10 ms·

Great explanation of DF's bodily combat damage modeling: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/95316-complex-damage-model-considerable-for-dayz-no-suggestio

Great explanation of DF's bodily combat damage modeling: http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/95316-complex-damage-model-considerable-for-dayz-no-suggestion/ http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/95316-complex-dama... > DF's damage system is just as complex and oftentimes difficult to keep track of as the rest of the game. Instead of simple health points or separate body parts DF simulates each individual by the sum of it's parts. This starts at the single parts of a body, then adds layers of tissue, muscle and fat to each part, connects all parts by joints and finally stuffs a share of vital and nonvital organs into the whole thing. Every part of this construct has several states it can be it, reaching from healthy over bruised, torn, mangled, nonfunctional, broken and missing... > How does that play out in the actual game? Depending on what kind of injury a creature suffers it tracks the damage to individual body part and the results of it. Slashing damage will cut through tissue, muscle and fat, might even separate body parts, blunt damage will pass through protective clothing and only bruise upper layers, but shatter bones and joints mercilessly. Piercing damage will effortlessly penetrate all layers and has a high chance to damage. A dwarf is graphically represented by a smiley face, so you can't see any of this happen. All of it is conveyed by descriptive text. It's also recommended to pick up a freshman textbook on geology to understand the game's many types of rocks, which is apparently pretty realistic following Tarn's personal interest in geology/mineralogy. The depth of this "game" is breathtaking. The only thing I can think of comparable might be high-fidelity but consumer grade flight simulators like X-Plane, or those put out by Russian developer DCS (e.g. http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/series/black_shark/#22728 http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/series/black_shark/... )

