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The handful of games inspired by Dwarf Fortress are cool, but I really hope somebody is working on a proper successor. A game that's even more ambitious with it

by TillE 12y ago

The handful of games inspired by Dwarf Fortress are cool, but I really hope somebody is working on a proper successor. A game that's even more ambitious with its simulation, with the software appropriately designed so it can be multithreaded and optimized. Dwarf Fortress is amazing. It's quite possibly my favorite game of all time. But at the same time, it's really only scratching the surface of what's possible with this kind of simulation. There's a whole genre of incredibly deep RPGs just waiting to be created.

falcolas 12y ago
That may be hard, since DF is under constant development. Being more ambitious in the sim department will be excruciatingly hard, since DF already has an almost silly level of simulation: http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/5926447/dwarf-fortress-will-crush-your-cpu-because-creating-history-is-hard http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/5926447/dwarf-fortress-will... That said, yeah, it's a cool genre which could use some real love.
- scuba7183 12y ago
  Awesome article, thanks
- bryondowd 12y ago
  I think it would be interesting to see something DF-inspired at an MMO scale. I'd like to imagine what a larger team could do, with access to lots of parallel CPU power. DF does a lot of work abstracting things that are off-site, since a typical PC can't simulate the entire world in realtime. But if you had enough servers sharing the work, I expect you could do much more. Throw in a bunch of players all giving some direction to their own little autonomous civilisations, and I think it would be fascinating to watch.
- Ideka 12y ago
  DF also already has an almost silly level of ambition: http://bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html http://bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
TrevorJ 12y ago
It's really encouraging to hear I am not the only one who thinks so. It's kind of my dream to build a game with that sort of depth someday. For now, I'm trying to solve subsets of the problem in a more limited scope by creating a crafting/building game that understands real-world material proprieties. The upshot of this approach is that the player can experiment with crafting say, a bow, out of any of the materials they have on hand. Some may work better than others, based on the properties of the material. I'm hoping this approach enables more player creativity because it's much more flexible. I suspect though, that it will prove to be tremendously difficult to balance the game as there will always be edge cases where very overpowered items can exist, but maybe that's half the fun.
- shalmanese 12y ago
  /r/outside was like this, then some asshole discovered that ramming together two heavy elements really hard was massively OP and ruined the game for everyone.

by TillE 12y ago

falcolas 12y ago

That may be hard, since DF is under constant development. Being more ambitious in the sim department will be excruciatingly hard, since DF already has an almost silly level of simulation: http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/5926447/dwarf-fortress-will-crush-your-cpu-because-creating-history-is-hard http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/5926447/dwarf-fortress-will... That said, yeah, it's a cool genre which could use some real love.

scuba7183 12y ago
Awesome article, thanks
bryondowd 12y ago
I think it would be interesting to see something DF-inspired at an MMO scale. I'd like to imagine what a larger team could do, with access to lots of parallel CPU power. DF does a lot of work abstracting things that are off-site, since a typical PC can't simulate the entire world in realtime. But if you had enough servers sharing the work, I expect you could do much more. Throw in a bunch of players all giving some direction to their own little autonomous civilisations, and I think it would be fascinating to watch.
Ideka 12y ago
DF also already has an almost silly level of ambition: http://bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html http://bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

TrevorJ 12y ago

It's really encouraging to hear I am not the only one who thinks so. It's kind of my dream to build a game with that sort of depth someday. For now, I'm trying to solve subsets of the problem in a more limited scope by creating a crafting/building game that understands real-world material proprieties. The upshot of this approach is that the player can experiment with crafting say, a bow, out of any of the materials they have on hand. Some may work better than others, based on the properties of the material. I'm hoping this approach enables more player creativity because it's much more flexible. I suspect though, that it will prove to be tremendously difficult to balance the game as there will always be edge cases where very overpowered items can exist, but maybe that's half the fun.

shalmanese 12y ago
/r/outside was like this, then some asshole discovered that ramming together two heavy elements really hard was massively OP and ruined the game for everyone.