wizards-and-warriors-part... https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/11/wizards-and-warriors-part-five/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/11/wizards-and-warriors-part... I have certainly committed all of these sins, too.
- mushishi 5y ago
  > We no longer have the problem of trying to fit “a wizard can only use a staff or dagger” into the type system of the C# language. We have no reason to believe that the C# type system was designed to have sufficient generality to encode the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, so why are we even trying? Good point! Skimmed the blog posts, seemed to have useful enumeration of techniques with considerations.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  this is a pretty good series of posts but I was rather surprised at where the series ended, with more (hypothetical) OOP abstraction instead of less. trying to fit game rules into a language's type system is a common thing for novice programmers to attempt, because it seems like the perfect logical application of these type system rules you just learned about when learning the language you're using. I kept expecting the article series to get around to reducing the system down to something like a Player class with a PlayerClass enum and member (and ditto for Weapon), then branching logic based on that, instead of trying to pack it into the type system.
chaostheory 5y ago
To me what was most surprising about Dwarf Fortress, given the complexity, is that Tad didn’t use git or any other code repository until more recently.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Why would that be surprising? For a single programmer working alone Git is an incredibly complicated tool. P.S.: A lot of you are confusing "complicated" with "difficult".
  - Pet_Ant 5y ago
    Or any other is the point. I mean even locally I depend on commits as save points to just allow me to go crazy and experiment with the code. I mean you can just copy the codebase elsewhere as backup but using git or mercurial is easier than that.
    - nolok 5y ago
      Not saying you're wrong, but to explain "how is that possible over 20 years without ever blowing things up": he says he uses visual studio since the beggining (the full blown ide). Since he's working alone, he can easily use the local backup feature of it, which allow to easily rollback to automatically made copies of files, diff and cherry pick between current and backups, etc ... It's basically done automatically for you. As long as you save your project regularly and don't need to merge code with anyone, it can go a long way.
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Actually extremely easy. Git add -a, git commit, git push. It only gets complicated if you try to do complicated things.
    - nhooyr 5y ago
      I believe it's: git add -A With a capital A.
jandeboevrie 5y ago
Df is just like OpenTTD. Both are like Chess, easy to start, fun to play casually but it takes years to master. Great games, complex if you want to and a time sink if you don't keep an eye on it. Have had many hundreds of fun hours in both games
- DizzyDoo 5y ago
  I've played a fair amount of Dwarf Fortress and I'd never describe it as 'easy to start'? The learning curve is notorious and for most people involves watching a lot of YouTube tutorials and copying actions. I'm hopeful that the upcoming Kitfox Games version makes it very accessible to lots more people.
- anthk 5y ago
  Eh, Chess it's much more complex than Slashem to me, and I never ascended in Nethack/Slashem/DCSS.
- short_sells_poo 5y ago
  I agree with the spirit of your post, but Dwarf Fortress and Easy to Start do not fit in the same sentence in my opinion. I mean, the game is legendary for it's arcane user interface and the vast number of things that can go wrong even for experts. Dwarf Fortress is something like vim, where usually on the first interaction people don't even know how to start the game, let alone do anything in it. Chess is easy to start, the rules fit on a post it note basically. Dwarf Fortress is difficult to start, and even more difficult to master.
  - devenvdev 5y ago
    When I first started playing DF it took me all day reading the wiki... Next week was spent on trying to survive the first winter... As a 15 years vim user though - vim has a much more gradual but also much higher learning curve, I'm still learning new tricks in vim on a weekly basis.
  - Agentlien 5y ago
    I love Dwarf Fortress and play it quite actively. I've been using Vim as my primary IDE for many years. That said, I wouldn't compare Dwarf Fortress to Vim. Vim is mainly difficult to get into because the model itself is so different from what people are used to and there's inherent complexity. But, quirks aside, it's mostly very consistent and learning a few patterns will get you very far. In Dwarf Fortress you need to fight not only incredible complexity, but also so very much bad UI/UX and inconsistencies between what should have been identical actions. A great example is searching a list of items. This is done with q for query. Or sometimes s for search. And in some cases f for filter. Or even better, the way k, v, t, q, are all just needles variants of "look at thing under cursor". And none of them work for some activity zones such as pastures, then you need i. As much as I love DF I'm very much looking forward to the Steam version, mainly for the UI overhaul, which is so far looking really promising.
markus_zhang 5y ago
IMO that's one of the best ways a single programmer can spend his career. No weird requirements, no deadlines, no nothing, nada. Just one's passion and a product. Whether it is successful is irrelevant. Kudos Mr. Adams for making the achievement and moves gaming history. Going back to the interview, I found this line (and the logic attached) interesting: >Making the item system polymorphic was ultimately a mistake, but that was a big one. >When you declare a class that’s a kind of item, it locks you into that structure much more tightly than if you just have member elements. I guess when the game becomes moderately complex then ECS or something similar suddenly makes a lot sense.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Everything about it is wonderful (I really mean that) except the fact that he's sponging off his mother to do it. I can't help but feel that it's a drop of vinegar that spoils the whole cup of milk
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    I think it's OK as long as they feel it's OK. We can say that his mother "sponsors" the project.
    - wly_cdgr 5y ago
      Edit: I was wrong about how much he is relying on his family - didn't realize how much Patreon support the project now has compared to when I last looked. My bad, should have checked. I still agree with the below in the abstract but I retract my criticism in this case I can get with that take when it comes to Patreon but it's harder to demonstrate ok-ness-with-it with family. Let's say she's really not all that jazzed about it, actually. What is she gonna do, throw her son out on the street? A lot of parents don't have it in them to do that even if they think they would be justified and it would be the best thing for their child. An adult shouldn't put their parents in that position. He should be making sure his mom is provided for, not the other way around
      - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wly_cdgr 5y ago
If you like this, you may also enjoy this Tarn Adams talk at NYU GameCenter's 2016 PRACTICE conference https://youtu.be/yDPb0jqRr3o https://youtu.be/yDPb0jqRr3o
_peeley 5y ago
Dwarf Fortress consumed hundreds of hours of my life in high school, I have so many fond memories of it. Every year or so I come back to it and I'm always surprised that they've managed to add another mechanic or feature that just makes the game feel even more like its own little universe. After enough time in the game there really is a moment like that scene in the Matrix - "I don't even see the ASCII anymore. All I see is dwarf, plump helmet, magnetite ore." That said, I've always wondered if Dwarf Fortress would be a more smooth experience if it had more developers or was just open source (understandable that it's not though since it's basically Tad's passion project). The biggest headache was always the lack of multithreading, since your fortress really starts to chug once you pass maybe 150 dwarves or do anything exciting with fluids. Regardless, it's amazing what one developer with a great idea and an enthusiastic community has been able to do with the game.
