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[ungulateman]

Kudos to Toady on this project, it's an incredible testament of coding prowess to brute-force a core-i7 (8 cores @ 2.0ghz) machine with 8gb of ram into a slow, wheezing demise due to the number of things running simultaneously. Adventurer mode is the only way I've managed to overload my machine. Then again, I wanted to play with actual rivers that were wide and deep and awesome to behold, so I made 'large regions' with 100's of z-levels of depth, so I guess i get what I pay for.

There's your problem. That's barely 25% stronger than my 5-year old laptop. DF cares about sheer processor strength as opposed to number of cores.

Wrong. CPU speed stopped going up years ago, ~2.0-3.0GHz is normal. What's been going up is instruction processing efficiency, cache size, (integrated) memory controller speed and number of cores. The last doesn't affect DF, but the rest all do. His i7 will get much much much more performance in DF than your laptop.

2GHz is still slow. Hell, the 'budget' CPU option in one of the computer magazines I read currently is a 2.9 GHz Tri-core, with overclocking recommended.

Sure, he'll perform better, but laptop architecture guarantees that regardless of power or efficiency.

[Plague]

I used to play DF, but gave it up a while back.

DF is of a game of economics, business and management than it is anything else. Unfortunately, the level of management stays the same throughout the entire game.

This is what I love about DF:

Arriving and staving off a dangerous wilderness with a handful of dwarves.
The militaristic and building aspects.
Constructing siege equipment, building huge magma chambers, reservoirs, establishing walls and moats and entryway defenses.
Repelling sieges, and being attacked by legendary creatures.
Expanding my fortress and creating new areas.
Designing my whole fortress and seeing it in action.

I do not love:
Having my time wasted by new migrants' problems.
Dwarfs not doing their jobs.
Jobs being overly complicated in their prerequisites and functions (you need a bag, which needs fibers, which needs X, which needs X, which needs X, etc).
Micro-managing individual dwarves' lives, down to what they own and what their taste in food is.
Finding that my fortress is always expanding to meet the needs of its own expansion.
Seeing my fortress doing nothing important.

To me, the whole problem is that you never stop establishing yourself. One would think that you would arrive, create what you need to survive, and then begin the slow process of unraveling a plan. Over time, you stop focusing on survival and micro-managing a small collection of dwarves to having large groups of dwarves that manage themselves, which you use to step up to the next tier of development. This does not happen. You are basically stuck in the same mode as you are upon your arrival, for the entire game.

This would be similar to a major business owner being required to oversee the day-to-day functions of every store he has across the country. You hire managers to perform these functions so that you can handle the next level of problems, which are often more complicated but not as intensive on minute details.

There is too much "depth" to DF created by adding superfluous details.

I want to be able to create a military force and journey to new lands and conquer evil goblin cities.

I do NOT want to see buildable toilets introduced, nor do I care what my 34th horse's thoughts on his favorite color happen to be.

DF is not streamlined, and its gameplay does not step up as you play. The things I WANT to do are impeded by an ever-piling list of things that someone else should be doing, and while I am capable of doing these things, I *do not want to.* That's why I don't bother playing.

As far as solutions, I have ideas, but that's not really the point of the thread, and that's not up to me anyway.

[NerfJihad]

Kudos to Toady on this project, it's an incredible testament of coding prowess to brute-force a core-i7 (8 cores @ 2.0ghz) machine with 8gb of ram into a slow, wheezing demise due to the number of things running simultaneously. Adventurer mode is the only way I've managed to overload my machine. Then again, I wanted to play with actual rivers that were wide and deep and awesome to behold, so I made 'large regions' with 100's of z-levels of depth, so I guess i get what I pay for.

There's your problem. That's barely 25% stronger than my 5-year old laptop. DF cares about sheer processor strength as opposed to number of cores.

Wrong. CPU speed stopped going up years ago, ~2.0-3.0GHz is normal. What's been going up is instruction processing efficiency, cache size, (integrated) memory controller speed and number of cores. The last doesn't affect DF, but the rest all do. His i7 will get much much much more performance in DF than your laptop.

2GHz is still slow. Hell, the 'budget' CPU option in one of the computer magazines I read currently is a 2.9 GHz Tri-core, with overclocking recommended.

Sure, he'll perform better, but laptop architecture guarantees that regardless of power or efficiency.

I'm running this on a laptop, and honestly, I don't feel like OC'ing this until I can afford a new one. This is a brand new machine, with relatively top-of-the-line components. 2.0ghz in an 8-core laptop is impressive in nearly every sense of the word. (Multi-core capacity would be greatly appreciated in a future release, but iono how well that'll go over.) Overclocked and in a climate-controlled environment, I could squeeze a lot more out of this, but I'm running linux and don't feel the need to do more to my box than is necessary.

