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Dwarf Fortress has always been a brilliant lesson in UX. It answers the question: what if you had a great product, but the user experience was the worst possib

by mabbo 4y ago

Dwarf Fortress has always been a brilliant lesson in UX. It answers the question: what if you had a great product, but the user experience was the worst possible choice in every single way, but all functionality still existed and worked? It turns out some people will still use the product. I'm excited to see what happens when the UX is also reasonable.

izend 4y ago
Much fewer users though... If Dwarf Fortress magically had the UX they are working on now back in 2012 it would be worth at least $50million+ Now, the fact they skipped working on the UX until now allowed Tarn to implement very difficult crazy features Z-level fortress layers and Fluid Dynamics.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The Z-level stuff is so ingrained into me as a default (I started playing just before it was added) that it's amazing to think that some of the most famous DF stories are from before it was added.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    What is the z-level stuff? Haven't you always been able to move through layers up/down?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Nope, that was added in Dwarf Fortress in 2008 (and it was a huge change at the time).
      - Arrath 4y ago
        Sometimes I miss the predictable and ensured progression as you tunneled into the mountain and got farther from natural light. Underground river -> Chasms -> Magma -> Bad Things(tm)
        jml7c5 4y ago
        I almost prefer it, I think! It felt much more like a proper story game with a challenge rather than the modern result of "The Sims, but dwarves". A single Z-level may be too austere today, so perhaps a modern iteration could use the same layout but with three or four Z-levels. I wonder if there's a way to replicate that today with some map editing... The real trouble I had with the old versions was the inability to build walls. As I recall, once you dug something out it was dug forever.
        bombcar 4y ago
        It used to be you could be almost completely safe if you just stayed in the upper z-levels and didn't dig too deep, but with the caverns update you now can find various types of fun imported directly to your back door.
        R0b0t1 4y ago
        Sometimes you have the fun, sometimes the fun has you.
        AngryData 4y ago
        When you generate your world you can change the amount of layers per layer zone. I don't know the minimum off hand but it is probably around 6 normal stone or cave levels, minus the levels used for open sky space and magma sea which I don't know the minimum for. Trees are multilevel now and I don't know that they will grow on a single layer.
  - NhanH 4y ago
    So what was it like before the Z-level stuff? Only the surface and one level below that?
    - drewcoo 4y ago
      https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Bloodline:Boatmurdered https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Bloodline:Boatmu...
    - danaris 4y ago
      From what I've seen, it was fully 2-D: the "surface" was to the left, then you hit the mountain face, and the further to the right you went, the deeper you were, until eventually you breached the proverbial Hidden Fun Stuff.
    - RugnirViking 4y ago
      No, the surface was at one side of the map, and you kept tunneling through to the side
    - Arrath 4y ago
      Pre-Z DF was basically a side-scroller. Surface was map-left, there was a cliff face, and the further map-right you went was 'deeper'
    - jtolmar 4y ago
      The left was outside, the mountain face was basically a vertical line, and all the things we associate with "deeper" were found further and further to the right of that line. Some ways in you'd find an underground river (which floods when you first find it), then a chasm (enemies spawn from here), then a magma river, [spoilers for ancient versions of DF start now] eerie glowing pits, and finally adamantine. Finding adamantine made the king show up and demand you mine more and more adamantine, but the more you mined the more likely you were to have your fortress suddenly end in a cutscene. All these fixed elements gave the game a specific progression of increasing rewards and challenges, and a guaranteed story arc for the whole fortress.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  >the fact they skipped working on the UX until now allowed Tarn to implement very difficult crazy features Z-level fortress layers and Fluid Dynamics Not sure how seriously this was meant, but I unironically agree. I learned, while still in college, never to mock up a "working" polished UI lacking all the complex backend, just to show the client how it'll look when it's done. To the non-computerati, the metaphor is a tradesman working on renovations. If you don't make development versions look and feel like crap, the normies won't accept that it's not "almost ready". Tarn's priorities here drive away most people, and filters for the sort of person who thinks "modern graphics library" means "ncurses".
