7 ms·

Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition – Release Date Trailer [video]

172 points by dmarchand90 4y ago

Azrael3000 4y ago
There's some more info on steam [0] about the release. TL/DR: 30 $, Legend mode for sure, Arena and Classic mode maybe or a few weeks after. More updates (graphics, Mac & Linux support) a bit later. Adventure mode will follow. [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
lemoncookiechip 4y ago
I'm so excited for this.
carabiner 4y ago
Hope they add 3d graphics like Stonesense some day: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/snrx46/the_castle_and_entrance_to_an_underground_city/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/snrx46/the_c...
- barroomhero 4y ago
  I'm assuming/hoping it will be one of the first Steam Workshop creations, once that's available.
pull_my_finger 4y ago
As a fan of roguelikes (not saying DF is a roguelike)/turn-based/grid-based games, I wish more of these "classical" games would take a look at the HUGE improvements to animation/motion that Jupiter Hell implemented. Seeing a game be released in 2022 and the character still mechanically slides from one grid cell to the next is painful. Not saying a hate it or wouldn't play a game that still does it, but seems to be holding the related genres back.
- causi 4y ago
  Wow, I had no idea it was still going to be like that in the final Steam version. It looks more like an amateur overlay someone could have cranked out in a month than a years-long project. Frankly that jank makes me prefer the original graphics. At least you expect single glyphs to blink around.
  - red_trumpet 4y ago
    If you take a look at their blog[1], you might realize that the Steam release is about more than slapping on a texture pack. AFAICT they overhauled most of the UI. [1] https://bay12games.com/dwarves/ https://bay12games.com/dwarves/
  - alpaca128 4y ago
    It was communicated from the start what the Steam version would look like. But also they significantly sped up world generation and built a graphical UI, among other things. That alone is a good reason for me to prefer "that jank". > It looks more like an amateur overlay someone could have cranked out in a month than a years-long project We both know that's not remotely true. They're not even done drawing all the graphics yet and that's not exactly because of laziness. And on the technical side this is a game built over 20 years without animated graphics in mind.
    - causality0 4y ago
      Is having characters face the direction they're moving really that big of an ask? I'm no master developer but comparing two X coordinates and picking a left-facing or right-facing sprite seems like the kind of thing computers are good at.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        >Is having characters face the direction they're moving really that big of an ask? For one character, probably not, but if you have 200 dwarfs and a large goblin raid is flooding your gates with about as many units you now have another coupling between the logic and UI that must be tracked bringing your fortress closer to FPS death at earlier stages.
nix23 4y ago
I changed to cataclysm, but maybe i should give df another try. https://cataclysmdda.org/ https://cataclysmdda.org/
- glenstein 4y ago
  Cataclysm is such an extraordinary game, especially for free. I believe it will have it's day in sun soon enough.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >I believe it will have it's day in sun soon enough. I really hope that for the dev's, they make an excellent job!
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Latest update: Candy bracelets no longer made of flesh.... Hmm, ok this is getting my attention.
omeysalvi 4y ago
The game is a legend for the possibilities it offers for emergent gameplay. Probably one day we can have its code open sourced, like its creators once wanted to, and take a peek behind its complex systems.
- airza 4y ago
  It must be a rat’s nest at this point. As much as i love the game, from the outside I am guessing that an autodidact c++ application that has been releasing more and more slowly over a decade is drowning in technical debt.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    It has loads of bugs as well -- the DF community finds them charming, but personally I quit after a while because I found them annoying. Planning my fortress around bug exploitation felt dirty; trying not to exploit them made the game seem like a job.
  - wolfram74 4y ago
    When the jank comes up I wonder for a few moments how one would architect something like this in retrospect.
kibwen 4y ago
