6 ms·

Maybe he just wants to make his game, perhaps not a game for you or many other people - but his game. For him. Not everything has to be simplified and dumbed do

Maybe he just wants to make his game, perhaps not a game for you or many other people - but his game. For him. Not everything has to be simplified and dumbed down. We have plenty of those kinds of games. Also, I'm confused by your shock that an ASCII game can bring an 8 core desktop to a crawl. Just because most games spend most of the system resources on displaying pretty graphics, doesn't mean that DF has to as well.

gnarbarian 14y ago
I'm sure he does just want to make his game. I'm also free to criticize the glaring shortcomings. There is VAST room for improvements without dumbing anything down. A perfect example of this is the fact there are two ways to draw rectangles for designating areas for trash vs mining. What on earth could be the reasoning behind that and how would fixing that be 'dumbing' it down? What about the nonesense up/down stairs. How many thousands of dwarfs have perished at the bottom of a Down only stairway they have just dug, only for the mistake of not designating the stairway as both capable of upward/downward movement. So you watch, helplessly as all of your miners slowly die of thirst in a hole 6 feet deep a foot away from everyone else. Playing chess by moving the pieces around with your hands is surely easier than rolling them around with your nose, but I would hardly call it 'dumbing down' the game.
- ajuc 14y ago
  First make it work. Then make it elegant. Then make it fast. DF is at stage 1 now, and I think it's very reasonable to postpone ui polishing and optimisations till all the features are in place. Otherways he would need to constantly rewrite optimizations and the structures that allows speeding the game up, to kep up with new features. Which will take much longer in the end, and could kill his enthusiasm, ending the project.
  - jawilson2 14y ago
    Isn't the game 11 years old? What is a reasonable amount of time to spend before moving to stage 2?
    - kaolinite 14y ago
      As long as he wants - it's his project.
      - amw 14y ago
        Amen to that. Where does everyone find their sense of entitlement?
        gnarbarian 14y ago
        I don't feel entitled I feel a tragic sense of loss knowing how much better it could be.
        MrMember 14y ago
        Eh, I don't know. Part of what makes Dwarf Fortress unique is its meticulous attention to detail. Tarn has so far been able to concentrate so fully on the game's simulation aspects by mostly ignoring things like the UI and optimization. Could he hire on another person to work on the non-simulation bits? Perhaps. But that takes money. Tarn makes donation information public, and he makes between $40k-50k a year before taxes and the ~$800 a month he pays his brother for the help he provides. Enough to support himself, but not nearly enough to hire on another full time person. Not to mention there are already other games out there attempting to emulate Dwarf Fortress (Gnomoria and Towns immediately come to mind) in a more user friendly form, but neither of them yet come close to intricacy and scale of Dwarf Fortress.
        gnarbarian 14y ago
        If he opened up the code I'm sure people would do it for free. If he doesn't want to open up more of the code I bet there are scads of people who would do it for a cut of the profits. And yes if he doesn't improve things eventually a competitor will mop the floor with him.
    - MrMember 14y ago
gnarbarian 14y ago
Regarding the inefficiency of the engine. There is something seriously FUBAR with the design when you must choose the size of simulation (the rendered rows and columns of ASCII representing the playable zone in the window not the physical dimensions) at the beginning of a game before embarking. The performance of the game is directly proportional to the number of blocks in this zone + the number of dwarfs and NOT the actual stuff happening to them. The bad part is that you have to completely start over and embark with new dwarfs if you decide that your system can/can't do a bit more and you wish to adjust the size of the zone.
- gchpaco 14y ago
  Current hypothesis on the forums is that he uses some simplistic variant of A*; in extreme situations everything pathfinds to everything else once a tick in a totally serial program. The player base sometimes resorts to weird hacks and layouts to reduce the branching complexity of the path finding, but ultimately the more loose stone and objects you have to pathfind off and the more things you have pathfinding the worse everything gets. You don't even have to have a large number of dwarves for it to crop up; sheep are capable of bringing your machine to its knees if you don't ruthlessly cull them, or notoriously the catsplosion problem.
  - kunil 14y ago
    Last time I played it, it wasn't that bad. It was like a year ago, before that minecart updates. People are exaggerating a bit or performance went worse?
    - intended 14y ago
      Nope, it's about the same, if anything I believe there are some improvements...which just mean your system gets pushed to its knees doing something even more crazy.
  - gnarbarian 14y ago
    I would love to see a bunch of hard hitting engineers focus on optimizing DF with multithreading and GPGPU stuff. It would probably require a full rewrite. Having some experience with AI and pyopencl physics simulations I have no doubt that DF could be many orders of magnitude faster and capable of sooooo much more. That's really where my angst stems from.
James_Duval 14y ago
I believe that the ASCII isn't true ASCII, though, as I believe gnabarian said - which is part of the problem. This post has more: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/24693/pseudo-ascii-graphics-what-is-the-point http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/24693/pseudo-ascii...
- wladimir 14y ago
  Normally the DF executable works like a terminal emulator, rendering the glyphs using GL or such. You can however run dwarf fortress in a console (ie, to run it over SSH) by changing the configuration file, and then it is a true text game. BTW it doesn't use only ASCII but a larger subset of unicode. ASCII would be a very restricted set of characters to use.
  - nwh 14y ago
    > to run it over SSH Cloud gaming. I like it.
    - chris_mahan 14y ago
      multiplayer next?
    - Millennium 14y ago
      More a matter, I think, of being able to run it in a screen session at home, then detach and pick up again from elsewhere.
  - Freaky 14y ago
    It uses a mix of graphical tiles and text, it's not all just an array of unicode. They're sufficiently decoupled now that you can have most text rendered nicely using truetype fonts alongside whatever graphics set you're using.

