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>streamline most/all of the features in DF What features did they streamline? I thought they just replaced the ASCII graphics with sprites and changed some hot

• netruk44 4y ago
  I haven't played the Steam version, but it's my understanding the menus aren't keyboard-based anymore. That alone is a massive undertaking, Dwarf Fortress has an insane number of submenus for them to figure out good GUI places for them all. Everything used to just be in a central massive "press a single letter for this specific submenu" sub-screen on the right third of the screen, with multiple submenus to navigate to what you're trying to do.
  • thatguy0900 4y ago
    All the menus are still keyboard navagable, if you have that muscle memory already. I think that's a great touch
    • MrLeap 4y ago
      This isn't true, as far as I know. Some menus are, but hotkeys have been changed quite a bit. Quite a few menus seem mouse only. I can't ABABABABABAB to add a bunch of beds to a carpenter anymore, DD doesn't mine. The hotkey path for placing doors in the steam version is bananas. Still a great game! Hoping there's a mod or a patch that lets me use the classic keys with the new interface eventually though.
      • pacoWebConsult 4y ago
        Agree there's definitely some quirks with building and making things not via work orders. Even for queuing up a couple of copper greaves at a metalworker's shop (because my king is obsessed with demanding their creation and banning their export), I opt for work orders rather than going through and selecting armor -> copper -> greaves twice.
        • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
          Or when 20 something dwarves plummet into lave in a tragic mining accident and you need to engrave all the slabs? awful. On the whole, the UI stuff is a significant improvement, though.
      • Arrath 4y ago
        Yes, there are some definite losses in the move to a mouse based interface. I'm glad I had enough of a break from my last ASCII DF play, so my muscle memory isn't driving me insane. Some of the hotkeys are a little rough (requiring a big stretch across the keyboard or two hands on the kb but I'm using a mouse now..) and I hope they get another pass.
        • MrLeap 4y ago
          YUP. Critical functions (doors?!) should all be on the left side of the keyboard if you're going to make me use the mouse. Wonder if the publishers use DVORAK or something.
          • Arrath 4y ago
            Whoever settled on B-P-R for doors is some form of sadist.
            • OkayPhysicist 4y ago
              The real move is to get in the habit of forbidding your fancy stuff by default, and then using "closest material" and "keep building after placement" for all furniture.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • Hikikomori 4y ago
        You csn select bed and select placing multiple ones now, so no need to spam hotkeys.
        • Arrath 4y ago
          Place, yes. But queuing them up for crafting in a workshop is a chore of clicks before you have an office set up for making work orders. Nested menus in workshops get even worse. God forbid having to click and scroll Steel -> Weapon -> Battleaxe too many times.
          • Hikikomori 4y ago
            Yeah i only use work orders now, only look at workshops to see what they make if I didn't already know.
    • Octopodes 4y ago
      Are you certain? I've played the classic version for ten years and the Steam release has completely different hotkeys, and is missing keyboard control for some tasks entirely.
  • mijoharas 4y ago
    Yes, they also implemented a tutorial, which I think is new, and reordered and reorganised the menus iirc. (This is from memory so I could of course be wrong).
• flohofwoe 4y ago
  I don't know the classic version all too well (because I never got into it despite multiple attempts), but the Steam release is generally much more approachable (so far I have put over 50 hrs into it and love it). It has a simple tutorial, the interface is fully mouse driven, there's sound effects and music, and the tile graphics really do a great job to visualise what's going on in the game.
  • agentwiggles 4y ago
    Sounds I need to stay well away from this game for now haha, I bounced off Factorio several times over the last few years and got wildly addicted to it a couple months ago. I imagine a similar fate could be in store with DF if I let myself peek in. I've got a decent run on a side project right now, and I've noticed that (no surprise) when I get into a new game, all of a sudden all of my "healthy" hobbies like guitar, weightlifting, and coding go out the window. Definitely planning to take a run at Dwarf Fortress eventually though.
    • wpietri 4y ago
      I feel that for sure. Both the risk-of-wild-addiction part and the kills-my-other-efforts part. There are whole classes of games I don't dare play because they feel like being productive/creative but have shorter/better reward feedback loops than the things I'd rather be doing.
      • theragra 4y ago
        Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I'm now writing short post each day, and think it is better spent time then playing Factorio for two hours, like my friend does.
• Manuel_D 4y ago
  Cursor-based interfaces was probably a big one. They also have things like minimaps, dwarf sprites that reflect equipment gender and profession. It's more than just a tileset. I think they also made a new jobs template system.
• bradford 4y ago
  There's a massive difference between Steam DF and the previous DF that I played (granted, that was probably in 2019). It's a totally new UI between the two versions: it's much friendlier to a broad population while still retaining the same game mechanics. [edit] I'll also add my favorite change: performance. Before the steam version I always ended up abandoning my fort because the framerate just became unbearable. In the steam version I have yet to encounter these issues.