Extremely excited. As someone who first got into DF a bit after Boatmurdered, fighting the impenetrable and inconsistent UI was seen as a rite of passage, though at the same time it prevented a lot of people from being able to appreciate this gem of the game. And the amazing thing is... it looks good! I've seen texture packs for DF and they're usually just OK, but never enough to drag me away from the classic glyphs. But IMO this looks better than any texture pack I've seen. The art is clear, delightful, and thematically-consistent, which is an achievement considering how small the sprites are and how much stuff is in this game that you have to depict. I gasped in surprise watching them scroll up through Z-levels in a livestream, realizing that you could see detailed cross-sections of trees with tapering branches and leaves (which change color with the seasons) as you ascend. And the UI actually looks reasonable now! I was concerned that Tarn might not have any talent at UX, but all the rearranged menus appear to be extremely thoughtful and optimized for convenience while still retaining the bevy of keybinds that power users crave. They've incorporated some ideas from third-party tools to make managing dwarves easier as well. Overall I'm not sure if DF is still the indisputable champion of weirdly-obsessively-thorough game simulations as of 2022, what with Rimworld and the like nipping at its heels, but I'll be getting this for sure. EDIT: Here's an hour-long live demo with Tarn and Zach from two months ago (I believe they've polished the UI even more since then): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE-FCtGdwMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE-FCtGdwMI
- bjelkeman-again 4y ago
  Boatmurdered had me laughing out loud. I really wanted to get into DF, but the learning curve stopped me. I wrote to some friends earlier: > The World is about to end. Dwarf Fortress GUI version to release December 6… And a friend replied: > I'm scared to pick that game up - afraid it will become a black hole in my life. Never played it but it always looked very interesting I am scared now. :)
  - kibwen 4y ago
    Doing a succession fortress with your friends, just like Boatmurdered, can be great fun (until someone fills the attic with lava, Zach). In the video linked above I believe they even mention a feature designed to make it easier to share the save between friends to make it easier to play succession games. EDIT: from https://youtu.be/uE-FCtGdwMI?t=2425 https://youtu.be/uE-FCtGdwMI?t=2425 : "We have a new system where you can group your saves by timeline. It's mainly for the title screen but it also lets you share them with people in different ways. [...] So you can have your own little Boatmurdered experience."
ingenieros 4y ago
For anyone nitpicking the animations, UI or graphics choice... Please go and read about the reasons which drove the Adams brothers to finally cash in on their 20 year long passion project. Spoiler alert: cancer and inadequate health care coverage is a terrible combination.
- AndrewOMartin 4y ago
  - nmilo 4y ago
    - canadianfella 4y ago
- wisnoskij 4y ago
  These guys have been getting donated like 5-20k per months for a over a decade.
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is on this; whether you're saying they make plenty of money, or not enough, or if you're not really speaking to whether it's enough. But speaking directly to the numbers - The smallest monthly amount the article mentions is $3,000 / month - The highest monthly amount the article mentions is $8,181 / month (Dec 2104) - The current number seems to indicate $6,999 / month - $7,000 * 12 = $84 / year - Split between two people, that's $42,000 / year each - General rule of thumb is that the cost for an employee doubles their salary (to account for expenses such as health care, supplies, taxes, etc). So assume they're actually making less than that. We'll make it $30,000 since the overhead for a contractor is less than that for an employee. $30,000 per year is not a lot of money to live on.
AndrewOMartin 4y ago
Let's take a moment to honour and respect all the coursework assignments, fitness regimes, and relationships that will go unattended due to this news. You were never meant for this world.
xwdv 4y ago
Honestly the major upgrade I would have loved to have seen was some kind of multi-threading for better performance on modern machines. Anyone who has played Dwarf Fortress with custom graphic tile sets has already played DF with good enough graphics. These graphics are good but what makes a game good isn’t the graphics.
- RupertEisenhart 4y ago
  I do agree about the multithreading, but I think better menus will probably make quite a big difference to the playability. I'm looking forward to getting into weapons and armour and more of the army screens that I never bothered taking the time to really penetrate.
gareth_untether 4y ago
Seeing the demo has peaked my interest to try it again. The learning curve I found too extreme last time. Mainly due to not being able to quickly understand what a text symbol was. The colours and graphics will certainly help me. More than anything I've really enjoyed really people's stories from the game.
- andybak 4y ago
  (just so you know it's "piqued my interest" - hope you don't mind the minor correction)
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
Finally! I've always wanted to play this game but could never get over the graphics.
JBits 4y ago
The menus, particularly for fortress mode, aren't the easiest so I'm looking forward to a reworked version in the Steam edition but I'm not sure if I'll play it if there isn't an ASCII mode.
wwfzyn 4y ago
Just noting that if the healthcare system were better in the US there would not be any incentive for DF to get better quickly. There has to be a good solution to the problem of productivity when all of one's needs are met.

