6 ms·

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…
  • joemi 4y ago
    I guess it kind of depends on how you mean it, but I think there are many worse things... I've used software where actions that should be a single step are two or three steps (like a "click OK and now confirm that you clicked OK" for an inconsequential step out). I've played games with intentionally difficult UI, like QWOP. There are a few Windows computers at my work which are a bit older and when you go to open a program, nothing apparently happens, so you instinctively click again, and again nothing happens, so you either click again or wait a while, and then finally your web browser (or whatever) opens, but you get several windows open since you clicked it a few times, and this happens every time, just due to the way the UI delay happens. Also, there are experimental designs like https://userinyerface.com/ https://userinyerface.com/ which illustrate brutally terrible UX. So, in my experience, the Dwarf Fortress UX is definitely complicated and isn't easily discoverable, but at least it does what it's supposed to. It doesn't infuriate me the way that some things (especially truly poorly designed things) do. This is why I claim it's far from the worst.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    I've seen interfaces as obscure as DFs but requiring the mouse or losing type-ahead. Once you know what you're doing in DF I find you can often be running ahead of the menus (and there's not that many variations to memorize, very quickly you get muscle memory if you're playing it for any significant time).
  • avereveard 4y ago
    The first word ribbon iteration was pretty dire. Finding out where stuff was tucked into was exasperating, especially since some stuff only showed up contextually to your caret position of range selection, so if you didn't know what you were looking for it was undiscoverable