- fridif 5y ago
  Passion project? It is the sole source of his income.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    It might be both.
  - Octopodes 5y ago
    He's lucky enough for it to be both.
  - Yajirobe 5y ago
    Lichess is Thibault's source of income, passion project, AND it is open-source.
    - fridif 5y ago
      I suspect that Thibault is making money from it because he is actually deploying a web service, and the value there is coming from the network effects of its multiplayer user base. Even if I deployed his code tonight, there's no guarantee users would switch over to my LeeChess clone :) In the case of Dwarf Fortress it's just "download my exe and please donate if you like it!"
mabbo 5y ago
> What’s your favorite bug and what caused it? > A: It’s probably boring for me to say, but I just can’t beat the drunken cat bug... That was the one where the cats were showing up dead all over the tavern floor, and it turned out they were ingesting spilled alcohol when they cleaned their paws. I think that bug explains very well just how deeply complex Dwarf Fortress really is. Drinks can be spilled. Some drinks have alcohol. If cats step in something it sticks to their paws. Cats clean their paws, causing them to ingest what's on them. Enough alcohol will kill a cat. Put together: dead drunken cats.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Unfortunately it remains unexplained (by the article) why this is considered a bug. It would be unethical to test, but this seems like perfectly cromulent behavior one might actually see in real life.
  - paavohtl 5y ago
    IIRC the actual bug was that cats licking their paws made them consume an entire tankard's worth of beer with each lick, which made them drunk (and dead) with just a few licks.
    - Arrath 5y ago
      Yeah this is what I recall being the case as well.
  - yung_steezy 5y ago
    I agree these types of features really embiggen the game
    - beamatronic 5y ago
      They're perfectly cromulent features.
      - 5y ago
100011_100001 5y ago
This is a little bit of a hijack but if I wanted to start coding games as a side project, where would I start? Which platform? Mobile, PC, console? Any good introductions on the subject of solo game development? I know I can google this, but I trust HN users more than the Google algo.
- darkandbrooding 5y ago
  I recommend Godot ( https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ ). It solves many of the problems you suggested.
- ljp_206 5y ago
  I'm not much of a game programmer, but lurk /r/gamedev. The common advice is to start small - think toys rather than MMOs. From there, it's said one should follow what they're interested in, and focus on follow-thru, not tacking on features to their dream game that is supposed to compete with Skyrim. Console development is always going to be more trouble than the more open platforms of computers and phones. Myself, I've always thought it'd be pretty fun to make a menu-heavy game with just web technology, which then of course CAN be played anywhere. There are lots of engines out there that can take care of things for you, or act as full fledged studios, like Game Maker. Some prefer to start from scratch of course. Again, the idea should be follow what you're interested in so that you can actually get something done.
- Octopodes 5y ago
  Check out this itch page for some suggestions: https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2020 https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2020 Scroll down to the " Help—I’ve never created a game before!" section and there are some suggestions like Phaser or Godot.
  - 100011_100001 5y ago
    Thanks, this is a good starting point.
- mhitza 5y ago
  I second Godot. You can make cross platform/mobile games with it. The IDE itself is built with the engine which is rather cool. Fair warning, the syntax is python inspired but not compatible, which most of the time that will trip you up. My second suggestion, is for your first project to develop a top down 2D (instead of a classical side scroller), using itch.io assets. To get a nice jump feeling for a side scroller 2D game, you straight ahead have to start using a state machine and fiddle a bunch, no hand holding with that.
vtail 5y ago
I know I will regret asking it… but what’s the modern way of starting playing DF?
- pradn 5y ago
  There's an officially-supported skin with good sprite-based graphics. It's still a bit in progress however. https://www.kitfoxgames.com/press/sheet.php?p=dwarf_fortress https://www.kitfoxgames.com/press/sheet.php?p=dwarf_fortress
- Inviz 5y ago
  Wait for steam version
  - devenvdev 5y ago
    Or don't if you want the full "meta" experience.
- hobs 5y ago
  An article for you https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Utility:Lazy_Newb_Pack https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Utility:Lazy_Newb_Pa...
- sjfkejrnakcijdj 5y ago
  Not exactly modern, but the Captain Duck Dwarf Fortess Video Tutorial[1] is still a great tutorial. [1]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5A3D7682BDD48FC2 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5A3D7682BDD48FC2
- AQuantized 5y ago
  The Wiki is probably the most up to date resource: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_guide https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_gu... It's really not that difficult once you get started, especially if you're used to learning some esoteric keybinds.
  - Agentlien 5y ago
njharman 5y ago
I thought it was developed by the two brothers? I've seen talks and interviews by both brothers on DF. like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRsScwdPcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRsScwdPcE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtKmLciKO30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtKmLciKO30
- psyc 5y ago
  This is StackOverflow, and the interview is about code, so they probably mean developer in that sense. Tarn is the only programmer.
- mtekman 5y ago
  One of the brothers is the main developer and ideas guy, the other is more the admin/idea control/art role
njharman 5y ago
If you like "small time" devs / roguelike programming the Roguelike Celebration conference YTs is excellent https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKv_QzXft4mD6TXmQBZtzIA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKv_QzXft4mD6TXmQBZtzIA
TheLocehiliosan 5y ago
Once I spent about a week struggling to create a DF config that defined the key bindings to be vi-like consistently throughout the game. I failed.
orf 5y ago
I tried to play DF. I even got over the ASCII interface. But honestly Rimworld is better and a bit deeper.
- jtms 5y ago
  Rimworld is phenomenal… I absolutely love it, but I wish it had z-levels and the fluid sim of DF. Nothing is more fun than accidentally flooding your fortress with magma!
- rcxdude 5y ago
  Rimworld is a better game but not really the deeper sim (I feel like it worked on distilling a lot of what made dwarf fortress compelling while making it much more accessible, and part of that is simplifying).
- dkbrk 5y ago
  I really can't agree. Rimworld might be more accessible, but it lacks DF's depth of simulation. Even if you ignore details in DF that are generally unimportant (e.g. all the intricate details of a dwarf's personality and the precise genetics of their facial hair), Rimworld's lack of 3D and fluid simulation alone make it vastly simpler. But what really annoyed me about Rimworld, and why I never really got into it, was how "gamey" it feels. One element is, the mechanics of random events, which feel extremely arbitrary. I'm not talking about random animals coming onto the map, that's little different from a legendary beast turning up in DF, but things like a solar event causing all your batteries to blow up for no reason. And random events seem to happen every few minutes. Whereas in DF, pretty much everything that happens, happens for a reason. There's randomness, but it's not completely random. If your fortress is wealthy, it will attract invasions. Forgotten beasts actually exist on the world map and have a history. That sort of thing. In addition to that, crafting and combat are extremely simplistic compared to DF. In DF, bootstrapping an economy which can actually craft everything you need from scratch is actually fairly difficult and requires significant planning and investment. Many things require multiple stages of processing, and it can be very hard to find the particular raw material you need. In Rimworld, you pick up a few raw materials and can manufacture an assault rifle in a couple of minutes. And that assault rifle doesn't need ammunition, and is hopelessly inaccurate beyond 10m or so, for some reason. Compare that to DF where when a dwarf shoots a crossbow it actually does a 3D simulation of the bolt's trajectory. And in the background it's also simulating things like the bolt's temperature, and when it hits the target, it determines what happens based on the density and strength of the bolt's material and the material of whatever it hit.
