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[zwei]

...

Problem is that that they are just there, by themselves, not really influencing anything. They also currently do more harm to gameplay than good (mostly by incredibly clutterted item lists)

It also comes to ... what are details?

To me addtional type of tree - which is just name, color and density does not seem much of an detail, but more as a elaboration of existing stuff. Sort of "more content" rather than "deeper content".

The "deep" part of the hundreds of materials actually comes from the game's physics and chemistry. Sure, hundreds of materials seem like nothing but clutter since they appear to behave the same at first glance, but then you realize it matters what stone you use for catapult ammo because the denser rock hits harder, and you realize your haulers will be more efficient if you use featherwood for bins, and you realize you can make nether-cap minecarts for transporting magma, because it's technically flammable but never burns since it radiates "coldness" (the DF multiverse is a strange place sometimes). That's genuine complexity right there.

Which brings me to side argument: in order to do such things, you need to micromanage and play in very counterintuitive way.

Dwarves will not prefer to use light wood for containers and making magma-proof minecart is excercise in locking dwarf in room with custom stockpile and workshop.

Game processes those material properties, but at same time does not care about them when creatures are making decidions. Of course, AI for that would be incredibly insane to code.

Also, those properties are heavily abstracted away when they are offscreen - history is not affected at all by whether anonymous soldier wears copper armor or steel. He merely exists as part of "number of soldiers of side a". Story about dragon defeated by adventurer wearing nether-cap wooden armor is not something that will come to pass. Mostly because that level of simulation is out of question for any reasonable future hardware.

[Manveru Taurënér]

...

Problem is that that they are just there, by themselves, not really influencing anything. They also currently do more harm to gameplay than good (mostly by incredibly clutterted item lists)

It also comes to ... what are details?

To me addtional type of tree - which is just name, color and density does not seem much of an detail, but more as a elaboration of existing stuff. Sort of "more content" rather than "deeper content".

The "deep" part of the hundreds of materials actually comes from the game's physics and chemistry. Sure, hundreds of materials seem like nothing but clutter since they appear to behave the same at first glance, but then you realize it matters what stone you use for catapult ammo because the denser rock hits harder, and you realize your haulers will be more efficient if you use featherwood for bins, and you realize you can make nether-cap minecarts for transporting magma, because it's technically flammable but never burns since it radiates "coldness" (the DF multiverse is a strange place sometimes). That's genuine complexity right there.

Which brings me to side argument: in order to do such things, you need to micromanage and play in very counterintuitive way.

Dwarves will not prefer to use light wood for containers and making magma-proof minecart is excercise in locking dwarf in room with custom stockpile and workshop.

Game processes those material properties, but at same time does not care about them when creatures are making decidions. Of course, AI for that would be incredibly insane to code.

Also, those properties are heavily abstracted away when they are offscreen - history is not affected at all by whether anonymous soldier wears copper armor or steel. He merely exists as part of "number of soldiers of side a". Story about dragon defeated by adventurer wearing nether-cap wooden armor is not something that will come to pass. Mostly because that level of simulation is out of question for any reasonable future hardware.

Deciding to use suitable materials for different items wouldn't be that difficult. You just need to create some categories for different types of materials and make them use stuff from the right category when making an item.

[gimli]

At this point I honestly don't care.
You just can't make a game JUST like Dwarf Fortress. It's physically impossible to replicate DF's depth and complexity, I feel.

That said, I'm still hoping for the trueform sci-fi Dwarf Fortress...

It's possible, it'll just take 12 years.

You can' be serious my lad..what if a team of 15-20+ devs would work on it? I am not sure that it will ever happen, since "complex games" never had a big playerbase. Even tho a complex game like DF with good graphics + UI + which is updated regularly [on a monthly max. 2-monthly basis] could create a nice profit for a devteam, that is for sure.

[thvaz]

At this point I honestly don't care.
You just can't make a game JUST like Dwarf Fortress. It's physically impossible to replicate DF's depth and complexity, I feel.

That said, I'm still hoping for the trueform sci-fi Dwarf Fortress...

It's possible, it'll just take 12 years.

You can' be serious my lad..what if a team of 15-20+ devs would work on it? I am not sure that it will ever happen, since "complex games" never had a big playerbase. Even tho a complex game like DF with good graphics + UI + which is updated regularly [on a monthly max. 2-monthly basis] could create a nice profit for a devteam, that is for sure.

It's possible, but not probable. Hence, in 8 years since the first release, no other game came close to replicate Dwarf Fortress.

[Langdon]

Also, depth and complexity is something that is very arguable:

There is a lot of redundant content (rock types, animal types) that people mistake for depth. It is not - game would loose very little if it got simplified to two dozen types of minerals and animals. And you do not need to be brilliant to add more of them.

I disagree. Even though the depth means much more than just hundreds of different stones and trees, they are important elements to make game feel so deep, since other games don't usually do that. All materials without distinct differences add the feeling of the depth, they add more flavor. A bit like dwarven beard shapings or many mental attributes - they aren't really needed for gameplay, but if they weren't there, DF would be much shallower in terms of details. It's one way how DF feels somehow more unique than most other games - there is so much irrelevant details just for sake of details. They add more information to the gaming experience which makes the game feel deeper.

Problem is that that they are just there, by themselves, not really influencing anything. They also currently do more harm to gameplay than good (mostly by incredibly clutterted item lists)

It also comes to ... what are details?

