Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lalandrathon]

One thing I realized that is a little tiny annoyance, but really makes the interface feel more clunky is the fact that the cursor re-centers on the view screen every time you switch menus. If it could be made to save its place until the viewing window was actually moved, that would make things feel a lot slicker, and perhaps combat the newbie interface fatigue.

[Mel_Vixen]

The heck "empty function solution"? If i would work this way some of my C++/Php/javascripts would be 10 Times as big as they are right now and even with a decent commenting and manual i would get some of the code out of the view by accident. Not to mention that i have to track 10 times more function names ,types and failure at the evaluation/compilation.

*sigh*

Look toady did implement some cardboard-code for us so we get a "feeling" and he can do some "Basics" which can thanks to the "Cardboard-code", be tested until the real code is worked out.

The new fight system is higly entangled with the new Body-code which is needed because without it fights just wouldnt work propper . To have the proper "über-Awesome-fist-of dragon-fights" we need the "toothbrushing and dwarf dressup" stuff first. From my view as programmer and rp-player i can say that abstracting here is a bit very tricky.

There is an old saying "First the work then the fun". Here does it mean that toad has to do the bodysystem - and doing it in one go minimizes the failurerate and the chance to forget something later - before we can go all "bruce lee". Also it enables more fun fights and dirty wrestling moves .


To get back to Threetoes last questions.


I think a world only for the Tutorials would be good. To cut out the need for a entire world to be downloaded you could just create a well defined Seed which gets some scripts. Since you know what you get after W-gen the scripts would work every time right. The scripts itself would be some 100 kilobytes - at max if you do a realy big tutorial. Done right toady could even implemet some kind of "story-writing/play story" mode which the community could use. But that goes to far for now i guess.

On the UI side i would add more mouse-support. Also the ? (question mark) should tell you can do with the selected stuff (These are logs. logs can be used to ....)

the UI mockup some post before this was by the way very interresting.

[PMantix]

1. A quick help. She was completely overwhelmed by the massive amount of things that can be done. What she would have liked to see was the ability to click a word or object and have some kind of helpful hint pop up to briefly explain the word. For example, she was making her starting 7 and wasn't familiar with what a thresher was or did. I wasn't around to explain it or show her the wiki, so she just skipped it..   what would have made the difference was a quick pop up text bubble stating what the job is, inputs/outputs, and associated buildings/areas. Same goes for objects..  "this is a throne. It is needed as seating adjacent to tables in dining rooms. It can be designated as an office for administrative purposes or as a throne room for nobles." That way you can be quickly informed about what something is, instead of the default "what the hell is that" or "how the hell do I make this"

This is a good idea.  The '?' help would be much more useful if it was context-sensitive and brought up information about whatever your cursor is over at the moment.  It would especially be nice to be able to get information about workshop tasks, too, learning what each task requires and produces.

That's what I thought too. I wouldn't want it to be just the wiki imported into the game, just the basic ins and outs of what the word or object is. I think that would make a world of difference just to have that very basic level of info available in game rather than relying on the player to figure out every single thing on their own or from outside sources.

[Kishmond]

Might I point out that were missing some things here. Maybe some of you are frustrated by the lack of tangible progress but you're letting it get to your heads. Take a look at the list of remaining items. There are 188 bullets on that list and only 8 of them relate to teeth, wrinkles, beards and whatnot, that you claim Toady has been working on for the last six months. And get this, they're mostly finished already. My point is we seem to be selectively observing things. I can see plenty of items on that list that will affect gameplay.

So just relax. We're getting there.

(And this is going to be a huge update. Everyone is likely to find something they'll like.)

[Rockphed]

Okay, to run with the context sensitive use of '?', what would it show when a piece of Raw Adamantine was selected.  Here is my idea:

Code: [Select]

Raw Adamantine is a stone.

Adamantine Strands can be extracted from it at the craftsdwarf workshop.

Legends speak of horrible fates befalling those who, in their greed, delved too deep in search of Adamantine.
Now, there are three parts to this listing that can each be generated by the game instead of being hard-coded in:

First, there is what type of object you are dealing with.  It could probably get even more specific, but I don't think it needs to.  Second, there is a description of its use.  In this case it could probably include other things that can be done with raw Adamantine, but extracting adamantine strands is probably the most important thing.  For normal stone, it should probably say that it isn't used in reactions, while flux stones should make mention of that property.

Thirdly is a special case for things found around HFS, like Adamantine.  There should, in my opinion, be a warning against digging too deep inherent in the game itself.

[Capntastic]

Okay, to run with the context sensitive use of '?', what would it show when a piece of Raw Adamantine was selected.  Here is my idea:

Code: [Select]

Raw Adamantine is a stone.