mattlondon 5y ago
I always wanted to love DF but I could never get into it. Perhaps it was the ASCII. I found Rimworld to scratch the same itch and have sunk many hours into it. I feel like it is spiritually very similar, even if the depth of simulation is not as deep as DF.
the_af 5y ago
I love the idea of Dwarf Fortress and I think the internet purest mission is to disseminate works of passion such as this, not to sell me ads instead. That said, I can't get past the ASCII interface -- I'm a huge fan of IF games (which used to be called "text adventures" in the olden days) and I can deal with spartan UIs, but for real-time strategy/sandbox games, I absolutely need some sort of graphics. Tiles, at least. The same happens to me with Nethack, which fortunately does have graphical tilesets. I'm glad to read Toady One is working on such a UI! Something I found insightful about TFA was this: > Q: With your ~90 side projects, have you explored any other programming languages? If so, any favorites? > A: Ha ha, nope! I’m more of a noodler over on the design side, rather than with the tech. I’m sure some things would really speed up the realization of my designs though, so I should probably at least learn some scripting and play around with threading more. People have even been kind enough to supply some libraries and things to help out there, but it’s just difficult to block side project time out for tech learning when my side project time is for relaxing. This is interesting. I constantly feel the temptation to learn new tools, new languages, new stuff. I get sidetracked by the tech. But the key to successful games seems to be designing them and sticking to the work of making them work no matter the tech or language. If Toady had kept playing with programming languages and frameworks instead of sticking to his actual project -- creating a game -- maybe Dwarf Fortress wouldn't exist, or it wouldn't be as featureful.
- teataster 5y ago
  Have you tried playing with tilesets? I feel they make the experience easier on the eyes.
- JonathanFly 5y ago
  >I love the idea of Dwarf Fortress and I think the internet purest mission is to disseminate works of passion such as this, not to sell me ads instead. That said, I can't get past the ASCII interface -- I'm a huge fan of IF games (which used to be called "text adventures" in the olden days) and I can deal with spartan UIs, but for real-time strategy/sandbox games, I absolutely need some sort of graphics. You can see the new tileset in action here, demoed by Tarn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlzCrJS1Fho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlzCrJS1Fho
intended 5y ago
So many projects in this game. I had one which involved trying to build a base, capture a dragon and start a breeding program. Which failed - so I ended up abandoning, starting a new base on top of a dragon lair, capturing said dragon, leaving the base, then starting an adventurer who carried the caged dragon in a mine cart across the map to the original base. It did not work. The version didn’t allow for the new adventurer to become a resident of the original base. Futzed around with dfhack to force residence permissions and so on, ended up breaking the game and changing the species or some other weird bug. But I did learn that adventure mode mine carts are ridiculously fast. As in survival is highly unlikely fast. There was a lot of saving and reloads due to the difficulty of banking turns at speeds that outran cheetahs.
umvi 5y ago
My favorite TIL about this game is that it is developed completely without VCS like git.
ambivalence 5y ago
Meta-question to the mods: why would you edit the original title of this entry? Feels somewhat interventionist.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  I agree, I thought the full title was better and more relevant.
  - meibo 5y ago
    Sometimes the rule is to not editorialize, sometimes you get slapped for it, other times the hall monitors step in to change the title after the fact because they don't like the article's actual title. They want you to remove clickbait numbers so maybe that's what happened here. Don't think too much about it.
robertwt7 5y ago
It’s amazing that he’s doing the same thing for those long. I think that’s the definition of passion, I really want to find some projects/startups that make me fee like that as a SE. That’s the dream, hope he keeps it up!
smoldesu 5y ago
Dwarf Fortress was a staple of my childhood, even if I only understood maybe 5% of the mechanics going on at any given time (even back when I used to play it). That was part of the appeal though: if you could learn how to do something in Dwarf Fortress, it felt like an accomplishment. Learning to dig better bases is a several-hour research project, and simple tasks like brewing beer can proliferate into any number of different problems. This kind of trial-and-error problem solving is probably responsible for getting me into development. Nowadays though, I mostly play Rimworld for my colony management fix. I love Dwarf Fortress, but I could never comfortably learn it's mechanics in a lifetime (let alone several). Even still, the emergent, chaotic gameplay of Dwarf Fortress should be picked apart by any budding game developers. Even after 15 years of playing PC games, Dwarf Fortress still feels the most "next gen" out of them all.
TKZZ 5y ago
In case anyone is interested in trying out DF, I recommend using the "Lazy Newb Pack". It provides a nifty GUI that lets you use different texture packs and change some settings that can improve enjoyment (cap population, remove aquifers, etc.) http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=126076.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=126076.0
rntksi 5y ago
A previous discussion with Tarn Adams: [1] I really liked how he explains generating the map. [1]: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/343859/QA_Dissecting_the_development_of_Dwarf_Fortress_with_creator_Tarn_Adams.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/343859/QA_Dissecting_the...
guyzero 5y ago
Still waiting to read WHY Dwarf Fortress is built
habibur 5y ago
My biggest take from this : > When you declare a class that’s a kind of item, it locks you into that structure much more tightly than if you just have member elements. It’s nice to be able to use virtual functions and that kind of thing, but the tradeoffs are just too much. Aka, OOP is a bad design even when you take the benefits of its virtual method system. Stick with struct and functions.
someperson 5y ago
What's surprising to me is Dwarf Fortress author uses Visual Studio Community, rather than the paid version of that IDE: > "In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or >$1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above." Surely there has been years where his revenue has exceeded $1 million.
- bojo 5y ago
  He posts his revenue. http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=177791.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=177791.0
  - someperson 5y ago
    Oh, that's not that much revenue: > 2020: $130801.30 > 2019: $119133.25 > 2018: $92558.50 > 2017: $83491.24 > 2016: $89423.38 > 2015: $60603.43 > 2014: $66765.31 > 2013: $48999.11 > 2012: $57854.88 > 2011: $42294.19 > 2010: $54501.15 > 2009: $32516.44 > 2008: $32318.46 > 2007: $19052.28 Once he releases the paid Steam version with updated graphics he'll likely be making millions in revenue though.
    - Agentlien 5y ago
      Considering this revenue is entirely made up of donations I feel it's actually quite impressive.
- ramshanker 5y ago
  WinRar 40 day trial, It is.
Arech 5y ago
I just take my hat off to Toady. DF is a masterpiece.
animal531 5y ago
The game is coming to Steam sometime, and with a new GUI interface.