gnarbarian 14y ago

I'm sure he does just want to make his game. I'm also free to criticize the glaring shortcomings. There is VAST room for improvements without dumbing anything down. A perfect example of this is the fact there are two ways to draw rectangles for designating areas for trash vs mining. What on earth could be the reasoning behind that and how would fixing that be 'dumbing' it down? What about the nonesense up/down stairs. How many thousands of dwarfs have perished at the bottom of a Down only stairway they have just dug, only for the mistake of not designating the stairway as both capable of upward/downward movement. So you watch, helplessly as all of your miners slowly die of thirst in a hole 6 feet deep a foot away from everyone else. Playing chess by moving the pieces around with your hands is surely easier than rolling them around with your nose, but I would hardly call it 'dumbing down' the game.

ajuc 14y ago
First make it work. Then make it elegant. Then make it fast. DF is at stage 1 now, and I think it's very reasonable to postpone ui polishing and optimisations till all the features are in place. Otherways he would need to constantly rewrite optimizations and the structures that allows speeding the game up, to kep up with new features. Which will take much longer in the end, and could kill his enthusiasm, ending the project.
- jawilson2 14y ago
  Isn't the game 11 years old? What is a reasonable amount of time to spend before moving to stage 2?
  - kaolinite 14y ago
    As long as he wants - it's his project.
    - amw 14y ago
      Amen to that. Where does everyone find their sense of entitlement?
      - gnarbarian 14y ago
        I don't feel entitled I feel a tragic sense of loss knowing how much better it could be.
        MrMember 14y ago
        Eh, I don't know. Part of what makes Dwarf Fortress unique is its meticulous attention to detail. Tarn has so far been able to concentrate so fully on the game's simulation aspects by mostly ignoring things like the UI and optimization. Could he hire on another person to work on the non-simulation bits? Perhaps. But that takes money. Tarn makes donation information public, and he makes between $40k-50k a year before taxes and the ~$800 a month he pays his brother for the help he provides. Enough to support himself, but not nearly enough to hire on another full time person. Not to mention there are already other games out there attempting to emulate Dwarf Fortress (Gnomoria and Towns immediately come to mind) in a more user friendly form, but neither of them yet come close to intricacy and scale of Dwarf Fortress.
        gnarbarian 14y ago
        If he opened up the code I'm sure people would do it for free. If he doesn't want to open up more of the code I bet there are scads of people who would do it for a cut of the profits. And yes if he doesn't improve things eventually a competitor will mop the floor with him.
  - MrMember 14y ago

gnarbarian 14y ago

Regarding the inefficiency of the engine. There is something seriously FUBAR with the design when you must choose the size of simulation (the rendered rows and columns of ASCII representing the playable zone in the window not the physical dimensions) at the beginning of a game before embarking. The performance of the game is directly proportional to the number of blocks in this zone + the number of dwarfs and NOT the actual stuff happening to them. The bad part is that you have to completely start over and embark with new dwarfs if you decide that your system can/can't do a bit more and you wish to adjust the size of the zone.

gchpaco 14y ago
Current hypothesis on the forums is that he uses some simplistic variant of A*; in extreme situations everything pathfinds to everything else once a tick in a totally serial program. The player base sometimes resorts to weird hacks and layouts to reduce the branching complexity of the path finding, but ultimately the more loose stone and objects you have to pathfind off and the more things you have pathfinding the worse everything gets. You don't even have to have a large number of dwarves for it to crop up; sheep are capable of bringing your machine to its knees if you don't ruthlessly cull them, or notoriously the catsplosion problem.
- kunil 14y ago
  Last time I played it, it wasn't that bad. It was like a year ago, before that minecart updates. People are exaggerating a bit or performance went worse?
  - intended 14y ago
    Nope, it's about the same, if anything I believe there are some improvements...which just mean your system gets pushed to its knees doing something even more crazy.
- gnarbarian 14y ago
  I would love to see a bunch of hard hitting engineers focus on optimizing DF with multithreading and GPGPU stuff. It would probably require a full rewrite. Having some experience with AI and pyopencl physics simulations I have no doubt that DF could be many orders of magnitude faster and capable of sooooo much more. That's really where my angst stems from.

James_Duval 14y ago

I believe that the ASCII isn't true ASCII, though, as I believe gnabarian said - which is part of the problem. This post has more: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/24693/pseudo-ascii-graphics-what-is-the-point http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/24693/pseudo-ascii...

wladimir 14y ago
Normally the DF executable works like a terminal emulator, rendering the glyphs using GL or such. You can however run dwarf fortress in a console (ie, to run it over SSH) by changing the configuration file, and then it is a true text game. BTW it doesn't use only ASCII but a larger subset of unicode. ASCII would be a very restricted set of characters to use.
- nwh 14y ago
  > to run it over SSH Cloud gaming. I like it.
  - chris_mahan 14y ago
    multiplayer next?
  - Millennium 14y ago
    More a matter, I think, of being able to run it in a screen session at home, then detach and pick up again from elsewhere.
- Freaky 14y ago
  It uses a mix of graphical tiles and text, it's not all just an array of unicode. They're sufficiently decoupled now that you can have most text rendered nicely using truetype fonts alongside whatever graphics set you're using.