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[MaDeR Levap]

That game does not clean up after itself. For example, blood and other filth (vomit, pus, etc - i do not know, why some people are so opposed to exctrements, difference is neglible) are tracked EVERYWHERE, multiplying, not evaporating. Some would thought that old contaiments, lacings etc would vanish with time, even if it was not cleaned up.

And yes, this rape your CPU. This is one of the bugs that should be fixed at first. Among other is, of course, hospital (do not diagnosis, suturing etc for no apparent reason) and military (cannot follow order for no apparent reason) woes.

[Antsan]

What bugs me is the inability to access legends screen when playing. Legends mode is not really an own game and it doesn't change the world in any way.

[Rollory]

1) Code optimization.  Too much processing doing too much stupid.  Like when the sea thaws (of course, it shouldn't freeze in the first place) and my machine halts for an hour as it recalculates every single water square and makes sure it isn't going anywhere.  Stupid.  And also pumps drastically slow things down.  They shouldn't.  Pathfinding optimization in general.

2) Bugfixing as opposed to new features.  Civilians -> temporary military -> back to civilian DOES NOT WORK right.  It should.  It's the player's first experience with combat.  Stop adding shiny crap and make the existing game work correctly before toying around with new features to add. 

3) Reclaiming, or settling on a foreign city, turning supposedly hostile or at least independent creatures friendly.  Nonsense.  Totally kills what there is of a strategic layer right now.  I want to be able to lose a fort to goblins, reclaim it, and have to fight my way in hall by bloody hall.  Also reclaim shouldn't give you dwarves scaled to how many there were at the end, but how many there were at max.  You can't (or at least shouldn't be able to) reclaim a huge fortress with 2 squads.

4) For newer players, more guidance as to what they are supposed to do beforehand.  For example, some training scenarios where they learn to set up a field and plant it, or set up a workshop and build and place a bed, or dig out some stones from a cliffside.

I am still playing 40d because, in spite of the fact that my fort is currently at 2 FPS, it is a stable game and I can still find interesting challenges in it.  31 has problems that make it not nearly as fun.

[Lord Shonus]

Most of the problems in the 31 series have been either fixed or greatly reduced.

[Footkerchief]

Most of the problems in the 31 series have been either fixed or greatly reduced.

There have been a lot of fixes, but it's far from "most."  The military situation has improved a lot, but there are still lots of problems with equipment and training.

[jei]

More specifically, what problems did you have before learning the ropes of the game? 
What do you think is scaring people away?  The building placement?  Designations?  The embark screen? 

The User interface. Everything is EXTREMELY cumbersome and much work to begin with and people don't have the time to learn it since everything seems very counter-intuitive.

For one, a proper database & task manager. Select from DWARVES * with SKILL=marksdwarf ... and put them into one task and place. A simple table would be nice. Also selecting the squads, the squad orderings jump around a lot in different lists.
Selecting dorfs based on different criteria to order around....

Right now we have also the burrows and for example, I have a siege going on and dwarves running out of the fortress despite denials and burrow restrictions, because some ELF HORSE has lost it's cargo outside. I dunno what's in it, but it's apparently something that the dorfs want and don't care about any restrictions. "Stay Inside" was nice and simple to order, burrows = lots of useless work that does not lead to any saved dorf lives or obeyed orders/restrictions. In my case, all the forbid other death items was in place, yet it doesn't appear to forbid the items that were carried by the elves' horses. Only those carried by the elves themselves.

I would say main frustrating thing is inability to command the dorfs or order them in a way that you would know to be respected and obeyed in a timely manner. Jos priorities would be nice, if you could order some masonry work to be done ASAP and first chance anyone gets...

Challenging game can be made with other means than by extremely non-working order system and frustrating user interface.

 

[derekiv]

The insane processor requirements that mean most of my forts die FPS deaths as opposed to being taken down by in-game hazards

Heh, the old "But can it run Crysis?" meme should read Dwarf Fortress instead.

My computer is sad to run everything short of Crysis and DF runs okay on it, leading me to believe that midgame forts are on the same level as Crysis.
(Then again, no dedicated graphics card might hurt the comparison)

[jei]

Toady One did not make Stonesense, does not develop Stonesene, and is not affiliated with Stonesense in any way, shape, or form.
I'm sorry, but that really, really needed to be said. There is way to much misunderstanding regarding Dwarf Fortress and all the third-party utilities.

I think Toady should learn to better delegate and share the workload. Make the big decisions and design interoperability but leave code implementation details to others and DELEGATE, delegate, delegate....

There should be more than enough volunteers around. Learn from Linus Torvalds a bit.

[Josephus]

Toady One did not make Stonesense, does not develop Stonesene, and is not affiliated with Stonesense in any way, shape, or form.

I'm sorry, but that really, really needed to be said. There is way to much misunderstanding regarding Dwarf Fortress and all the third-party utilities.