1130 points by andreareina 5y ago

I read everything about this game I can get my hands on. I don’t fully understand why I find dwarf fortress so intriguing. It’s such a pure passion project… that actually made it.

dexwiz 5y ago
It's the programming equivalent to the people who turn their houses into model train worlds. People dabble in it, or make a few toys of their own, but its rare to commit so hard.
petercooper 5y ago
Do you actually play it? I'm a bit the same about reading about it, yet I have never once played it for myself!
- reidjs 5y ago
  I tried playing it like a decade or two ago. Couldn’t get past the ridiculous learning curve.
  - tastyfreeze 5y ago
    Its worth the effort and likely easier now than before. The myriad ways that a fortress can die amazes me. Its easy to get a fort that can survive invaders but ultimately your fortress will die. The number of times I have been nonplused by a new fortress failure is amazing. Those crazy dwarves keep finding new ways to destroy themselves.
  - tstrimple 5y ago
    This image is a reasonable estimation of the learning curve. https://i.stack.imgur.com/iECXl.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/iECXl.jpg
  - LeegleechN 5y ago
    They're working on a Steam release with a more accessible interface, including mouse support. I suggest trying it again when that comes out.
    - opinion-is-bad 5y ago
      Is there any timeline for the stream release? The release date on the store page just says, “Time is subjective.”
  - andi999 5y ago
    I just saw that O'Reilly published a book to help with that: https://www.amazon.de/Getting-Started-Dwarf-Fortress-complex/dp/1449314945 https://www.amazon.de/Getting-Started-Dwarf-Fortress-complex...
- Arrath 5y ago
  Hah, this is like EVE Online for me. I love reading about the espionage and cloak and dagger and pure insanity, but other than a brief toe-dip...oh no I will not play it. DF lives in my blood, however.
  - eigenvalue 5y ago
    Totally agree on reading about EVE Online. This is a real classic if you haven’t seen it before, and actually contains a lot of very important notions for identifying Ponzi schemes: http://web.archive.org/web/20091026234156/http://geocities.com/currintrading/ http://web.archive.org/web/20091026234156/http://geocities.c...
    - willis936 5y ago
      "I put the isk in risk!"
      - chupasaurus 5y ago
        The ultimate "Safety off" button is Undock.
    - setr 5y ago
      Use this date instead — the epilogue link fails in 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/20080408110250/http://www.geocities.com/currintrading/ http://web.archive.org/web/20080408110250/http://www.geociti...
    - danuker 5y ago
      Thank you. I spent an hour reading this, and am probably better off financially in the real world because of it. There are lots of scams out there.
- prepend 5y ago
  I love reading about it, but have played for maybe 30 minutes. The game doesn’t intrigue me, but the building of it does. Same for Minecraft and similar. Figuring out the software and the cool way it came into existence is the problem to solve, actually playing it is (perhaps incorrectly) predictable details and so boring.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  I've put in probably over a thousand hours on it, and have played it over the years as new releases come out. I've gotten to the point where I usually hit FPS death (too large a fortress that it overloads the CPU) even on the harder starts and with dfhack to help. The draw for me was the steep learning curve that rewards you with logical complexity when you finally understand it. The lore that your fortress generates, as well as the random stories, is just icing on the cake. It's definitely not for everyone though since the UI requires additional programs like DF Therapist and DF Hack to be manageable still.
  - outworlder 5y ago
    For me, the reason I have stopped playing is that I have issues managing migrants. There are just too many dwarves to care for. Even DF Therapist doesn't (or didn't?) really help micromanaging jobs. It becomes tedious quickly. I remember seeing something about auto-allocating jobs, but it didn't work for me.
    - praptak 5y ago
      Most hardcore players set limits on the number of dwarves. This helps both with the micromanagement and with FPS.
    - curtainsforus 5y ago
      That's why many players had methods for 'taking care of' migrants
- AndyMcConachie 5y ago
  If DF is too daunting try RimWorld. It's based mostly on DF, but has graphics and is considerably more approachable. It's also heavily modded and with mods can get just as complicated as DF can.
milgrim 5y ago
I am the same. I also started to play a few times, but not knowing the mechanics and not having enough time/motivation to learn them in detail is frustrating. But there’s a nice alternative: https://youtube.com/c/kruggsmash https://youtube.com/c/kruggsmash Watching someone else play Dwarf Fortress can be surprisingly entertaining. Just start one of his series from the start.
- devenvdev 5y ago
  My favorite gaming youtuber. They are somewhat similar with Tarn, also a pure passion project that made it, with all the hand drawn pictures and down to earth approach.
  - milgrim 5y ago
    I agree. That’s why both get a bit from me on Patreon.
setr 5y ago
Games are interactive simulations, by nature. DF is an honest attempt at simulating things thoroughly. Therefore, DF is an honest attempt at making a thorough game. Very few games can make such a claim
- b0rsuk 5y ago
  Your reply is somewhat self-contradictory. If games are interactive simulations by nature, why is DF so unusual? There is a trend to call many modern games "immersive sims" and somehow they don't produce such stories. In my opinion game developers have mostly stopped trying to simulate things. The focus is on clothes, rigid crafting systems, skill trees, storyline, cutscenes, vehicles, item collection. It's sandboxes, not simulations. Does Witcher 3 have emergence? Does GTA? Compare that to Bullfrog, a game company which made simulations almost exclusively. In the 90's "simulation" was a game genre.
  - setr 5y ago
    > If games are interactive simulations by nature, why is DF so unusual? It’s an honest attempt at making a thorough simulation. Most games attempt only shallow rules and simulations — nearly everything that happens in Witcher 3 is encoded precisely, with few knock-on effects (because there’s nothing underneath the immediate effect + visualization — what’s modeled is precisely what you see); leading to the lack of emergent behavior. You’re dealing with a fairly rudimentary and static system. GTA is more flexible, but ultimately nothing follows any particular logic that doesn’t revolve around the player. More notably, in both games, if the player doesn’t exist, the world can no longer reasonably operate. Simulation is inherent to game design, but very few games actively work towards it, as you’ve seen. The simulation games of the 90’s were in the right vein — they faltered for practical reasons. As a result, they often make for thorough simulations that are dishonest — the internal logic of the simulation is violated for reasons of hardware limitations, UX simplicity, fun, etc. Tornados happen because it’s fun. DF is honest in the sense that it is only compromised by Tarn’s inability to implement something (and practical impact — it’s not worth trying to model atoms when fluid dynamics will suffice). I don’t mean that DF produces a “realistic” simulation (as a climate scientist might) but that he produces a uncompromisingly logically consistent one (as a fiction author might)
totetsu 5y ago
I used to love falling asleep to the DFTalk podcast..