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It's also a side-effect of his work on the previous game, where he got bogged down in graphics, etc, and couldn't even get close to what he wanted to make. Which is why it is Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress.
- ctvo 4y ago
  > If Dwarf Fortress magically had the UX they are working on now back in 2012 it would be worth at least $50million+ And how did you come up with that 50 million USD number? Is it multiplayer? Can a major corporation use it to target a young audience demographic? Will there be a mobile version or micro transactions?
  - kjs3 4y ago
    If it had all that, someone would say it was worth $1b+.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Consider https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/ https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/ and its estimated value https://fictionhorizon.com/how-much-is-minecraft-worth/ https://fictionhorizon.com/how-much-is-minecraft-worth/ If Dwarf Fortress was able to be more than an inspiration and took the "we're selling it" instead which then would allow a different cycle time on features with different priorities, a 50M number isn't unreasonable at all for what the game would be worth today.
    - ctvo 4y ago
      I understand Minecraft's valuation -- sort of my point -- those features are what made Minecraft valuable, not the core gameplay elements. Dwarf Fortress would need to go down that road, not just a nicer UI for it to be valuable.
EnKopVand 4y ago
I was under the impression that people use their own UIs on top of it. Sort of how some people use the fumbbl client. Which are sort of effective ways of “outsourcing” the UI development on projects where you don’t have the funds (or the talent) to make a great UI.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The graphics people often change, though technically the UI would remain the same (keyboard characters, etc). However, there are additional tools that let you do "bulk actions" by directly editing the Dwarf Fortress memory while it is running - these are technically a UI bypass. The actual UI is just difficult to learn but once you do it's surprisingly easy to use - it's consistent in its own inconsistent way.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    I would think things like Dwarf Therapist are a good example of the community trying their best to improve the UI despite the roadblocks put up by the developer.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah, what we need is DFaaS, where the engine is converted into various API calls and anyone can make a front-end for it.
      - cyberpunk 4y ago
        dfremote was close to this, it was very nice on my ipad with the apple pencil. Sadly we've not had updates in some time and I think the developer has moved onto other things [0]. 0: http://mifki.com/df/ http://mifki.com/df/ edit: In that with dfremote, df itself runs in a docker container on a server somewhere, and the UI is running entirely on your ipad.
      - lom888 4y ago
        I am a DF obsessive. Many thousands of hours spent playing the game over the past 12 years, it is my favorite game by far. I've also had numerous abortive attempts to learn how to code. It humbles me to think that people find the UI so difficult to use that they'd sooner spend time coding another one.
jeffwask 4y ago
> It answers the question: what if you had a great product, but the user experience was the worst possible choice in every single way, but all functionality still existed and worked? I feel like this describes every Bethesda game.
- sliken 4y ago
  I've seen terrible game UIs, but DF seemed to take it to a new level. Like say for instance a dozen or so ways to select units.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Are there still, like, 3 commands to look/inspect/view contents or did those finally get condensed?
    - gs17 4y ago
      If we're thinking of the same interactions, the current (texty) version still has those.
    - sliken 4y ago
      Heh, dunno, never got into it, but was curious. Been following progress, and plan to tinker once the steam version with a full GUI have been released. The blog updates have been amusing, things like dying cats from soaking up too much beer in the pubs. Various bugs and non-bugs that result in crazy events. Many amusing stories, etc. I love the idea, but didn't want to invest that much time in learning the UI.
  - ZetaZero 4y ago
    There is a reason why Tarn asks for donations every month, and Notch is a billionaire.
    - sliken 4y ago
      Indeed, they moved from occasional donations to steam in an effort to get a reliable income stream and be able to afford health insurance.
montagg 4y ago