I know. But it would still be awesome if you have isometric graphics in the game.

Actually, it would. GearHead2, for example, has three different display modes. An ASCII, a 2D mode, and an Isometric view mode. So, there's precedent for a roguelike that can switch between all three.

Admittedly, it doesn't use OpenGl to render things that should be simple text, but ah well.

[Zaik]

Being new to DF myself coming into .31.12, i have to say the military is easily the most frustrating part.


I probably spent a week of on again off again attempts with it, having 10 man squads of dwarves getting maimed and killed by single ambushes of 4-6 because all their skills were dabbling because they won't train, or would wear 5 weapons and 3 shields and wrestle with everything, or even when they do train the skill gain is so minimal that it'd likely take 50 in game years for a dwarf to hit legendary with a combat skill.

After totally giving up on the military and just refusing to even touch it, i eventually managed to put together some strategies that would properly defend, at least against early sieges.

It was probably a month later i happened to come over to this forum to answer some question that i couldn't figure out with the wiki, and i happened to see the two methods more experienced people were using to train a military. Was only after that that it was even functional.

Even still, they're constantly equipping other people's stuff, equipping several weapons in the same hand(but using none of them), ignoring massive quality upgrades sometimes and other times running like a bat out of hell to go grab something that increases the quality by maybe 1 tops, only equipping one gauntlet or boot while leaving a bare or just clothed hand/foot. All of these problems *could* be solved by equipping specific gear on each individual dwarf, however there is no indication(and as far as i know, no way to indicate) as to what gear has already been equipped, and the list of gear seems to shuffle within it's quality in relation to...something...the dwarf's position, or what is/isn't equipped, or something? I don't know, but if you have, say...5 masterwork Battle axes, and 5 dwarves to equip them on, only two or three will actually end up with them, the others will have had theirs taken away and will have to pick from the 5 again with no indication which is which, and the list constantly shifts.

Soooo, long story short, either the miltary needs huge fixes, or at the very least minor fixes and a big flashing !!warning!! that it is for advanced players only.

[NW_Kohaku]

I think Toady should learn to better delegate and share the workload. Make the big decisions and design interoperability but leave code implementation details to others and DELEGATE, delegate, delegate....

There should be more than enough volunteers around. Learn from Linus Torvalds a bit.

You DO understand this is a game largely made by one person, and not something that he is just open sourcing to the public, or can call on people to be temporary volunteer employees on, correct? 

It's not simply pride or ego if someone makes their living off of developing something, and doesn't want to open source the whole thing... and if Toady starts "delegating", there isn't any guarantee that the people he delegates to will not distribute source code, will continue to work well with others, will be able to produce quality code, and will not hamper the overall effort with miscommunications and disorganization... And then there's the entirely legitimate claim by Toady that he just prefers to work alone, so that he doesn't have to deal with problems like that.

[James.Denholm]

I think Toady should learn to better delegate and share the workload. Make the big decisions and design interoperability but leave code implementation details to others and DELEGATE, delegate, delegate....

There should be more than enough volunteers around. Learn from Linus Torvalds a bit.

What Kohaku said, but also:

It's... his. The Adam Team doesn't really want to work with anyone else on a major fashion - Toady's main joy in life, if I understand the man as well as I should, is the development of Dwarf Fortress. Well, maybe not his "main joy", but... yeah. Something like that.

This is not a normal software development system, gentlemen.

[jei]

Actually, the only thing that keeps me from playing 24/7 is the lack of sieges and the updates.

Whenever I play, I think "Well, I shouldn't get to addicted or the update will just make me have to restart EVERYTHING." Which is an annoying habit because I really want to play but I get so immersed that I hate to have to get the newest version.

Second, I wish there were much more goblin sieges, and there was some way to increase their frequency from within the game, so I could start having 24/7 sieges once my fort's defences are all set up.

Besides those two problems, I fucking LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVEVOEOVOBUNRINGOHGODAOJSIAAUUUUGH Dwarf Fortress.

Well, I've been having 24/7 sieges and I can tell you that it gets very boring after a while. I wish there was more to the gameplay with other countries and nations. Like United Dwarves deciding to embargo US and stop our illegal Adamantine weapons productions and development, sending in the Giant Eagle bombers and weapons inspectors. And crusades to weed out the heretics. And a more XANTH-like quality to the game.
 

[Djohaal]

lag.

[zwei]

I think Toady should learn to better delegate and share the workload. Make the big decisions and design interoperability but leave code implementation details to others and DELEGATE, delegate, delegate....

There should be more than enough volunteers around. Learn from Linus Torvalds a bit.

You DO understand this is a game largely made by one person, and not something that he is just open sourcing to the public, or can call on people to be temporary volunteer employees on, correct? 

He might code alone and hide his sources, but community is well able to contribute in many, many other ways. And quite few people already do.