drakeandrews 14y ago
> Ulric McDwarf has torn his brain > Ulric McDwarf has broken his spleen Ah, Dwarf Fortress. How I love you. Wait, no, the other one. Hate. Definitely hate.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  I know, right. 'feelings' - sometimes a difficult concept to grasp after too much Fortran 90 or something similar.
  - drakeandrews 14y ago
    Having never touched Fortran or similar, I'd never know. Unless I've spent so long working with it it's erased all memory of it from my brain. We must spread the word, we could make millions.
    - DeepDuh 14y ago
      According to [1] this has already been invented. Too late then. Let's make millions anyway, just because.. [1] http://www.radiolab.org/2007/jun/07/ http://www.radiolab.org/2007/jun/07/
pistacchioso 14y ago
now, this confirms my opinion that the game has been really fun to program, much more than to play. Simulating inch by inch damage is a fun thing to think, model and develop, but in the end the player gets a bunch of chars and some description that could have been well picked up randomly with no impact on the gameplay
- ajuc 14y ago
  It is very fun to play. Fortress mode at least (where you control whole fortress of dwarves). It feels like herding cats and delaying the inevitable doom. And the doom always comes because of you missing one of the small details. Like - one of the dwarfs went insane, cause you forgot to give him proper bed, and when he wanted to make some artifact there were no forge available for a long time. Then he goes berserk and kills a few other dwarves. Your police force kills him, but your cemetary is full, so a few bodies were left by dwarves to rot in the cave (you shoud have checked that, but you were busy on the other level ensuring dwarves have something to eat). After a few weeks miasma from the bodies is everywhere, and other dwarves went insane from it, killing each other. A few still sane try to stop that, you try to divide caves with doors to stop the miasma and insane dwarves, but then the sane one die or go insane from starvation. Or because their friends or partners were killed. And then goblins come :) That's how most of the games look, but thanks to insane level of details it's much more varied. Sometimes it's flood that takes your fortress, sometimes it's lack of water, sometimes it's digging too dip and revealing subterran horrors. The game has steep learning curve, but it's very rewarding.
  - jaxonrice 14y ago
    You forgot to mention the vampire dwarf who arrives as a migrant and ends up killing your Militia commander in his sleep. Oh, and the fact that finding out who the vampire is is an exercise in detective work (and pure luck).
- gchpaco 14y ago
  It is actually really a blast, enough so to cause these sort of really frustrated "it's awesome but it's awful" threads. It is a weird combination of open world architecture combined with really stupid minions. What is in reality probably an AI mistake really feels like massive stupidity the twentieth time your mason seals himself on the wrong side of a floodgate. You spend hours getting things set up just so and then a megabeast comes and seals you in your fortress and your dwarves go mad and start murdering each other for lack of a sock. Or you decide what the world really needs is pressurized magma cannon and spend a couple of real life weeks and countless in-game years and dwarf lives getting the pump stack to work, only to find out the first time you try and use it that the pressure system doesn't work and what is supposed to be a raging torrent of molten rock is actually sort of a sprinkler system. Of molten rock. And you haven't devised a purge system yet, so your half working masterpiece is going to have to be taken apart very, very carefully by a bunch of idiots. (This is not hypothetical; it happened to a succession fort that went by "FailCannon") Not for nothing is the community devoted to megaprojects. Not only are they cool they offer countless ways to introduce Fun into your boring, dreary existence. And sometimes they even work; the "minecart shotgun loaded with gold bars (because, why not?) complete with optional F.R.O.G.G.E.R. system is just a gorgeous thing to watch happen, and it's viscerally satisfying to watch some goblin take a gold bar going a good 30, 40 mph to the face.
gnarbarian 14y ago
The UI in Dwarf Fortress is completely indefensible. Even when you do understand how to play the game it's a kludge. Let alone the fact that AN ASCII GAME CAN BRING AN 8 CORE DESKTOP TO A CRAWL. (The ASCII is actually rendered in OPENGL for performance which is a joke in and of itself because 99% of the system resources are spent poorly simulating stagnant blocks of air rock and dirt with nothing happening to them). There are many amazing and laudable aspects to DF. Tarn has a physics background and in this regard the game is well thought out. It has unmatched emergent gameplay and behavior due to the physics and complexity of each dwarf. What isn't well thought out at all are both the 'design' of the software and interface. This is the most beautifully complex game with endless unique and hilarious morsels of awesome (the naming of geographic features and depictions engraved on items) Yet absolutely no effort is spent on conveying that to the user. It's like the game itself is autistic in its savant level complexity and all that beauty is hidden behind an utterly unusable interface and horribly inefficient software design. Dwarf Fortress is a perverse decent into a single brilliant yet mal adjusted person's 'ideal' game. It's wildly capable and meticulously tended to in all the wrong areas while the glaringly obvious flaws go unattended. It's like a brilliant mathematician who shits on the floor and writes earth-shattering proofs on discarded fast food bags leaving them strewn about homeless shelters. The hobos (DF fans) all rightfully commend his genius and defend the antisocial idiosyncratic behavior as "part of the creative process" or that anything else would detract from 'the experience' of reading a revolutionary proof off of a shit stained McDonalds bag. The main problem is Tarn's inability to work with anyone else or compromise. The poor quality interface and software design is a perfect metaphor for the developer behind it. The smallest improvement such as rendering more ASCII layers at once from an isometric perspective would vastly improve the usability and likely expand the userbase by 10 fold yet no effort is made to make ANY UI adjustments. Minecraft is the perfect example of the level of success DF is capable of. Their premise is quite similar, but where Notch's effort went into a simplistic usable UI with simple physics, Tarn went without a UI and devoted his effort to a bewilderingly complex and amazingly inefficent engine with no reasonable way for anyone to experience it. Tarn could be a multi millionare if he simply would take some damn advice about sofware and UI design. Seriously, With two more people helping him, one person focused on optimizing the codebase and another focused on improving the UI this would literally be one of the greatest games of all time. Until that day DF will remain an obscure oddity, like a model train set with a revolutionary efficient engine whose owner steadfastly refuses anyone to use it in anything except a toy which actually causes physical pain to all who attempt to play with it.
huskyr 14y ago
> "It's also recommended to pick up a freshman textbook on geology to understand the game's many types of rocks" I guess you need to be a major in biology, geology and medicine just to play this game properly? :)
- James_Duval 14y ago
  After you see your fourth dwarf carry on fighting with a "torn brain", you give up on conventional ideas of biology and medicine. Then again, dwarves are not the brightest. Possibly as long as the CNS is intact they're fully capable of continuing about their various tasks.
  - trentlott 14y ago
    There are plenty of stories like Phineas Gauge that demonstrate the importance of placement in brain damage. Seeing a dwarf fight with a torn brain isn't unrealistic.
    - James_Duval 14y ago
      Some or all of this might be wrong, however my understanding is that Gage was able to speak within _minutes_ (not _seconds_) of his injury, and walk with a little help to the cart, where he sat until he was able to vomit a bit of brain out in front of a (presumably either horrified or intensely interested) physician. He was then very ill for months afterwards, barely mumbling his responses to people. This was with the best care available at the time. Imagining that his injury were caused by a Dragon rather than a crowbar (or whatever it was the tool was, some kind of iron bar for poking at explosives with I believe), I don't think he could have continued the fight. If there are cases that show someone fighting with a torn brain, I'm definitely extremely interested in them!