hprotagonist 5y ago

Making the item system polymorphic was ultimately a mistake, but that was a big one. Q: Why was this was a mistake? A: When you declare a class that’s a kind of item, it locks you into that structure much more tightly than if you just have member elements. It’s nice to be able to use virtual functions and that kind of thing, but the tradeoffs are just too much. I started using a “tool” item in the hierarchy, which started to get various functionality, and can now support anything from a stepladder to a beehive to a mortar (and pestle, separately, ha ha), and it just feels more flexible, and I wish every crafted item in the game were under that umbrella. We do a lot of procedural generation, and if we wanted to, say, generate an item that acts partially like one thing and partially like another, it’s just way harder to do that when you are locked down in a class hierarchy. Preach: https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part-one/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part... https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/30/wizards-and-warriors-part-two/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/30/wizards-and-warriors-part... https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/04/wizards-and-warriors-part-three/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/04/wizards-and-warriors-part... https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/07/wizards-and-warriors-part-four/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/07/wizards-and-warriors-part... https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/11/wizards-and-warriors-part-five/ https://ericlippert.com/2015/05/11/wizards-and-warriors-part... I have certainly committed all of these sins, too.

mushishi 5y ago
> We no longer have the problem of trying to fit “a wizard can only use a staff or dagger” into the type system of the C# language. We have no reason to believe that the C# type system was designed to have sufficient generality to encode the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, so why are we even trying? Good point! Skimmed the blog posts, seemed to have useful enumeration of techniques with considerations.
adamrezich 5y ago
this is a pretty good series of posts but I was rather surprised at where the series ended, with more (hypothetical) OOP abstraction instead of less. trying to fit game rules into a language's type system is a common thing for novice programmers to attempt, because it seems like the perfect logical application of these type system rules you just learned about when learning the language you're using. I kept expecting the article series to get around to reducing the system down to something like a Player class with a PlayerClass enum and member (and ditto for Weapon), then branching logic based on that, instead of trying to pack it into the type system.

chaostheory 5y ago

To me what was most surprising about Dwarf Fortress, given the complexity, is that Tad didn’t use git or any other code repository until more recently.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Why would that be surprising? For a single programmer working alone Git is an incredibly complicated tool. P.S.: A lot of you are confusing "complicated" with "difficult".
- Pet_Ant 5y ago
  Or any other is the point. I mean even locally I depend on commits as save points to just allow me to go crazy and experiment with the code. I mean you can just copy the codebase elsewhere as backup but using git or mercurial is easier than that.
  - nolok 5y ago
    Not saying you're wrong, but to explain "how is that possible over 20 years without ever blowing things up": he says he uses visual studio since the beggining (the full blown ide). Since he's working alone, he can easily use the local backup feature of it, which allow to easily rollback to automatically made copies of files, diff and cherry pick between current and backups, etc ... It's basically done automatically for you. As long as you save your project regularly and don't need to merge code with anyone, it can go a long way.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Actually extremely easy. Git add -a, git commit, git push. It only gets complicated if you try to do complicated things.
  - nhooyr 5y ago
    I believe it's: git add -A With a capital A.