It’s one of those stories people can turn into whatever conclusion they want: - DF is still a great game, so good UX in games doesn’t mean anything. - DF is still a niche game, so good UX in games is essential. Caveat: I’m a UX designer who absolutely loves DF and is saddened by how many people may never find out how great it is.
- Natsu 4y ago
  The original DF UI reminds me of vi, both good and bad.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    As a vim lover is it actually bad from a UX perspective? Having a learning curve can be offset by enhanced efficiency right?
    - ericbarrett 4y ago
      It's...pretty bad. (I have thousands of hours in both DF and vim.)
    - LanceH 4y ago
      I'm personally not fond of having a command mode separate from a typing mode. As someone who learned to touch type (on a typewriter) I don't always look at the screen. In vi, if you're typing away while in command mode, all sorts of things can go wrong. The one sin I can't forgive, though, is that he movement keys aren't the same as the home row keys. jkl; would have been so much better. Everything else I'm willing to chalk up to preference -- I prefer the chording of emacs, but I can understand it's not for everyone. To me it feels like vi was written for hunt and peck typists.
      - galangalalgol 4y ago
        jkl; does make sense, I may try remapping that, though I don't really think about it anymore. I remap jj to esc so I don't have to leave the home row. I dont have to look at the screen unless I'm trying to build a regex for something. I do remember being in the wrong mode a couple times and doing odd things. My only problem with the chording is that my pinky gets tired way faster than my other fingers.
joemi 4y ago
It might not be the best UX, but it's certainly far from the worst.
- mabbo 4y ago
  > but it's certainly far from the worst I'm scared to ask this, but what is worse? And I say this as someone who has lost hundreds of hours to Dwarf Fortress.
  - 542458 4y ago
    Aurora 4X is pretty bad - it's as confusing as DF, but much more clumsy to use. Some dungeon crawl games have incredibly opaque UIs. System Shock 1 (non-enhanced) feels really, really terrible now, but I'm not sure it was as bad at the time. I'm not sure those qualify as worse than DF though. Depends on your definition of worse, I guess.
    - waste_monk 4y ago
      Also, DF makes an effort to make the game at least minimally playable on a variety of systems e.g. adjustable resolution of the game window, tileset support and so on, Aurora is basically a big old "screw you" to anyone who needs text or DPI scaling (which I would suggest is most people using a QHD or higher resolution display). Important UI elements get pushed off-screen, and the dev outright refuses to consider fixing it. It is understandable enough given it's a personal passion project that they've happened to make public, works fine on the devs own system, and as I understand properly handling windows scaling is a LOT of work, but it does make it very frustrating to see this tantalising game but not being able to play it without non-trivial amounts of screwing around.
      - db48x 4y ago
        I think the only way to get that type of improvement in Aurora would be to sneak into his house to replace all of his monitors with better ones. I understand that he goes camping in his RV for several weeks at a time several times a year…
Der_Einzige 4y ago
Well, what's interesting is that Rimworld has a good UI/UX and has the same formula/gameplay loop at DF. Last I remembered, it had the highest user rating on steam for awhile. Many, including myself, consider it as one of the greatest games ever made. DF is also occasionally listed as a contender for "best game ever made" - but the fact that it's inaccessible will always force it to be obscure and nearly mystical among gamers. I'm also convinced that the modding community in rimworld has overtaken its DF equivilant, meaning that modded rimworld is probably more filled with content (and therefor, emergent possibility) in 2022 than DF-with-mods is... --------------------------- I always thought that Dwarf Fortress should be compared to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (CDDA) on the UI/UX front. I think CDDA is the gold standard for ASCII/CLI/TUI style of control - and I find that I can extremely quickly do things in that game all on my keyboard, almost like a tiling window manager. I'm sure this sort of nirvana is possible with Dwarf Fortress (with the LNP) - but I was unable to achieve it, despite having sunk over 500 hours into rimworld and nearly as much in CDDA before playing DF.
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  I've played RimWorld modded to hell and back, and got maybe 20% of the way towards vanilla DF. That's not to diss Rimworld of course, it's probably my favorite game and has a different focus than DF. But in terms of pure emergent complexity, Rimworld has it incidentally and DF has essentially nothing else.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I think this is something people miss - the "build a fort" part of DF is almost an afterthought around the main engine power - the story generation. The whole idea is to generate emergent stories of the high fantasy type - and it works surprisingly well at that. I've rarely, if ever, read anything like Boatmurdered based on another game.
