4 ms·
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, thoug
by 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 agoBoatmurdered 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 agoDoing 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."
- Sharlin 4y agoI doubt any of the competitors have anything even remotely approaching the worldgen complexity of DF, even if some aspects of the gameplay simulation might be comparable to DF’s equivalents. And the Myth&Magic arc (that should begin in earnest once the Steam version is stable) will vastly increase the depth of the world’s history and permit many, many more aspects of the world and its inhabitants to be "evolved" (with lots of tweakable parameters) for each generated world separately rather than hardcoded or just naively randomized. Another thing that is expected to vastly improve over the next several years is how "alive" the worlds are – how much things continue ticking outside your fortress during gameplay, and how your fortress affects and is affected by the events, politics, and subterfuge in the world at large.
- drakythe 4y agoWorth noting: Tarn and Zac seem to have had very very little to do with the actual UI beyond feedback, providing data retrieval endpoints, and sometimes reorganizing how data was deliver. Kitfox games are the ones delivering the UI.