When you say "incorrect" to my statement that commercial real-time games could also be called turn-based with automatically passing turns, that leads me to conclude that either 1) you missed that I'm talking on a
programming level, not a gameplay level, or 2) you don't understand how real-time games really work under the hood, and thus think DF's turn-based roots make it different from other real-time games.
Well, I spent a couple years of college majoring in how to program real-time games, so here comes the wall of text.
When you perceive a game to be running "in real time", that's because the game turns pass so fast that they blur together into one smooth movement. It's not actually real time, it just looks that way. 30 turns or frames per second is plenty to get this effect. By default, Dwarf Fortress runs at 100 turns (frames) per second, but the units move on a grid, so there's no way it's going to feel smooth. Of course, the mechanics of how real-time gaming works is the same at one turn per second as at one hundred -- the difference is that if you actually
notice the divisions between turns, you'll realize very quickly it's turn-based, while if the turns pass fast enough, you'll think it's fancy real-time gaming.
Ideally the game usually tries to run one frame ever 1/60 or 1/30 of a second, as that usually keeps things synchronized with the monitor refresh rate, but it doesn't always work out that way. If you have a ship flying around on a 2D plane, the ship's speed is rated not in distance over time, but distance per frame. Each frame, everything moves its movement speed, guys shoot at each other, AI thinks for awhile, whatever happens in the game happens. At the end of the frame, if there's enough time left, it renders the state of the game at the end of that frame. If there isn't enough time left, it simply doesn't render that frame, since rendering is very slow and tends to lag the computer even more, and the game wants to maintain the
illusion of everything happening "in real time", which will become a problem if the logic framerate changes. This is why when a commercial game lags, the game itself (usually) appears to keep moving at a constant rate, even though your FPS drops.
What DF does differently from the usual commercial model during Dwarf Mode is very little:
1) DF decouples the render framerate from the logic framerate, allowing you to set separate targets for each. This was the solution to the "rendering too much aggrivates lag" problem, and operates in place of the variable FPS for rendering and constant FPS for game logic that commercial games generally aim for.
2) DF exposes more of the turn-based underpinnings to the player. It pauses regularly, has an alternate game mode that's entirely turn-based, and yes, adds the ability to advance individual frames in a turn-based style, as you said. From a
gameplay perspective, that's a huge difference, but from a
programming perspective, it's insignificant. It would be very easy to add this to other games, but in most games it's not useful. There's no point in advancing only one frame in Command and Conquer or Counter-Strike, for example. But again, because they
are turn-based on a low level, it would be very easy to expose this functionality to the player if that was the programmer's intent.
To the programmer, Dwarf Fortress in Dwarf Mode is every bit as much a real-time game as anything else out there. You're just likely to perceive it differently as a player because DF embraces its turn-based roots, moves its units around on a grid, and lags much more, while other games go out of their way to trick you into thinking the game is just constantly running and everything is smoothly gliding from place to place in a very natural and consistent manner. In reality, on a programming level, even real-time games are still turn-based, just like Dwarf Fortress. You just don't have to know that to play them.
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