simonw 4y ago
I first learned this lesson from Napster ~1999/2000. The Napster UI was terrible - almost completely incomprehensible. And everyone I knew, including my least technical friends, was using it. Because getting music for free was worth dealing with any UI. Second time was MySpace customization: you had to paste your own CSS into the "about me" profile box! And people figured it out, because having a custom profile was desirable enough that it was worth it.
- tomcam 4y ago
  There’s some kind of lesson we maybe haven’t absorbed properly. Millions of people learned crazy shit like WordStar before Word, then MS-DOS before Windows, and then building websites by hand using HTML. Millions. Of course I completely recognize that improved software increased these markets by orders of magnitude, but to this day I remained fascinated that regular people managed to use such primitive tools for so long.
  - chinchilla2020 4y ago
    The modern UI design on smartphones and PCs has created a whole skillset of its own. Many boomer types find MSDOS to be simpler than windows. I would argue that in many ways html/css/javascript is simpler and more intuitive than wordpress. Text is such a simple way to organize information. I am still amazed how much information and precision you can pack into text that would take a 10 hour youtube to match.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  Was it? I hardly remember, but searching for old screenshots from the time, it seems pretty straightforward... are those later clients already? Did you have any particular gripes?
  - simonw 4y ago
    I found a screenshot here which matches my recollection of it being a pretty spartan, jargon-heavy interface: https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/8jrtnx/napster_the_original_pirate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/8jrtnx/napster_t...
initplus 4y ago
In a way that's part of what makes it so interesting. It's not merely bad, the UX is completely alien. It feels like software designed by another species. There is loads of software with terrible UX, but most of it is bad in the same boring ways. I see Dwarf Fortress as outsider art: "Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds." Other than the fact that the game was not discovered after his death, every other element of Wikipedia's outsider art intro paragraph fits to a T.
- darkteflon 4y ago
  Thanks for that. I’ve never heard it before but that’s such a great term - very evocative.
  - quirino 4y ago
    Outsider music is also fascinating, this RateYourMusic list gives loads of recommendations: https://rateyourmusic.com/list/KeepPunchin/the-curious-universe-of-outsider-and-incorrect-music/ https://rateyourmusic.com/list/KeepPunchin/the-curious-unive...
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly is a classic example. Found after James Hampton's death in 1964, he'd spent the previous ~14 years meticulously constructing more than 180 separate pieces from discarded material. https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/throne-third-heaven-nations-millennium-general-assembly-9897 https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/throne-third-heaven-natio... http://www.spacesarchives.org/explore/search-the-online-collection/throne-of-the-third-heaven-of-the-nations-millennium-general-assembly/ http://www.spacesarchives.org/explore/search-the-online-coll...
    - darkteflon 4y ago
      Love it. I listened to an interview this morning on the Eurogamer podcast with _Citizen Sleeper_ creator Gareth Damian Martin, who spoke eloquently at length on this sort of thing. He felt (and I agree) that the video game - especially now - is such a great medium for exploring just this kind of thing.
ramesh31 4y ago
My theory is that this is why most enterprise software is terribly slow and buggy with horrible UX. If something works, and there is a completely coherent logically consistent system buried in the mess, people can and will usually figure things out. And the drive to make more features generally wins out over time above addressing technical/UX debt.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Also once people are used to it, if you change it all hell breaks loose - see Salesforce Lightning (it still sucks).
deltaonefour 4y ago
It makes sense, dwarf fortress is not suppose to be useful, it's a game, people play for the challenge... so destroying it's usefulness with bad UI doesn't mean much as it's not useful in the first place. But doing the same thing of destroying the usefulness of a actual useful product will cause people to not use it. Replacing the steering wheel of a car with the DF UI, for example, will literally stop everyone from driving it.
bluedino 4y ago
I'd like to introduce you to the majority of ERP systems out there. Or most of Microsoft's Azure portal. Have you used Intune?