jandeboevrie 5y ago

Df is just like OpenTTD. Both are like Chess, easy to start, fun to play casually but it takes years to master. Great games, complex if you want to and a time sink if you don't keep an eye on it. Have had many hundreds of fun hours in both games

DizzyDoo 5y ago
I've played a fair amount of Dwarf Fortress and I'd never describe it as 'easy to start'? The learning curve is notorious and for most people involves watching a lot of YouTube tutorials and copying actions. I'm hopeful that the upcoming Kitfox Games version makes it very accessible to lots more people.
anthk 5y ago
Eh, Chess it's much more complex than Slashem to me, and I never ascended in Nethack/Slashem/DCSS.
short_sells_poo 5y ago
I agree with the spirit of your post, but Dwarf Fortress and Easy to Start do not fit in the same sentence in my opinion. I mean, the game is legendary for it's arcane user interface and the vast number of things that can go wrong even for experts. Dwarf Fortress is something like vim, where usually on the first interaction people don't even know how to start the game, let alone do anything in it. Chess is easy to start, the rules fit on a post it note basically. Dwarf Fortress is difficult to start, and even more difficult to master.
- devenvdev 5y ago
  When I first started playing DF it took me all day reading the wiki... Next week was spent on trying to survive the first winter... As a 15 years vim user though - vim has a much more gradual but also much higher learning curve, I'm still learning new tricks in vim on a weekly basis.
- Agentlien 5y ago
  I love Dwarf Fortress and play it quite actively. I've been using Vim as my primary IDE for many years. That said, I wouldn't compare Dwarf Fortress to Vim. Vim is mainly difficult to get into because the model itself is so different from what people are used to and there's inherent complexity. But, quirks aside, it's mostly very consistent and learning a few patterns will get you very far. In Dwarf Fortress you need to fight not only incredible complexity, but also so very much bad UI/UX and inconsistencies between what should have been identical actions. A great example is searching a list of items. This is done with q for query. Or sometimes s for search. And in some cases f for filter. Or even better, the way k, v, t, q, are all just needles variants of "look at thing under cursor". And none of them work for some activity zones such as pastures, then you need i. As much as I love DF I'm very much looking forward to the Steam version, mainly for the UI overhaul, which is so far looking really promising.

markus_zhang 5y ago

IMO that's one of the best ways a single programmer can spend his career. No weird requirements, no deadlines, no nothing, nada. Just one's passion and a product. Whether it is successful is irrelevant. Kudos Mr. Adams for making the achievement and moves gaming history. Going back to the interview, I found this line (and the logic attached) interesting: >Making the item system polymorphic was ultimately a mistake, but that was a big one. >When you declare a class that’s a kind of item, it locks you into that structure much more tightly than if you just have member elements. I guess when the game becomes moderately complex then ECS or something similar suddenly makes a lot sense.

wly_cdgr 5y ago
Everything about it is wonderful (I really mean that) except the fact that he's sponging off his mother to do it. I can't help but feel that it's a drop of vinegar that spoils the whole cup of milk
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  I think it's OK as long as they feel it's OK. We can say that his mother "sponsors" the project.
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    Edit: I was wrong about how much he is relying on his family - didn't realize how much Patreon support the project now has compared to when I last looked. My bad, should have checked. I still agree with the below in the abstract but I retract my criticism in this case I can get with that take when it comes to Patreon but it's harder to demonstrate ok-ness-with-it with family. Let's say she's really not all that jazzed about it, actually. What is she gonna do, throw her son out on the street? A lot of parents don't have it in them to do that even if they think they would be justified and it would be the best thing for their child. An adult shouldn't put their parents in that position. He should be making sure his mom is provided for, not the other way around
    - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wly_cdgr 5y ago

If you like this, you may also enjoy this Tarn Adams talk at NYU GameCenter's 2016 PRACTICE conference https://youtu.be/yDPb0jqRr3o https://youtu.be/yDPb0jqRr3o

_peeley 5y ago

Dwarf Fortress consumed hundreds of hours of my life in high school, I have so many fond memories of it. Every year or so I come back to it and I'm always surprised that they've managed to add another mechanic or feature that just makes the game feel even more like its own little universe. After enough time in the game there really is a moment like that scene in the Matrix - "I don't even see the ASCII anymore. All I see is dwarf, plump helmet, magnetite ore." That said, I've always wondered if Dwarf Fortress would be a more smooth experience if it had more developers or was just open source (understandable that it's not though since it's basically Tad's passion project). The biggest headache was always the lack of multithreading, since your fortress really starts to chug once you pass maybe 150 dwarves or do anything exciting with fluids. Regardless, it's amazing what one developer with a great idea and an enthusiastic community has been able to do with the game.

fridif 5y ago
Passion project? It is the sole source of his income.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  It might be both.
- Octopodes 5y ago
  He's lucky enough for it to be both.
- Yajirobe 5y ago
  Lichess is Thibault's source of income, passion project, AND it is open-source.
  - fridif 5y ago
    I suspect that Thibault is making money from it because he is actually deploying a web service, and the value there is coming from the network effects of its multiplayer user base. Even if I deployed his code tonight, there's no guarantee users would switch over to my LeeChess clone :) In the case of Dwarf Fortress it's just "download my exe and please donate if you like it!"

mabbo 5y ago

> What’s your favorite bug and what caused it? > A: It’s probably boring for me to say, but I just can’t beat the drunken cat bug... That was the one where the cats were showing up dead all over the tavern floor, and it turned out they were ingesting spilled alcohol when they cleaned their paws. I think that bug explains very well just how deeply complex Dwarf Fortress really is. Drinks can be spilled. Some drinks have alcohol. If cats step in something it sticks to their paws. Cats clean their paws, causing them to ingest what's on them. Enough alcohol will kill a cat. Put together: dead drunken cats.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Unfortunately it remains unexplained (by the article) why this is considered a bug. It would be unethical to test, but this seems like perfectly cromulent behavior one might actually see in real life.
- paavohtl 5y ago
  IIRC the actual bug was that cats licking their paws made them consume an entire tankard's worth of beer with each lick, which made them drunk (and dead) with just a few licks.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    Yeah this is what I recall being the case as well.
- yung_steezy 5y ago
  I agree these types of features really embiggen the game
  - beamatronic 5y ago
    They're perfectly cromulent features.
    - 5y ago

