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[Brzhk]

97 pages of complaints and toady's still reading.


I'm impressed.

(by what i've read so far, i'm not giving you another internet, it seems you got a internetsplosion already. I'll find something else.)

[Medicine Man]

The Nemesis Unit scares me shi*less,as a matter of fact i have had it before and i had backed up my saves but when i replaced the bad saves df didn't work 
Oh and Toady for still reading i give you an in-i mean an elf head.

[Aquillion]

For anyone getting savefile corruption frequently (especially if it says 'one of the compressed files on disk has an error in it' or something like that):  Are you running the game in XP64?  If you are, you could try going into the init file and turning COMPRESSED_SAVES to NO.

Note that this will make your savefiles huge (100 MB or so huge; you may want to zip any backups you make manually.)  However, it solved the problem for me.

Flights of stairs which can be moved into from any direction with no impediments whatsoever.

I think they're meant to be spiral staircases.  That's certainly how I picture any long stacked staircases I make.

[The Architect]

I would like to apologize for the post I made earlier, as the tone was harsh and uncalled-for. I'm sorry, Murphy.

As for staircases: the staircase may not occupy the entire tile. These things can be hard to fathom with an undefined spatial system. Then, again, we do have a convention widely used with staircases even today, known as "landings". Most of these things are easily explained with a little imagination, such as carrying along the extra equipment to exit a hole after digging it. The real puzzlers are where game mechanics such as the lack of in-between states and frame-by-frame movement conflict with the depiction of real events, such as digging a hole and instantly/fully leaving it before adjacent fluids can enter it.

[Kalasen]

First, I absolutely love Dwarf Fortress. There's only a few things that jump to mind on how it could be be better. First, it's pretty darn inaccessible to new players; they're thrown up again the intimidating "Generate New World", then the multitude of embark options, and when they finally get started, they're up against a wall of ASCII representing a wrecked Dwarven wagon, wondering "what the hell do I do now?". I concur with some other suggestions here: Have it come with a pre-generated world, with a good standard embark profile. Also, a tutorial would be immensely helpful. Perhaps a game-in-progress, specifically built as a tutorial using Notes. That seems well within the bounds of what can be done right now.

Second, the performance. Oh Armok, the FPS death. The biggest hitters seem to be pathfinding and item counts. Perhaps pathfinding can use a better algorithm, or otherwise be improved? Can items be handled more efficiently? Something more simple though, put in an options screen to change things in the init file. It'll appeal more to the less hardcore hacker types. Some preset options profiles that would do things like Weather: OFF automatically.

Third, and more of a personal thing than the others: it needs more difficulty in the latter tiers of experience. But I assume that will happen with things like the siege arc, so this is a much more backburner thing.

Those are the things that I think would improve the game the most and broaden its appeal. Again, I'm amazed. This is probably the greatest game ever made, and it's not even done yet. The only one to improve against now is yourself, so keep up the good work. Your fans regard you with awe because of it.

[Draco18s]

The real puzzlers are where game mechanics such as the lack of in-between states and frame-by-frame movement conflict with the depiction of real events, such as digging a hole and instantly/fully leaving it before adjacent fluids can enter it.

Such is the flaw of a cellular automata system.  Once you define your cell states it's very hard to have transitional states between them.

[The Architect]

I'm glad someone understood my very badly written sentence. I think some of these problems do have potential solutions, and I'd love to discuss them, but this is of course not the Suggestions page.

[Murphy]

I feel that I should try to explain my words better.

The matter is that in 40d the nemesis error was predictable. If a fortress lived long enough to receive a liaison or guild representative, after abandonment I always found this bug with adventurers. I learned to circumvent it by disabling all diplomats in humans and generating the world with as few dwarven civs as possible. Backing up saves did not help because they were being corrupted 95% of the time when I made even a single trade agreement.

Anyway, this is not the place to go into details, the only thing I want to say is that the crash was predictable, and avoidable. Now it isn't - the save doesn't get corrupted every time I make trade agreements, but instead it seems completely random. And even though I am able to revert to old saves, I still have to replay a few years of game time, and I also have to periodically savescum and abandon to see if the world got corrupted or not. Believe me, this is frustrating.

And yeah, I'm not whining. I still play the game and recognise it as one of the best among its kind. I wrote all this just because the thread asks about it, sort of. Thank you for your understanding.