by mabbo 4y ago

izend 4y ago

Much fewer users though... If Dwarf Fortress magically had the UX they are working on now back in 2012 it would be worth at least $50million+ Now, the fact they skipped working on the UX until now allowed Tarn to implement very difficult crazy features Z-level fortress layers and Fluid Dynamics.

bombcar 4y ago
The Z-level stuff is so ingrained into me as a default (I started playing just before it was added) that it's amazing to think that some of the most famous DF stories are from before it was added.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  What is the z-level stuff? Haven't you always been able to move through layers up/down?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Nope, that was added in Dwarf Fortress in 2008 (and it was a huge change at the time).
    - Arrath 4y ago
      Sometimes I miss the predictable and ensured progression as you tunneled into the mountain and got farther from natural light. Underground river -> Chasms -> Magma -> Bad Things(tm)
      - jml7c5 4y ago
        I almost prefer it, I think! It felt much more like a proper story game with a challenge rather than the modern result of "The Sims, but dwarves". A single Z-level may be too austere today, so perhaps a modern iteration could use the same layout but with three or four Z-levels. I wonder if there's a way to replicate that today with some map editing... The real trouble I had with the old versions was the inability to build walls. As I recall, once you dug something out it was dug forever.
        bombcar 4y ago
        It used to be you could be almost completely safe if you just stayed in the upper z-levels and didn't dig too deep, but with the caverns update you now can find various types of fun imported directly to your back door.
        R0b0t1 4y ago
        Sometimes you have the fun, sometimes the fun has you.
        AngryData 4y ago
        When you generate your world you can change the amount of layers per layer zone. I don't know the minimum off hand but it is probably around 6 normal stone or cave levels, minus the levels used for open sky space and magma sea which I don't know the minimum for. Trees are multilevel now and I don't know that they will grow on a single layer.
- NhanH 4y ago
  So what was it like before the Z-level stuff? Only the surface and one level below that?
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Bloodline:Boatmurdered https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Bloodline:Boatmu...
  - danaris 4y ago
    From what I've seen, it was fully 2-D: the "surface" was to the left, then you hit the mountain face, and the further to the right you went, the deeper you were, until eventually you breached the proverbial Hidden Fun Stuff.
  - RugnirViking 4y ago
    No, the surface was at one side of the map, and you kept tunneling through to the side
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Pre-Z DF was basically a side-scroller. Surface was map-left, there was a cliff face, and the further map-right you went was 'deeper'
  - jtolmar 4y ago
    The left was outside, the mountain face was basically a vertical line, and all the things we associate with "deeper" were found further and further to the right of that line. Some ways in you'd find an underground river (which floods when you first find it), then a chasm (enemies spawn from here), then a magma river, [spoilers for ancient versions of DF start now] eerie glowing pits, and finally adamantine. Finding adamantine made the king show up and demand you mine more and more adamantine, but the more you mined the more likely you were to have your fortress suddenly end in a cutscene. All these fixed elements gave the game a specific progression of increasing rewards and challenges, and a guaranteed story arc for the whole fortress.
revolvingocelot 4y ago
>the fact they skipped working on the UX until now allowed Tarn to implement very difficult crazy features Z-level fortress layers and Fluid Dynamics Not sure how seriously this was meant, but I unironically agree. I learned, while still in college, never to mock up a "working" polished UI lacking all the complex backend, just to show the client how it'll look when it's done. To the non-computerati, the metaphor is a tradesman working on renovations. If you don't make development versions look and feel like crap, the normies won't accept that it's not "almost ready". Tarn's priorities here drive away most people, and filters for the sort of person who thinks "modern graphics library" means "ncurses".
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's also a side-effect of his work on the previous game, where he got bogged down in graphics, etc, and couldn't even get close to what he wanted to make. Which is why it is Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress.
ctvo 4y ago
> If Dwarf Fortress magically had the UX they are working on now back in 2012 it would be worth at least $50million+ And how did you come up with that 50 million USD number? Is it multiplayer? Can a major corporation use it to target a young audience demographic? Will there be a mobile version or micro transactions?
- kjs3 4y ago
  If it had all that, someone would say it was worth $1b+.
- shagie 4y ago
  Consider https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/ https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/ and its estimated value https://fictionhorizon.com/how-much-is-minecraft-worth/ https://fictionhorizon.com/how-much-is-minecraft-worth/ If Dwarf Fortress was able to be more than an inspiration and took the "we're selling it" instead which then would allow a different cycle time on features with different priorities, a 50M number isn't unreasonable at all for what the game would be worth today.
  - ctvo 4y ago
    I understand Minecraft's valuation -- sort of my point -- those features are what made Minecraft valuable, not the core gameplay elements. Dwarf Fortress would need to go down that road, not just a nicer UI for it to be valuable.