172 points by dmarchand90 4y ago

There's some more info on steam [0] about the release. TL/DR: 30 $, Legend mode for sure, Arena and Classic mode maybe or a few weeks after. More updates (graphics, Mac & Linux support) a bit later. Adventure mode will follow. [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

lemoncookiechip 4y ago

I'm so excited for this.

carabiner 4y ago

Hope they add 3d graphics like Stonesense some day: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/snrx46/the_castle_and_entrance_to_an_underground_city/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/snrx46/the_c...

barroomhero 4y ago
I'm assuming/hoping it will be one of the first Steam Workshop creations, once that's available.

pull_my_finger 4y ago

As a fan of roguelikes (not saying DF is a roguelike)/turn-based/grid-based games, I wish more of these "classical" games would take a look at the HUGE improvements to animation/motion that Jupiter Hell implemented. Seeing a game be released in 2022 and the character still mechanically slides from one grid cell to the next is painful. Not saying a hate it or wouldn't play a game that still does it, but seems to be holding the related genres back.

causi 4y ago
Wow, I had no idea it was still going to be like that in the final Steam version. It looks more like an amateur overlay someone could have cranked out in a month than a years-long project. Frankly that jank makes me prefer the original graphics. At least you expect single glyphs to blink around.
- red_trumpet 4y ago
  If you take a look at their blog[1], you might realize that the Steam release is about more than slapping on a texture pack. AFAICT they overhauled most of the UI. [1] https://bay12games.com/dwarves/ https://bay12games.com/dwarves/
- alpaca128 4y ago
  It was communicated from the start what the Steam version would look like. But also they significantly sped up world generation and built a graphical UI, among other things. That alone is a good reason for me to prefer "that jank". > It looks more like an amateur overlay someone could have cranked out in a month than a years-long project We both know that's not remotely true. They're not even done drawing all the graphics yet and that's not exactly because of laziness. And on the technical side this is a game built over 20 years without animated graphics in mind.
  - causality0 4y ago
    Is having characters face the direction they're moving really that big of an ask? I'm no master developer but comparing two X coordinates and picking a left-facing or right-facing sprite seems like the kind of thing computers are good at.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      >Is having characters face the direction they're moving really that big of an ask? For one character, probably not, but if you have 200 dwarfs and a large goblin raid is flooding your gates with about as many units you now have another coupling between the logic and UI that must be tracked bringing your fortress closer to FPS death at earlier stages.

nix23 4y ago

I changed to cataclysm, but maybe i should give df another try. https://cataclysmdda.org/ https://cataclysmdda.org/

glenstein 4y ago
Cataclysm is such an extraordinary game, especially for free. I believe it will have it's day in sun soon enough.
- nix23 4y ago
  >I believe it will have it's day in sun soon enough. I really hope that for the dev's, they make an excellent job!
- pixl97 4y ago
  Latest update: Candy bracelets no longer made of flesh.... Hmm, ok this is getting my attention.

omeysalvi 4y ago

The game is a legend for the possibilities it offers for emergent gameplay. Probably one day we can have its code open sourced, like its creators once wanted to, and take a peek behind its complex systems.

airza 4y ago
It must be a rat’s nest at this point. As much as i love the game, from the outside I am guessing that an autodidact c++ application that has been releasing more and more slowly over a decade is drowning in technical debt.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  It has loads of bugs as well -- the DF community finds them charming, but personally I quit after a while because I found them annoying. Planning my fortress around bug exploitation felt dirty; trying not to exploit them made the game seem like a job.
- wolfram74 4y ago
  When the jank comes up I wonder for a few moments how one would architect something like this in retrospect.