Adamantine Strands can be extracted from it at the craftsdwarf workshop.

Legends speak of horrible fates befalling those who, in their greed, delved too deep in search of Adamantine.

The thing here is that it's very hard to implement this stuff easily, I think.   Especially since A:  The game should, I feel, only tell you what has been discovered about some object- like Adamantine.   Likewise, there's like a zillion objects in the game, and I'd rather have Toady working on the game then in-game descriptions for 'em right now.   For the time being, at least.

I really think that a lot of the tutorials and wiki stuff are fine the way they are now- a product of the community.

[MrWiggles]

Okay, to run with the context sensitive use of '?', what would it show when a piece of Raw Adamantine was selected.  Here is my idea:

Code: [Select]

Raw Adamantine is a stone.

Adamantine Strands can be extracted from it at the craftsdwarf workshop.

Legends speak of horrible fates befalling those who, in their greed, delved too deep in search of Adamantine.

The thing here is that it's very hard to implement this stuff easily, I think.   Especially since A:  The game should, I feel, only tell you what has been discovered about some object- like Adamantine.   Likewise, there's like a zillion objects in the game, and I'd rather have Toady working on the game then in-game descriptions for 'em right now.   For the time being, at least.

I really think that a lot of the tutorials and wiki stuff are fine the way they are now- a product of the community.

I think a tutorial like this would be best, in the end. Before 1V gets out, since until then things will get added, modded and dropped making the tutorials always out of date, if they are in game.

The wiki for now, is the best solution. I didn't really start getting the game until I followed the first fortress guide on the wiki. That really let me grow acustom to how the menus, and various are worked as well as teaching the basic of the ASCII diction that the game uses.

[PMantix]

I really think that a lot of the tutorials and wiki stuff are fine the way they are now- a product of the community.

I agree, because it would definitely take a long time to add these quick helps for every single object in the game. But I think having the help and tutorials outside the game is what turns away a good portion of the 90% who play fortress for a few minutes and then never come back. All of us who have struggled through are the exception to that rule I think.

A link to the wiki in game may give the most benefit for the least amount of work.

[SirPenguin]

I definitely disagree the game needs any sort of built in tutorial. We have plenty made the community...on the wiki, on the forums, on YouTube. A better solution would to make these resources very obvious to the player. I saw the Wiki link snuck into the ReadMe, but honestly, who actually reads those? When someone opens "Help" they should be presented with a series of links pointing them elsewhere.

Anyways, I'm going to split this up like a previous poster did into "What turned me off in the beginning" and "What turns me off now", as I think the distinction is important.

Beginning:
*ASCII graphics coupled with the low color amount. One or the other I could probably deal with, but both made it very difficult to understand ANYTHING going on. I remember the first time I noticed vermin, as I kept wondering what the fuck these weird colored commas and apostrophes were doing blinking in and out of existence. Finally I was able to pause just in time to see it was a fairy flying around. Cute.

I understand the difficulties Toady has to overcome when it comes to graphics. On the one hand to stop and focus on them would eat up a lot of his time. However, to simply open it up to the community would also wrestle some pretty important control over the game away from him, something he clearly does not want (nor should he).

And yet despite all of this, the ASCII graphics and limited colors are the #1 reason people are being turned away from the game. It's mentioned in the first line of any description of the game ("...and if you can get past the Matrix-like quality of DF...") and is definitely both a turn off for people who DO know what they're doing and downright scary for people who DON'T know what they're doing.

*Beyond that? A clunky interface that seems to change its mind far too often (Wanna close this screen? Try Space. NO WAIT I MEANT F9!) and that overcomplicates an already overcomplicated game.

*Finally, the lack of any meaningful description as to what is what in the world. When I first started out I had the Wiki open in another tab constantly searching info about every stone I found because I had absolutely no idea what was important and what was not. Repeat this process for damn near every item, building, and character. Also, as someone who hasn't taken a geology course in his entire life, it surprised the hell out of me when I wasn't striking any "iron veins". Little did I know that shit came from ores that sound like Pokemon.



Now, as a "seasoned" DFer:

*No goal or incentive to do anything most of the time. Hard to fault the ALPHA of a game for this, but if you're asking what turns me off, this is a big one.

*Clunky Legends mode. I LOVE Legends, but in its current form it's almost impossible to follow even one character around without getting lost. And what kills me is that it is SO OBVIOUS how AMAZING it would be if it followed a "Wiki" style formatting. Oh, Soandso moved to Placething? Awesome! Click on Placething to see what it was like and where it was. Oh the battle of Squeezingthighs took place here? Click on that to get a detailed view of the battle. Oh hey, there's Soandso leading the battle!