EnKopVand 4y ago

I was under the impression that people use their own UIs on top of it. Sort of how some people use the fumbbl client. Which are sort of effective ways of “outsourcing” the UI development on projects where you don’t have the funds (or the talent) to make a great UI.

bombcar 4y ago
The graphics people often change, though technically the UI would remain the same (keyboard characters, etc). However, there are additional tools that let you do "bulk actions" by directly editing the Dwarf Fortress memory while it is running - these are technically a UI bypass. The actual UI is just difficult to learn but once you do it's surprisingly easy to use - it's consistent in its own inconsistent way.
- jandrese 4y ago
  I would think things like Dwarf Therapist are a good example of the community trying their best to improve the UI despite the roadblocks put up by the developer.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah, what we need is DFaaS, where the engine is converted into various API calls and anyone can make a front-end for it.
    - cyberpunk 4y ago
      dfremote was close to this, it was very nice on my ipad with the apple pencil. Sadly we've not had updates in some time and I think the developer has moved onto other things [0]. 0: http://mifki.com/df/ http://mifki.com/df/ edit: In that with dfremote, df itself runs in a docker container on a server somewhere, and the UI is running entirely on your ipad.
    - lom888 4y ago
      I am a DF obsessive. Many thousands of hours spent playing the game over the past 12 years, it is my favorite game by far. I've also had numerous abortive attempts to learn how to code. It humbles me to think that people find the UI so difficult to use that they'd sooner spend time coding another one.

jeffwask 4y ago

> It answers the question: what if you had a great product, but the user experience was the worst possible choice in every single way, but all functionality still existed and worked? I feel like this describes every Bethesda game.

sliken 4y ago
I've seen terrible game UIs, but DF seemed to take it to a new level. Like say for instance a dozen or so ways to select units.
- Arrath 4y ago
  Are there still, like, 3 commands to look/inspect/view contents or did those finally get condensed?
  - gs17 4y ago
    If we're thinking of the same interactions, the current (texty) version still has those.
  - sliken 4y ago
    Heh, dunno, never got into it, but was curious. Been following progress, and plan to tinker once the steam version with a full GUI have been released. The blog updates have been amusing, things like dying cats from soaking up too much beer in the pubs. Various bugs and non-bugs that result in crazy events. Many amusing stories, etc. I love the idea, but didn't want to invest that much time in learning the UI.
- ZetaZero 4y ago
  There is a reason why Tarn asks for donations every month, and Notch is a billionaire.
  - sliken 4y ago
    Indeed, they moved from occasional donations to steam in an effort to get a reliable income stream and be able to afford health insurance.

montagg 4y ago

It’s one of those stories people can turn into whatever conclusion they want: - DF is still a great game, so good UX in games doesn’t mean anything. - DF is still a niche game, so good UX in games is essential. Caveat: I’m a UX designer who absolutely loves DF and is saddened by how many people may never find out how great it is.