drakeandrews 14y ago

> Ulric McDwarf has torn his brain > Ulric McDwarf has broken his spleen Ah, Dwarf Fortress. How I love you. Wait, no, the other one. Hate. Definitely hate.

DeepDuh 14y ago
I know, right. 'feelings' - sometimes a difficult concept to grasp after too much Fortran 90 or something similar.
- drakeandrews 14y ago
  Having never touched Fortran or similar, I'd never know. Unless I've spent so long working with it it's erased all memory of it from my brain. We must spread the word, we could make millions.
  - DeepDuh 14y ago
    According to [1] this has already been invented. Too late then. Let's make millions anyway, just because.. [1] http://www.radiolab.org/2007/jun/07/ http://www.radiolab.org/2007/jun/07/

pistacchioso 14y ago

now, this confirms my opinion that the game has been really fun to program, much more than to play. Simulating inch by inch damage is a fun thing to think, model and develop, but in the end the player gets a bunch of chars and some description that could have been well picked up randomly with no impact on the gameplay

ajuc 14y ago
It is very fun to play. Fortress mode at least (where you control whole fortress of dwarves). It feels like herding cats and delaying the inevitable doom. And the doom always comes because of you missing one of the small details. Like - one of the dwarfs went insane, cause you forgot to give him proper bed, and when he wanted to make some artifact there were no forge available for a long time. Then he goes berserk and kills a few other dwarves. Your police force kills him, but your cemetary is full, so a few bodies were left by dwarves to rot in the cave (you shoud have checked that, but you were busy on the other level ensuring dwarves have something to eat). After a few weeks miasma from the bodies is everywhere, and other dwarves went insane from it, killing each other. A few still sane try to stop that, you try to divide caves with doors to stop the miasma and insane dwarves, but then the sane one die or go insane from starvation. Or because their friends or partners were killed. And then goblins come :) That's how most of the games look, but thanks to insane level of details it's much more varied. Sometimes it's flood that takes your fortress, sometimes it's lack of water, sometimes it's digging too dip and revealing subterran horrors. The game has steep learning curve, but it's very rewarding.
- jaxonrice 14y ago
  You forgot to mention the vampire dwarf who arrives as a migrant and ends up killing your Militia commander in his sleep. Oh, and the fact that finding out who the vampire is is an exercise in detective work (and pure luck).
gchpaco 14y ago
It is actually really a blast, enough so to cause these sort of really frustrated "it's awesome but it's awful" threads. It is a weird combination of open world architecture combined with really stupid minions. What is in reality probably an AI mistake really feels like massive stupidity the twentieth time your mason seals himself on the wrong side of a floodgate. You spend hours getting things set up just so and then a megabeast comes and seals you in your fortress and your dwarves go mad and start murdering each other for lack of a sock. Or you decide what the world really needs is pressurized magma cannon and spend a couple of real life weeks and countless in-game years and dwarf lives getting the pump stack to work, only to find out the first time you try and use it that the pressure system doesn't work and what is supposed to be a raging torrent of molten rock is actually sort of a sprinkler system. Of molten rock. And you haven't devised a purge system yet, so your half working masterpiece is going to have to be taken apart very, very carefully by a bunch of idiots. (This is not hypothetical; it happened to a succession fort that went by "FailCannon") Not for nothing is the community devoted to megaprojects. Not only are they cool they offer countless ways to introduce Fun into your boring, dreary existence. And sometimes they even work; the "minecart shotgun loaded with gold bars (because, why not?) complete with optional F.R.O.G.G.E.R. system is just a gorgeous thing to watch happen, and it's viscerally satisfying to watch some goblin take a gold bar going a good 30, 40 mph to the face.