100011_100001 5y ago

This is a little bit of a hijack but if I wanted to start coding games as a side project, where would I start? Which platform? Mobile, PC, console? Any good introductions on the subject of solo game development? I know I can google this, but I trust HN users more than the Google algo.

darkandbrooding 5y ago
I recommend Godot ( https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/ ). It solves many of the problems you suggested.
ljp_206 5y ago
I'm not much of a game programmer, but lurk /r/gamedev. The common advice is to start small - think toys rather than MMOs. From there, it's said one should follow what they're interested in, and focus on follow-thru, not tacking on features to their dream game that is supposed to compete with Skyrim. Console development is always going to be more trouble than the more open platforms of computers and phones. Myself, I've always thought it'd be pretty fun to make a menu-heavy game with just web technology, which then of course CAN be played anywhere. There are lots of engines out there that can take care of things for you, or act as full fledged studios, like Game Maker. Some prefer to start from scratch of course. Again, the idea should be follow what you're interested in so that you can actually get something done.
Octopodes 5y ago
Check out this itch page for some suggestions: https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2020 https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2020 Scroll down to the " Help—I’ve never created a game before!" section and there are some suggestions like Phaser or Godot.
- 100011_100001 5y ago
  Thanks, this is a good starting point.
mhitza 5y ago
I second Godot. You can make cross platform/mobile games with it. The IDE itself is built with the engine which is rather cool. Fair warning, the syntax is python inspired but not compatible, which most of the time that will trip you up. My second suggestion, is for your first project to develop a top down 2D (instead of a classical side scroller), using itch.io assets. To get a nice jump feeling for a side scroller 2D game, you straight ahead have to start using a state machine and fiddle a bunch, no hand holding with that.

vtail 5y ago

I know I will regret asking it… but what’s the modern way of starting playing DF?

pradn 5y ago
There's an officially-supported skin with good sprite-based graphics. It's still a bit in progress however. https://www.kitfoxgames.com/press/sheet.php?p=dwarf_fortress https://www.kitfoxgames.com/press/sheet.php?p=dwarf_fortress
Inviz 5y ago
Wait for steam version
- devenvdev 5y ago
  Or don't if you want the full "meta" experience.
hobs 5y ago
An article for you https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Utility:Lazy_Newb_Pack https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Utility:Lazy_Newb_Pa...
sjfkejrnakcijdj 5y ago
Not exactly modern, but the Captain Duck Dwarf Fortess Video Tutorial[1] is still a great tutorial. [1]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5A3D7682BDD48FC2 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5A3D7682BDD48FC2
AQuantized 5y ago
The Wiki is probably the most up to date resource: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_guide https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_gu... It's really not that difficult once you get started, especially if you're used to learning some esoteric keybinds.
- Agentlien 5y ago

njharman 5y ago

I thought it was developed by the two brothers? I've seen talks and interviews by both brothers on DF. like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRsScwdPcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRsScwdPcE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtKmLciKO30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtKmLciKO30

psyc 5y ago
This is StackOverflow, and the interview is about code, so they probably mean developer in that sense. Tarn is the only programmer.
mtekman 5y ago
One of the brothers is the main developer and ideas guy, the other is more the admin/idea control/art role

njharman 5y ago

If you like "small time" devs / roguelike programming the Roguelike Celebration conference YTs is excellent https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKv_QzXft4mD6TXmQBZtzIA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKv_QzXft4mD6TXmQBZtzIA

TheLocehiliosan 5y ago

Once I spent about a week struggling to create a DF config that defined the key bindings to be vi-like consistently throughout the game. I failed.

orf 5y ago

I tried to play DF. I even got over the ASCII interface. But honestly Rimworld is better and a bit deeper.

jtms 5y ago
Rimworld is phenomenal… I absolutely love it, but I wish it had z-levels and the fluid sim of DF. Nothing is more fun than accidentally flooding your fortress with magma!
rcxdude 5y ago
Rimworld is a better game but not really the deeper sim (I feel like it worked on distilling a lot of what made dwarf fortress compelling while making it much more accessible, and part of that is simplifying).
dkbrk 5y ago
I really can't agree. Rimworld might be more accessible, but it lacks DF's depth of simulation. Even if you ignore details in DF that are generally unimportant (e.g. all the intricate details of a dwarf's personality and the precise genetics of their facial hair), Rimworld's lack of 3D and fluid simulation alone make it vastly simpler. But what really annoyed me about Rimworld, and why I never really got into it, was how "gamey" it feels. One element is, the mechanics of random events, which feel extremely arbitrary. I'm not talking about random animals coming onto the map, that's little different from a legendary beast turning up in DF, but things like a solar event causing all your batteries to blow up for no reason. And random events seem to happen every few minutes. Whereas in DF, pretty much everything that happens, happens for a reason. There's randomness, but it's not completely random. If your fortress is wealthy, it will attract invasions. Forgotten beasts actually exist on the world map and have a history. That sort of thing. In addition to that, crafting and combat are extremely simplistic compared to DF. In DF, bootstrapping an economy which can actually craft everything you need from scratch is actually fairly difficult and requires significant planning and investment. Many things require multiple stages of processing, and it can be very hard to find the particular raw material you need. In Rimworld, you pick up a few raw materials and can manufacture an assault rifle in a couple of minutes. And that assault rifle doesn't need ammunition, and is hopelessly inaccurate beyond 10m or so, for some reason. Compare that to DF where when a dwarf shoots a crossbow it actually does a 3D simulation of the bolt's trajectory. And in the background it's also simulating things like the bolt's temperature, and when it hits the target, it determines what happens based on the density and strength of the bolt's material and the material of whatever it hit.

mattlondon 5y ago

I always wanted to love DF but I could never get into it. Perhaps it was the ASCII. I found Rimworld to scratch the same itch and have sunk many hours into it. I feel like it is spiritually very similar, even if the depth of simulation is not as deep as DF.