Natsu 4y ago
The original DF UI reminds me of vi, both good and bad.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  As a vim lover is it actually bad from a UX perspective? Having a learning curve can be offset by enhanced efficiency right?
  - ericbarrett 4y ago
    It's...pretty bad. (I have thousands of hours in both DF and vim.)
  - LanceH 4y ago
    I'm personally not fond of having a command mode separate from a typing mode. As someone who learned to touch type (on a typewriter) I don't always look at the screen. In vi, if you're typing away while in command mode, all sorts of things can go wrong. The one sin I can't forgive, though, is that he movement keys aren't the same as the home row keys. jkl; would have been so much better. Everything else I'm willing to chalk up to preference -- I prefer the chording of emacs, but I can understand it's not for everyone. To me it feels like vi was written for hunt and peck typists.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      jkl; does make sense, I may try remapping that, though I don't really think about it anymore. I remap jj to esc so I don't have to leave the home row. I dont have to look at the screen unless I'm trying to build a regex for something. I do remember being in the wrong mode a couple times and doing odd things. My only problem with the chording is that my pinky gets tired way faster than my other fingers.

joemi 4y ago

It might not be the best UX, but it's certainly far from the worst.

mabbo 4y ago
> but it's certainly far from the worst I'm scared to ask this, but what is worse? And I say this as someone who has lost hundreds of hours to Dwarf Fortress.
- 542458 4y ago
  Aurora 4X is pretty bad - it's as confusing as DF, but much more clumsy to use. Some dungeon crawl games have incredibly opaque UIs. System Shock 1 (non-enhanced) feels really, really terrible now, but I'm not sure it was as bad at the time. I'm not sure those qualify as worse than DF though. Depends on your definition of worse, I guess.
  - waste_monk 4y ago
    Also, DF makes an effort to make the game at least minimally playable on a variety of systems e.g. adjustable resolution of the game window, tileset support and so on, Aurora is basically a big old "screw you" to anyone who needs text or DPI scaling (which I would suggest is most people using a QHD or higher resolution display). Important UI elements get pushed off-screen, and the dev outright refuses to consider fixing it. It is understandable enough given it's a personal passion project that they've happened to make public, works fine on the devs own system, and as I understand properly handling windows scaling is a LOT of work, but it does make it very frustrating to see this tantalising game but not being able to play it without non-trivial amounts of screwing around.
    - db48x 4y ago
      I think the only way to get that type of improvement in Aurora would be to sneak into his house to replace all of his monitors with better ones. I understand that he goes camping in his RV for several weeks at a time several times a year…

Der_Einzige 4y ago

Well, what's interesting is that Rimworld has a good UI/UX and has the same formula/gameplay loop at DF. Last I remembered, it had the highest user rating on steam for awhile. Many, including myself, consider it as one of the greatest games ever made. DF is also occasionally listed as a contender for "best game ever made" - but the fact that it's inaccessible will always force it to be obscure and nearly mystical among gamers. I'm also convinced that the modding community in rimworld has overtaken its DF equivilant, meaning that modded rimworld is probably more filled with content (and therefor, emergent possibility) in 2022 than DF-with-mods is... --------------------------- I always thought that Dwarf Fortress should be compared to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (CDDA) on the UI/UX front. I think CDDA is the gold standard for ASCII/CLI/TUI style of control - and I find that I can extremely quickly do things in that game all on my keyboard, almost like a tiling window manager. I'm sure this sort of nirvana is possible with Dwarf Fortress (with the LNP) - but I was unable to achieve it, despite having sunk over 500 hours into rimworld and nearly as much in CDDA before playing DF.

ravi-delia 4y ago
I've played RimWorld modded to hell and back, and got maybe 20% of the way towards vanilla DF. That's not to diss Rimworld of course, it's probably my favorite game and has a different focus than DF. But in terms of pure emergent complexity, Rimworld has it incidentally and DF has essentially nothing else.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I think this is something people miss - the "build a fort" part of DF is almost an afterthought around the main engine power - the story generation. The whole idea is to generate emergent stories of the high fantasy type - and it works surprisingly well at that. I've rarely, if ever, read anything like Boatmurdered based on another game.