gnarbarian 14y ago

The UI in Dwarf Fortress is completely indefensible. Even when you do understand how to play the game it's a kludge. Let alone the fact that AN ASCII GAME CAN BRING AN 8 CORE DESKTOP TO A CRAWL. (The ASCII is actually rendered in OPENGL for performance which is a joke in and of itself because 99% of the system resources are spent poorly simulating stagnant blocks of air rock and dirt with nothing happening to them). There are many amazing and laudable aspects to DF. Tarn has a physics background and in this regard the game is well thought out. It has unmatched emergent gameplay and behavior due to the physics and complexity of each dwarf. What isn't well thought out at all are both the 'design' of the software and interface. This is the most beautifully complex game with endless unique and hilarious morsels of awesome (the naming of geographic features and depictions engraved on items) Yet absolutely no effort is spent on conveying that to the user. It's like the game itself is autistic in its savant level complexity and all that beauty is hidden behind an utterly unusable interface and horribly inefficient software design. Dwarf Fortress is a perverse decent into a single brilliant yet mal adjusted person's 'ideal' game. It's wildly capable and meticulously tended to in all the wrong areas while the glaringly obvious flaws go unattended. It's like a brilliant mathematician who shits on the floor and writes earth-shattering proofs on discarded fast food bags leaving them strewn about homeless shelters. The hobos (DF fans) all rightfully commend his genius and defend the antisocial idiosyncratic behavior as "part of the creative process" or that anything else would detract from 'the experience' of reading a revolutionary proof off of a shit stained McDonalds bag. The main problem is Tarn's inability to work with anyone else or compromise. The poor quality interface and software design is a perfect metaphor for the developer behind it. The smallest improvement such as rendering more ASCII layers at once from an isometric perspective would vastly improve the usability and likely expand the userbase by 10 fold yet no effort is made to make ANY UI adjustments. Minecraft is the perfect example of the level of success DF is capable of. Their premise is quite similar, but where Notch's effort went into a simplistic usable UI with simple physics, Tarn went without a UI and devoted his effort to a bewilderingly complex and amazingly inefficent engine with no reasonable way for anyone to experience it. Tarn could be a multi millionare if he simply would take some damn advice about sofware and UI design. Seriously, With two more people helping him, one person focused on optimizing the codebase and another focused on improving the UI this would literally be one of the greatest games of all time. Until that day DF will remain an obscure oddity, like a model train set with a revolutionary efficient engine whose owner steadfastly refuses anyone to use it in anything except a toy which actually causes physical pain to all who attempt to play with it.

huskyr 14y ago

> "It's also recommended to pick up a freshman textbook on geology to understand the game's many types of rocks" I guess you need to be a major in biology, geology and medicine just to play this game properly? :)

James_Duval 14y ago
After you see your fourth dwarf carry on fighting with a "torn brain", you give up on conventional ideas of biology and medicine. Then again, dwarves are not the brightest. Possibly as long as the CNS is intact they're fully capable of continuing about their various tasks.
- trentlott 14y ago
  There are plenty of stories like Phineas Gauge that demonstrate the importance of placement in brain damage. Seeing a dwarf fight with a torn brain isn't unrealistic.
  - James_Duval 14y ago
    Some or all of this might be wrong, however my understanding is that Gage was able to speak within _minutes_ (not _seconds_) of his injury, and walk with a little help to the cart, where he sat until he was able to vomit a bit of brain out in front of a (presumably either horrified or intensely interested) physician. He was then very ill for months afterwards, barely mumbling his responses to people. This was with the best care available at the time. Imagining that his injury were caused by a Dragon rather than a crowbar (or whatever it was the tool was, some kind of iron bar for poking at explosives with I believe), I don't think he could have continued the fight. If there are cases that show someone fighting with a torn brain, I'm definitely extremely interested in them!