Actually, fsck 'relatively'. I'm running a beast of a computer, and my biggest gripe is that it takes more power to run this than it does to run Crysis.

[Jayce]

The creeping in of political correctness.

[The Architect]

summarized: never-ending micromanagement is not fun.

I can stand behind this 100%. I'd like to see improvements to the features that already exist, allowing them to be actually utilized. This is a thread for negativity, so keep in mind that I'm a huge fan of the Toad and his work while you read my complaints.

I advise skipping the examples unless you read the rest and think I'm exaggerating or over the line. If so, then come back and read them, and see if your opinion has wavered nearer to mine.

Spoiler: Examples (click to show/hide)

There is now a reasonably deep system of genetic heritage and varied genetic traits, however you can't breed a pack of extremely hardy, powerful animals (of any type) because you only get vague descriptions, and unlike a real person your dwarves cannot make relative judgments of size, strength, or health. So you'll never know why that "incredibly muscular" dog is easily outpaced by the dog "belarded with rings of fat". It would probably take about an hour to fix this.

You can build a mighty tower, an epic creation, but designating it in-game will probably take about as long as building a real one would take. Position pointer with many keypresses. 9 more to lengthen wall to maximum length. Move down list to desired material. hit 10 times. Repeat. This is a not-intractable interface problem. A MAJOR holdup to many people.

Another: you can pump magma and water into a giant scaffolding (assuming you get it designated without giving up or having a life) to create a magnificent cast obsidian sculpture, but several bugs with dwarves not wanting to perform their jobs, flows being inconsistent and inefficient, and so on will make it more of a headache than a grand accomplishment. Instead of making it more workable, Toady saw gaps between reality and simulation and handicapped the player with some nerfy changes.

In summary: I see the endless micromanagement issues largely as a result of underdeveloped features. Toady's so quick to put in cool new doodads that he doesn't ever seem to get around to fixing the old features properly. His response (after two years of the same version and same bugs and bugreports) to the plague of the worthless cattle who only served as a cpu drain and annoyance in your forts (no milking, butchering only a stand-in, etc) was "Oh, I think I may or may not have done something about that. On review, realizing my fans/testers are really plagued by it, let me take 2 weeks of programming and take it from a stand-in to a full-blown amazing banquet of features. Now, those features are largely useless due to various small bugs, but I have a really cool new idea so I'm going to do that now."

It's amazing to me to learn that a couple of days are all that is required to flesh out problematic features from annoyances to joys, yet this is never the priority. I understood the mentality of add-it-all-then-fix-it-later before, but now I see the truth: the features to be added are almost limitless, and we're approaching the point where the number of incompletely implemented features will make the game truly unplayable for even the most hard-core fans.

It passed that point already for me. If I can't get a leak stopped because no dwarves will take a job to disassemble a gear, and I can't tell if it is a bug or job problem because idle dwarves held up from work by the leak are constantly trying to throw parties, and I can't keep the fort under control because buggy programming causes children to walk around drowning themselves, and ...

then I have to sit back, take a moment, and think: this isn't a challenge; it's not a game; it's a debacle. It's more frustrating than work, which I actually enjoy. I used to enjoy DF, and I'd like to again. It's such a wonderful compilation of imagination and potential.

Anyway, if I ran DF it wouldn't be anything on the grand scale of Toady's imagination. Then, again, it would be highly playable. So I think the scale has just tipped a little too far the wrong way. I'd like Toady to take a little bit to catch up with himself, get the current features in order, then proceed with adding his new ideas. But we all know what gets him excited about the game, and it's implementing new ideas (not fixing the old ones!)

[Urist McDepravity]

Anyway, if I ran DF it wouldn't be anything on the grand scale of Toady's imagination. Then, again, it would be highly playable.

Making freeware game is usually perceived much more simplier than in fact it is.
So much more likely it would not exist at all rather than being 'highly playable'.

[Josephus]

The creeping in of political correctness.

What do you mean?

[Thief^]

Kudos to Toady on this project, it's an incredible testament of coding prowess to brute-force a core-i7 (8 cores @ 2.0ghz) machine with 8gb of ram into a slow, wheezing demise due to the number of things running simultaneously. Adventurer mode is the only way I've managed to overload my machine. Then again, I wanted to play with actual rivers that were wide and deep and awesome to behold, so I made 'large regions' with 100's of z-levels of depth, so I guess i get what I pay for.

There's your problem. That's barely 25% stronger than my 5-year old laptop. DF cares about sheer processor strength as opposed to number of cores.

Wrong. CPU speed stopped going up years ago, ~2.0-3.0GHz is normal. What's been going up is instruction processing efficiency, cache size, (integrated) memory controller speed and number of cores. The last doesn't affect DF, but the rest all do. His i7 will get much much much more performance in DF than your laptop.