kibwen 4y ago

Extremely excited. As someone who first got into DF a bit after Boatmurdered, fighting the impenetrable and inconsistent UI was seen as a rite of passage, though at the same time it prevented a lot of people from being able to appreciate this gem of the game. And the amazing thing is... it looks good! I've seen texture packs for DF and they're usually just OK, but never enough to drag me away from the classic glyphs. But IMO this looks better than any texture pack I've seen. The art is clear, delightful, and thematically-consistent, which is an achievement considering how small the sprites are and how much stuff is in this game that you have to depict. I gasped in surprise watching them scroll up through Z-levels in a livestream, realizing that you could see detailed cross-sections of trees with tapering branches and leaves (which change color with the seasons) as you ascend. And the UI actually looks reasonable now! I was concerned that Tarn might not have any talent at UX, but all the rearranged menus appear to be extremely thoughtful and optimized for convenience while still retaining the bevy of keybinds that power users crave. They've incorporated some ideas from third-party tools to make managing dwarves easier as well. Overall I'm not sure if DF is still the indisputable champion of weirdly-obsessively-thorough game simulations as of 2022, what with Rimworld and the like nipping at its heels, but I'll be getting this for sure. EDIT: Here's an hour-long live demo with Tarn and Zach from two months ago (I believe they've polished the UI even more since then): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE-FCtGdwMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE-FCtGdwMI

bjelkeman-again 4y ago
Boatmurdered had me laughing out loud. I really wanted to get into DF, but the learning curve stopped me. I wrote to some friends earlier: > The World is about to end. Dwarf Fortress GUI version to release December 6… And a friend replied: > I'm scared to pick that game up - afraid it will become a black hole in my life. Never played it but it always looked very interesting I am scared now. :)
- kibwen 4y ago
  Doing a succession fortress with your friends, just like Boatmurdered, can be great fun (until someone fills the attic with lava, Zach). In the video linked above I believe they even mention a feature designed to make it easier to share the save between friends to make it easier to play succession games. EDIT: from https://youtu.be/uE-FCtGdwMI?t=2425 https://youtu.be/uE-FCtGdwMI?t=2425 : "We have a new system where you can group your saves by timeline. It's mainly for the title screen but it also lets you share them with people in different ways. [...] So you can have your own little Boatmurdered experience."

ingenieros 4y ago

For anyone nitpicking the animations, UI or graphics choice... Please go and read about the reasons which drove the Adams brothers to finally cash in on their 20 year long passion project. Spoiler alert: cancer and inadequate health care coverage is a terrible combination.

AndrewOMartin 4y ago
- nmilo 4y ago
  - canadianfella 4y ago
wisnoskij 4y ago
These guys have been getting donated like 5-20k per months for a over a decade.
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is on this; whether you're saying they make plenty of money, or not enough, or if you're not really speaking to whether it's enough. But speaking directly to the numbers - The smallest monthly amount the article mentions is $3,000 / month - The highest monthly amount the article mentions is $8,181 / month (Dec 2104) - The current number seems to indicate $6,999 / month - $7,000 * 12 = $84 / year - Split between two people, that's $42,000 / year each - General rule of thumb is that the cost for an employee doubles their salary (to account for expenses such as health care, supplies, taxes, etc). So assume they're actually making less than that. We'll make it $30,000 since the overhead for a contractor is less than that for an employee. $30,000 per year is not a lot of money to live on.

AndrewOMartin 4y ago

Let's take a moment to honour and respect all the coursework assignments, fitness regimes, and relationships that will go unattended due to this news. You were never meant for this world.

xwdv 4y ago

Honestly the major upgrade I would have loved to have seen was some kind of multi-threading for better performance on modern machines. Anyone who has played Dwarf Fortress with custom graphic tile sets has already played DF with good enough graphics. These graphics are good but what makes a game good isn’t the graphics.

RupertEisenhart 4y ago
I do agree about the multithreading, but I think better menus will probably make quite a big difference to the playability. I'm looking forward to getting into weapons and armour and more of the army screens that I never bothered taking the time to really penetrate.

gareth_untether 4y ago

Seeing the demo has peaked my interest to try it again. The learning curve I found too extreme last time. Mainly due to not being able to quickly understand what a text symbol was. The colours and graphics will certainly help me. More than anything I've really enjoyed really people's stories from the game.

andybak 4y ago
(just so you know it's "piqued my interest" - hope you don't mind the minor correction)

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago

Finally! I've always wanted to play this game but could never get over the graphics.

JBits 4y ago

The menus, particularly for fortress mode, aren't the easiest so I'm looking forward to a reworked version in the Steam edition but I'm not sure if I'll play it if there isn't an ASCII mode.

wwfzyn 4y ago

Just noting that if the healthcare system were better in the US there would not be any incentive for DF to get better quickly. There has to be a good solution to the problem of productivity when all of one's needs are met.