• Macha 4y ago
  One example of "something was a pain in the ass but no longer is" streamling is that you can dig a stairway across levels and it will put a down stair on the top level and up/down stairs on the middle levels and a up stair on the bottom level. In the "the feature is less complex" in the steam version (note most of these are still in the simulation, just missing from the GUI so inaccessible to the player), some examples are: - Health and body part level damage - Reading historical logs - Ammo - Idlers counter
  • 0xffff2 4y ago
    Is it true that you can't manually choose what kind of stairs to place anymore if you want to? I read a Steam review that claimed that your stair example is true, but it doesn't always work perfectly and there's no way to manually specify what kind of stairs you want. Honestly kept me from buying the game for now.
    • burnished 4y ago
      Why was that the thing that kept you off? I have not played in a while, is it that impactful?
      • 0xffff2 4y ago
        Well, it is fairly impactful in that if the automatic stair generation puts a down stair where an up/down stair should have been, there is no way to completely fix it. You can build the correct stairs, but it will never be carved out of natural rock since that rock has been removed. Call me crazy, but that's a distinction that matters to me in what is effectively a procedural story generator. More generally, it speaks to a level of sloppiness that tells me I'm better off waiting a couple of years. I've played a lot of buggy DF builds over the years. It's just part of the experience, but I don't have as much free times as I used to so I'd rather wait than play through the bugs these days.
        • scambier 4y ago
          There are stairs that only go up or down?...
• jackmott42 4y ago
  That is a non charitable but fairly accurate way of phrasing it. I would say more accurate would be to say the user interface was completely rethought and much more approachable. I couldn't play the game before, now it is a joy.
  • 0xffff2 4y ago
    On the other hand, for DF veterans "just replaced the ASCII graphics with sprites and changed some hotkeys" would have been the most charitable thing they could have done. I haven't played the Steam version yet, but my reading of reviews gives me the strong impression that they've changed so much that I will have to approach it as an entirely new game.
• Arrath 4y ago
  The labor system is the biggest thing that got refined. Instead of painstakingly assigning jobs to dwarves in a very fine grained process through the labor menu for each individual, dwarves are assigned to jobs. That is, the vast majority of jobs are by default assigned to all dwarves, and the game intelligently assigns work based on dwarf skill and pathing distance. You are free to tweak labor settings from there, for instance by assigning a forge to be the exclusive workplace of a legendary weaponsmith and only making weapons at that forge, or specializing miners to only mine so that they won't find themselves cleaning fish when idle between mining gigs. You can also create custom work profiles more akin to the old setup, enabling or disabling specific tasks and then assign that profile to specific dwarves if you want to get so detailed. However I find the new system works very well.
  • 0xffff2 4y ago
    Is that different from simply making all labors enabled by default in old dwarf fortress? >the game intelligently assigns work based on dwarf skill and pathing distance sounds like mostly what happened before.
    • Arrath 4y ago
      That's a good question! I am not too familiar with how job assignment worked under the hood in classic DF so I can't really answer. I'm mostly going off of a devlog and a followup reddit post from one of the Kitfox folks.
    • Sharlin 4y ago
      I don’t think the old system cared about either proficiency or proximity, it just picked whomever was available. Besides, there was no way for the player to "make all labora enabled by default" in the previous versions, or even "enable/disable one particular labor for all", because you could only toggle labors for a single dwarf at a time.
      • 0xffff2 4y ago
        I'm quite certain that proximity has been accounted for for many years. Obviously availability was a prerequisite.
• Arrath 4y ago
  As minor as it is, having a settings screen you can tweak ingame instead of a .txt config file in the install folder you have to twiddle with and then relaunch the game is a real nice change.
• yAak 4y ago
  UX
• seanhunter 4y ago
  1)Labour, as a sibling said. You no longer need dwarf therapist to play the game without losing your marbles 2)Automining veins is now part of the base game rather than a dfhack thing 3)The military UI is still confusing and counterintuitive but it's a billion times better than before. I've actually managed to effectively train, equip and station troops and deploy them in combat without having to check the wiki. There's no way I could do that in classic and I've played a fair amount of DF 4)Things like the minecart UX and the thing which specifies how bridges open etc are way less confusing than before. Small, but there are thousands of UX improvements like that. 5)Rather than sometimes it's hjkl and sometimes wasd and sometimes arrow keys and sometimes numpad and sometimes you can select a box and sometimes you select the first tile and then the last tile to get a rectangle and sometimes you select the first tile and then use hjkl (or sometimes wasd) to grow your rectangle to the size you want, now you click the first tile, then the last tile. For everything. Building bridges, specifying zones, specifying burrows, building stockpiles etc, they all work the same. (Ironically there is a keyboard cursor if you want that but it is buggy for me at the moment.) 6)The system for worldgen and embark is also a lot better. For example you don't have the 3 weird confusing maps any more, you just have a big map and if you zoom in you get another map where you can pick exactly where you want to embark and the size. 7)Notifications. They all appear on the side in cronological order with an appropriate icon, you can hover to get the basics or click to see more or interact. Right-clicking dismisses them. I could go on but you get the idea. There are lots of examples like this. It's still DF, but at least playing it isn't some Kafka-esque bullshit nightmare.