2GHz is still slow. Hell, the 'budget' CPU option in one of the computer magazines I read currently is a 2.9 GHz Tri-core, with overclocking recommended.

Sure, he'll perform better, but laptop architecture guarantees that regardless of power or efficiency.

I'm running this on a laptop, and honestly, I don't feel like OC'ing this until I can afford a new one. This is a brand new machine, with relatively top-of-the-line components. 2.0ghz in an 8-core laptop is impressive in nearly every sense of the word. (Multi-core capacity would be greatly appreciated in a future release, but iono how well that'll go over.) Overclocked and in a climate-controlled environment, I could squeeze a lot more out of this, but I'm running linux and don't feel the need to do more to my box than is necessary.

Actually, fsck 'relatively'. I'm running a beast of a computer, and my biggest gripe is that it takes more power to run this than it does to run Crysis.

It's also an i7, which means that it can raise the cpu speed on a single core if you are only using the one. e.g. when playing DF.
If your cpu is the i7 I think it is, it will boost to up to 3.2GHz when only one core is in use, and up to 3.0 GHz when two are in use.

i7s are sweet cpus.

[Antsan]

It would probably take about an hour to fix this.

Yes, that's how bug tracking and programming works. "I'm going to rewrite a whole subsystem of my program, where I need to maintain a lot of functionality that is used at several different spots in the engine and introducing new functionality that I didn't even plan to be there before, so how long should this take, taking into account, I might introduce several really obscure bugs on the way? Oh well, an hour I guess."
Don't ever measure how long it could take to fix or implement something just by how complex the task seems to you. Even formalizing the ideas you've got can take a good slice of time.

[Rumrusher]

looks like this interface problem is effecting those who play fort mode and doesn't seem to cross over into the other two modes toady made especially into adventure mode.
oh well
the only major gripe I get from the game is the memory leaks that might suck up a good chuck of my small ram and the face I can't really copy and edit the title of a old save with out corrupting it which means I need to make separate folders for swapping saves. I play it as a rogue-like with exploring the game and seeing what new hidden stuff one can do.
still need to figure out how to non-lethal disband companions, plop a child, permanently stay in the body your in, and figure out the right number stats for a 'wambler punch'(using a hammer as a template) to fling a bronze colossus fifty feet.

[Draco18s]

You realize that DF's memory usage isn't a memory leak, right?  It's legitimately using all of it, unless you have a good indication as to why it shouldn't need it.

[Rumrusher]

You realize that DF's memory usage isn't a memory leak, right?  It's legitimately using all of it, unless you have a good indication as to why it shouldn't need it.

okay then let me rephrase it
I hate it when dwarf fort takes a huge chunk some times and ends up crashing it self when it reaches my pc  max commit charge limit. It's a small gripe and only happens during my testing the game hidden features for adventure mode.

[nickbii]

It would probably take about an hour to fix this.

Yes, that's how bug tracking and programming works. "I'm going to rewrite a whole subsystem of my program, where I need to maintain a lot of functionality that is used at several different spots in the engine and introducing new functionality that I didn't even plan to be there before, so how long should this take, taking into account, I might introduce several really obscure bugs on the way? Oh well, an hour I guess."
Don't ever measure how long it could take to fix or implement something just by how complex the task seems to you. Even formalizing the ideas you've got can take a good slice of time.

He doesn't want a rewrite. He wants Toady to display the genetic traits a breeder would be interested in.

In other words he wants Toady to use the subroutine saying "the doggy has green eyes" to also say "the doggy's speed is 7, strength is 12, and toughness is 8." Or something like that. The data is he's talking about is presumably stored in the same spot as eye-color, which would make this a trivial change.

And I think we can all agree that a fortress dedicated to breeding gigantic War Eagles would be incredibly cool.

Nick

I doubt he'll make it, because he's got about a billion things on his to-do list, but this is a pretty good place to bring up the issue.

[Vercingetorix]

Right now, probably the lack of most event continuation after world gen ends; I like the thought of my fortress interacting with the world and having a definable, long-term impact on it and those who live there.  It's not a game-ender or anything like that because imagination fills in the gaps pretty well, but it also means most of my worlds don't survive beyond the first fort.

So, from my perspective this is the area that I'd like to see implemented first going forward.  The new entity populations are a step in this direction because they'll make creating a real trade system easier; hell, right now I'd be happy just to have non-local populations continue to have children, age, and die.

[zwei]

Right now, there is one largest issues i have with interface:

Damn Huge Lists of (random) Stuff from which i have to find something.

They are usually ordered in semirandom way (so making human&elves-corpse stockpile is real joy). Especially when it makes sense to be at least alphabetic, it is not.
They are rarely searchable and filterable (i would love to filter stocks menu the same way i can filter items in bring-to-depot dialog) so you have to find group of items you want to do something manually.

Well designed component reused all over df would go long way...