simonw 4y ago

I first learned this lesson from Napster ~1999/2000. The Napster UI was terrible - almost completely incomprehensible. And everyone I knew, including my least technical friends, was using it. Because getting music for free was worth dealing with any UI. Second time was MySpace customization: you had to paste your own CSS into the "about me" profile box! And people figured it out, because having a custom profile was desirable enough that it was worth it.

tomcam 4y ago
There’s some kind of lesson we maybe haven’t absorbed properly. Millions of people learned crazy shit like WordStar before Word, then MS-DOS before Windows, and then building websites by hand using HTML. Millions. Of course I completely recognize that improved software increased these markets by orders of magnitude, but to this day I remained fascinated that regular people managed to use such primitive tools for so long.
- chinchilla2020 4y ago
  The modern UI design on smartphones and PCs has created a whole skillset of its own. Many boomer types find MSDOS to be simpler than windows. I would argue that in many ways html/css/javascript is simpler and more intuitive than wordpress. Text is such a simple way to organize information. I am still amazed how much information and precision you can pack into text that would take a 10 hour youtube to match.
anyfoo 4y ago
Was it? I hardly remember, but searching for old screenshots from the time, it seems pretty straightforward... are those later clients already? Did you have any particular gripes?
- simonw 4y ago
  I found a screenshot here which matches my recollection of it being a pretty spartan, jargon-heavy interface: https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/8jrtnx/napster_the_original_pirate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/8jrtnx/napster_t...

initplus 4y ago

In a way that's part of what makes it so interesting. It's not merely bad, the UX is completely alien. It feels like software designed by another species. There is loads of software with terrible UX, but most of it is bad in the same boring ways. I see Dwarf Fortress as outsider art: "Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds." Other than the fact that the game was not discovered after his death, every other element of Wikipedia's outsider art intro paragraph fits to a T.

darkteflon 4y ago
Thanks for that. I’ve never heard it before but that’s such a great term - very evocative.
- quirino 4y ago
  Outsider music is also fascinating, this RateYourMusic list gives loads of recommendations: https://rateyourmusic.com/list/KeepPunchin/the-curious-universe-of-outsider-and-incorrect-music/ https://rateyourmusic.com/list/KeepPunchin/the-curious-unive...
- ethbr0 4y ago
  The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly is a classic example. Found after James Hampton's death in 1964, he'd spent the previous ~14 years meticulously constructing more than 180 separate pieces from discarded material. https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/throne-third-heaven-nations-millennium-general-assembly-9897 https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/throne-third-heaven-natio... http://www.spacesarchives.org/explore/search-the-online-collection/throne-of-the-third-heaven-of-the-nations-millennium-general-assembly/ http://www.spacesarchives.org/explore/search-the-online-coll...
  - darkteflon 4y ago
    Love it. I listened to an interview this morning on the Eurogamer podcast with _Citizen Sleeper_ creator Gareth Damian Martin, who spoke eloquently at length on this sort of thing. He felt (and I agree) that the video game - especially now - is such a great medium for exploring just this kind of thing.

ramesh31 4y ago

My theory is that this is why most enterprise software is terribly slow and buggy with horrible UX. If something works, and there is a completely coherent logically consistent system buried in the mess, people can and will usually figure things out. And the drive to make more features generally wins out over time above addressing technical/UX debt.

bombcar 4y ago
Also once people are used to it, if you change it all hell breaks loose - see Salesforce Lightning (it still sucks).

deltaonefour 4y ago

It makes sense, dwarf fortress is not suppose to be useful, it's a game, people play for the challenge... so destroying it's usefulness with bad UI doesn't mean much as it's not useful in the first place. But doing the same thing of destroying the usefulness of a actual useful product will cause people to not use it. Replacing the steering wheel of a car with the DF UI, for example, will literally stop everyone from driving it.

bluedino 4y ago

I'd like to introduce you to the majority of ERP systems out there. Or most of Microsoft's Azure portal. Have you used Intune?