To me addtional type of tree - which is just name, color and density does not seem much of an detail, but more as a elaboration of existing stuff. Sort of "more content" rather than "deeper content".

Ah but you miss the charm of DF. How seemingly minor and irrelevant details can combine their seemingly innocent side effects and come up with hilarious and memorable bugs... err features.

For example, melting all the fat off a dwarf without killing him will make him later immune to the effects of fire. Do you think emergent "features" such as this (or catsplosions!) would appear if Toady hadn't modeled the melting point/boiling point of fat, or modeled a separate fat layer underneath skin and decided to just treat dwarves as homogenous bags of meat?

Right now he's modeling multi-tile trees and elf habitats. Don't you think there'll be dozens of wonderful, wonderful "issues" that would come out, unforeseen, out of all that detail?

[miauw62]

Weeegh, the premise of this thread seems fairly elitist. It's not a bad thing that a developer got inspired by DF to make a game like it. Quite the contrary. How does this harm DF, or us? It doesn't. Maybe it will bring players off those games to come and play DF itself, which is great. I rate a game by it's quality, not by the fact that "a less complex game mentioning DF is an insult to DF". Even Notch has stated that he was somewhat inspired by DF for minecraft. It has always made me happy that DF seems to be spawning it's own subgenre of simulation/city management games.

[cprng]

That said, I'm still hoping for the trueform sci-fi Dwarf Fortress...

Nobody mentioned Aurora 4x here yet? http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=47678.0

[Naros]

Last time someone told me 'try this game it's like DF', it was Gnomoria.

Which is like DF dwarfmode, polished, with cute pixelgraphics and mechanics that just work and are fun. It's a bit more casual, sure. But that's perfect for when I'm tired and don't quite have the concentration needed for games like DF or CK2.

So while I feel your pain, I kinda don't have your issue, OP.

[Orange Wizard]

Last time someone told me 'try this game it's like DF', it was Gnomoria.

Which is like DF dwarfmode, polished, with cute pixelgraphics and mechanics that just work and are fun. It's a bit more casual, sure. But that's perfect for when I'm tired and don't quite have the concentration needed for games like DF or CK2.

So while I feel your pain, I kinda don't have your issue, OP.

I've never actually played Gnomoria but I don't like it. Something about the casual cute pixelly graphics. I'm not saying I'm prejudiced against cute pixelly graphics, but I am.

[BigD145]

I've never actually played Gnomoria but I don't like it. Something about the casual cute pixelly graphics. I'm not saying I'm prejudiced against cute pixelly graphics, but I am.

Get out. ---->

[thvaz]

I bought and played Gnomoria and it was wasted money. Another game trying to take DF's niche and completely missing the point of what makes DF great (at least for me).

I kinda like Rimworld and Prison Architect, though. Clockworks Empires seems good, too.

[Cruxador]

don't quite have the concentration needed for games like DF or CK2.

You can be too tired for CK2? That's my super relaxing game, for me.

I've never actually played Gnomoria but I don't like it.

Well, at least your honest.

I mean, I don't care for it either, but I've actually tried it. And it's not exactly bad, although I think the graphical style is kind of uncompelling,  but there's not really any situation that I'd rather play it than DF. Even the graphics, Gnomoria was more or less on part with Stonesense at launch, but Stonesense has gotten better while Gnomoria hasn't. And the gameplay is just the same thing but less.

[Iapetus]

3D Monster Maze - released in 1982 for the Sinclair ZX81. It was written in BASIC and appears to use ASCII graphics to simulate a 3D maze with a Tyrannosaurus Rex in it that you have to escape from.

While you could argue that on-screen ASCII graphics aren't 3D so much as it is a 2D picture that makes use of perspective to represent 3D, later "3D" games like Wolfenstein and Doom still used perspective to represent 3D as well (in development, they were called "pseudo-3D"). I don't think it was until we got 64-bit processing like we see in the Nintendo 64 that real 3D graphics with 3D wire frame models and 3D geometry came into common use in games. There might be an exception, though. However I would love to see it.

Elite was 1984, wire line graphics.

The Sentinel was 1986, solid 3d graphics.

Both ran on ZX Spectrums, which were 8-bit.

As well as those, the Amstrad CPC had some genuine 3D (filled polygon) games as well.  Can't remember what it was called, but I remember playing a demo of some game where you wandered around some sort of 3D world doing... well, I could never quite work out what you were supposed to do.  It was some sort of adventure/puzzle/shoot-em-up, I think.  Can't remember its name though.

[Inarius]

Well the truth is that the real "insult" is not made by those who make the games. A lot of them really like DF and they are inspired by the spirit of this game, and I'm sure there is a part of us who would like to have the time to make things like this.

The "real" issue is from articles from different reviewers who missed the point of DF, and think that "games with dwarves or management/micro management/ugly/procedural/no real goal"= Dwarf Fortress-like.


On the other hand, it is not so bad. It means that this game is still considered as a Genre-creator. This brings more media to DF, and...more players, therefore more money, therefore no need to work for anything else for Toady.

[FrankMcFuzz]

I personally am insulted by Prison Architect, only because all my friends play it and I am a hipster.

But after I tried Towns I swore I would never fall for DF clones again!

(Although I like how close Banished comes to a management city builder)

I've never actually played Gnomoria but I don't like it. Something about the casual cute pixelly graphics. I'm not saying I'm prejudiced against cute pixelly graphics, but I am.

You've never seen DF Stonesense, huh?

It's basically an identical style.