[Draco18s]

I do believe that qualifies as a reproducible, unreported, bug and should be reported.

[Murphy]

It is reported.
There's an entire topic about it in the bug reports forum, and it is stickied.
It is also on the bug tracker.

[Draco18s]

It is reported.
There's an entire topic about it in the bug reports forum, and it is stickied.
It is also on the bug tracker.

Ah, good.  I don't read the bug report forum anymore, and tend to only hit the bugtracker when I have something to report (which recently, has been "not at all" as I haven't been playing the game).

[zwei]

Dorf behavior just got better of me ad I am raging (repostign from another thread):

I sent squad of 10 dwarves to kill single plain Lion. Eight of them engaged Lion and dodged from several zlevels cliff right into water. One of two survivors got Lion with clean beheading hit.

Having whole squad sent to kill lion eliminated by their ninja dodging skills and not by lion is just not right. Getting their guts ripped out by him, sure. It is quite schizo to have fight outcomes only in "smashed it to bloody bits with my axe" and "dodged and died." categories. I'll go as far ahead ad say this is not fun even if loosing is fun.

It kind of undoes all of the combat mechanics.

---

And then there is minor peve of how ineffective pathing is:

Code: [Select]

###
.[color=red]#[/color].
.#@
.#.
.#.
.#.
.#.
...

# is wall desigated to be dug or smoothet or engraved.

I would expect dwarf to move to this position ad to the work:

Code: [Select]

###
.[color=red]#[/color]@
.#.
.#.
.#.
.#.
.#.
...

But without fail, he would take long road and do this instead:

Code: [Select]

###
@[color=red]#[/color].
.#.
.#.
.#.
.#.
.#.
...

Silimar, i have this:

Code: [Select]

####
#+[color=red]+[/color]+
####

+ is constructed floor designated to be removed. Istead of dwarf working from this tile:

Code: [Select]

####
#+[color=red]+[/color]@
####

Which is shorter walk (not to mention not entraping walk), he decides to make two extra steps and work from here:

Code: [Select]

####
#@[color=red]+[/color].
####

This general tendency of ai to do everything from west and north first.

---

Oh, and shell moods.

Shell, which is:

* Not obtainable by trading.
* Only obtained by fishing, aparently exhaustible source with which decent fisherman immgirant is done with withing seasom.
* Decays just like vermin so if you manage to get supply, it will eventually be gone within few seasons

(Thak god for being able to mod other bodyparts to act like shell)

[EvilCartyen]

When I started playing, the biggest problem was that I could not find a map-legend to explain the various faux-ASCII symbols on either the map or the embark-area. I did have the time and patience to watch the first couple of tutorial vids, but had I been busier and less dedicated, I might not have had the patience.

Getting into the game, the Wiki was essential to me. I quickly realised that the in-game documentation was worth very little. Had the wiki been in the state it is now, with the new release, instead of being for 40d, I would probably not have continued playing. This is not a critique of the people updating the wiki, it is merely an explanation of the various times where I could quite easily have decided not to continue playing DF.

Now, after having played quite a bit, the major turn-off is the FPS-slowdown. I know I am not amongst those worst-off, but I have to be honest and say that that doesn't matter, when it's too slow for me to enjoy it anyway

The second thing keeping me from playing the game at the moment, is probably the vision of what the game is going to be. When you dream about the finished product, the status-quo seems less interesting. I want my forts to be able to live on, and I want to play in a living, breathing world. Naturally, I know this will only come in time, but again I have to be honest, and say that the vision is quite a bit better than the current itiration

[Thief^]

And then there is minor peve of how ineffective pathing is:

This general tendency of ai to do everything from west and north first.

I would assume that this is due to finding a free space adjacent to the destination object, then pathing to there, instead of doing a path-find to the destination itself and calling the pathfinding "done" at distance of 1 from the pathing destination instead of 0.

It wouldn't be a hard thing for me to fix, and I hope toady could fix it based off my explanation too.
EDIT: I can provide a demo if needed.

[Jiri Petru]

My 200 dwarves fort in 40d ran at about 15 fps which was enough for me not to complain.

My 80 dwarves fort in 2010 runs at about 5 fps(*) which is enough for me to turn me off Dwarf Fortress completely.

(*) That's after I revealed all the levels and killed all the &s, which means there shouldn't be anyone walled off and spamming pathing requests.