the_af 5y ago

I love the idea of Dwarf Fortress and I think the internet purest mission is to disseminate works of passion such as this, not to sell me ads instead. That said, I can't get past the ASCII interface -- I'm a huge fan of IF games (which used to be called "text adventures" in the olden days) and I can deal with spartan UIs, but for real-time strategy/sandbox games, I absolutely need some sort of graphics. Tiles, at least. The same happens to me with Nethack, which fortunately does have graphical tilesets. I'm glad to read Toady One is working on such a UI! Something I found insightful about TFA was this: > Q: With your ~90 side projects, have you explored any other programming languages? If so, any favorites? > A: Ha ha, nope! I’m more of a noodler over on the design side, rather than with the tech. I’m sure some things would really speed up the realization of my designs though, so I should probably at least learn some scripting and play around with threading more. People have even been kind enough to supply some libraries and things to help out there, but it’s just difficult to block side project time out for tech learning when my side project time is for relaxing. This is interesting. I constantly feel the temptation to learn new tools, new languages, new stuff. I get sidetracked by the tech. But the key to successful games seems to be designing them and sticking to the work of making them work no matter the tech or language. If Toady had kept playing with programming languages and frameworks instead of sticking to his actual project -- creating a game -- maybe Dwarf Fortress wouldn't exist, or it wouldn't be as featureful.

teataster 5y ago
Have you tried playing with tilesets? I feel they make the experience easier on the eyes.
JonathanFly 5y ago
>I love the idea of Dwarf Fortress and I think the internet purest mission is to disseminate works of passion such as this, not to sell me ads instead. That said, I can't get past the ASCII interface -- I'm a huge fan of IF games (which used to be called "text adventures" in the olden days) and I can deal with spartan UIs, but for real-time strategy/sandbox games, I absolutely need some sort of graphics. You can see the new tileset in action here, demoed by Tarn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlzCrJS1Fho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlzCrJS1Fho

intended 5y ago

So many projects in this game. I had one which involved trying to build a base, capture a dragon and start a breeding program. Which failed - so I ended up abandoning, starting a new base on top of a dragon lair, capturing said dragon, leaving the base, then starting an adventurer who carried the caged dragon in a mine cart across the map to the original base. It did not work. The version didn’t allow for the new adventurer to become a resident of the original base. Futzed around with dfhack to force residence permissions and so on, ended up breaking the game and changing the species or some other weird bug. But I did learn that adventure mode mine carts are ridiculously fast. As in survival is highly unlikely fast. There was a lot of saving and reloads due to the difficulty of banking turns at speeds that outran cheetahs.

umvi 5y ago

My favorite TIL about this game is that it is developed completely without VCS like git.

ambivalence 5y ago

Meta-question to the mods: why would you edit the original title of this entry? Feels somewhat interventionist.

pcthrowaway 5y ago
I agree, I thought the full title was better and more relevant.
- meibo 5y ago
  Sometimes the rule is to not editorialize, sometimes you get slapped for it, other times the hall monitors step in to change the title after the fact because they don't like the article's actual title. They want you to remove clickbait numbers so maybe that's what happened here. Don't think too much about it.

robertwt7 5y ago

It’s amazing that he’s doing the same thing for those long. I think that’s the definition of passion, I really want to find some projects/startups that make me fee like that as a SE. That’s the dream, hope he keeps it up!

smoldesu 5y ago

Dwarf Fortress was a staple of my childhood, even if I only understood maybe 5% of the mechanics going on at any given time (even back when I used to play it). That was part of the appeal though: if you could learn how to do something in Dwarf Fortress, it felt like an accomplishment. Learning to dig better bases is a several-hour research project, and simple tasks like brewing beer can proliferate into any number of different problems. This kind of trial-and-error problem solving is probably responsible for getting me into development. Nowadays though, I mostly play Rimworld for my colony management fix. I love Dwarf Fortress, but I could never comfortably learn it's mechanics in a lifetime (let alone several). Even still, the emergent, chaotic gameplay of Dwarf Fortress should be picked apart by any budding game developers. Even after 15 years of playing PC games, Dwarf Fortress still feels the most "next gen" out of them all.

TKZZ 5y ago

In case anyone is interested in trying out DF, I recommend using the "Lazy Newb Pack". It provides a nifty GUI that lets you use different texture packs and change some settings that can improve enjoyment (cap population, remove aquifers, etc.) http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=126076.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=126076.0

rntksi 5y ago

A previous discussion with Tarn Adams: [1] I really liked how he explains generating the map. [1]: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/343859/QA_Dissecting_the_development_of_Dwarf_Fortress_with_creator_Tarn_Adams.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/343859/QA_Dissecting_the...

guyzero 5y ago

Still waiting to read WHY Dwarf Fortress is built

habibur 5y ago

My biggest take from this : > When you declare a class that’s a kind of item, it locks you into that structure much more tightly than if you just have member elements. It’s nice to be able to use virtual functions and that kind of thing, but the tradeoffs are just too much. Aka, OOP is a bad design even when you take the benefits of its virtual method system. Stick with struct and functions.

someperson 5y ago

What's surprising to me is Dwarf Fortress author uses Visual Studio Community, rather than the paid version of that IDE: > "In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or >$1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above." Surely there has been years where his revenue has exceeded $1 million.

bojo 5y ago
He posts his revenue. http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=177791.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=177791.0
- someperson 5y ago
  Oh, that's not that much revenue: > 2020: $130801.30 > 2019: $119133.25 > 2018: $92558.50 > 2017: $83491.24 > 2016: $89423.38 > 2015: $60603.43 > 2014: $66765.31 > 2013: $48999.11 > 2012: $57854.88 > 2011: $42294.19 > 2010: $54501.15 > 2009: $32516.44 > 2008: $32318.46 > 2007: $19052.28 Once he releases the paid Steam version with updated graphics he'll likely be making millions in revenue though.
  - Agentlien 5y ago
    Considering this revenue is entirely made up of donations I feel it's actually quite impressive.
ramshanker 5y ago
WinRar 40 day trial, It is.

Arech 5y ago

I just take my hat off to Toady. DF is a masterpiece.

animal531 5y ago

The game is coming to Steam sometime, and with a new GUI interface.