*90% of all locations are "boring" or, in some cases, entirely stupid to settle on. Without magma your metal production will crawl, and your glass production probably won't exist. No flux? No steel. No sand? No glass. Lack of adamantine = lack of awesome weapons/armor/items and also lack of some pretty important "end game" difficulties. Found an awesome place nestled in the mountains or on an island? Get ready to play Dwarf Fortress: Survivor, as if others can't "reach" you, then you may as well be all along in this world. No traders. No sieges. Nothing.

So people spend countless hours trying to get the planets to align and find the one suitable place where a lot of those features cross. And as I and many others have noticed, it's quite rare for all of this to occur in a playing space less than 3x3...which leads me to...

*FPS problems. Number one complaint as a DF veteran. It is THE reason I quit fortresses basically 9 times out of 10. I have two rigs, neither one of them bad. The laptop has a speedy processor and lots of memory to go around, and the desktop, though old, has plenty of decent parts. My desktop can play L4D on medium settings, it can run Fallout 3 on the low ones, and basically any game released before 2008 it can run high.

And yet god forbid I have a fortress larger than 50 dwarves, else my FPS is cut down into the 40s on a good day, and into the single digits when a trader comes.


Anyways, this post is long, but hey, a developer of the game asked me an honest question, and I think I owe it to you guys to give you an honest answer.

[change name please]

Might I point out that were missing some things here. Maybe some of you are frustrated by the lack of tangible progress but you're letting it get to your heads. Take a look at the list of remaining items. There are 188 bullets on that list and only 8 of them relate to teeth, wrinkles, beards and whatnot, that you claim Toady has been working on for the last six months. And get this, they're mostly finished already. My point is we seem to be selectively observing things. I can see plenty of items on that list that will affect gameplay.

So just relax. We're getting there.

(And this is going to be a huge update. Everyone is likely to find something they'll like.)

This happens to be an inconvenient time to argue what TouretteDog and I have seen to be the problem with dwarf fortress since there is this big, nebulous update that's coming out "soon" (read: in the next 1-6 months) that will purpotedly incorporate the layers system and the military and a rich-content underworld and serve you a cold beer.  Me, I'm banking on there being far less to this patch than most people are expecting, and I'm not expecting the changes to enrich gameplay that much.  Unfortunately, there's not really much I can do while this looms somewhere off in the distance other than to ask "why not sooner?" and promise to return to say "I told you so" when we end up with one or two extra little features and five pages of dwarven hair and scar and tooth descriptions

[thvaz]

This happens to be an inconvenient time to argue what TouretteDog and I have seen to be the problem with dwarf fortress since there is this big, nebulous update that's coming out "soon" (read: in the next 1-6 months) that will purpotedly incorporate the layers system and the military and a rich-content underworld and serve you a cold beer.  Me, I'm banking on there being far less to this patch than most people are expecting, and I'm not expecting the changes to enrich gameplay that much.  Unfortunately, there's not really much I can do while this looms somewhere off in the distance other than to ask "why not sooner?" and promise to return to say "I told you so" when we end up with one or two extra little features and five pages of dwarven hair and scar and tooth descriptions

Now, who's trolling? Your agressive tone in every post you make let this very clear. You are here not to answer a question Threetoe asked, or to help the development of the game, but just to let everyone and their dog know how and why this game and Toady's way of working sucks.

About what turns me off about the game, I can tell just as a veteran DF player, as when I started nothing turned me off. What brought me into the game was a post in another forum, a good tale about what happened in a fort of another player It was so interesting it made me have the necessary committing to learn the game and ignore its obvious flaws, flaws that are obvious even to Toady (interface, ASCII graphics, and everything everyone and this thread correctly remarked).

The fact is, without the necessary committing, everyone will be turned off by this game. And most people won't have this committing. This is why we need more stories like Boatmurdered or the post that got into the game, they are the game most effective publicity.

What turns me off of the game nowadays are the problems other veterans remarked: the crawling FPS of late-game fortresses, the lack of challenges, and the closing in of a new release. There are about some months I don't play the game, and even when I have the will to play, I just can't, in antecipation of the new features of the next release. Always there is a new significant release, I play the game for weeks.

[Jiri Petru]

Stop fighting, kids.

[macdonellba]

The thing here is that it's very hard to implement this stuff easily, I think.

Not really, especially not compared to the ridiculous assertions being made about optimization in this thread. Heck, since the data has to be loaded from a file anyway, just getting the community to provide context-sensitive information that balances help against spoilers would be one way to get this done with little more than some refactoring and the addition of a hook to several parts of the raws (plus creating placeholder doc files for anything hardcoded.)

Anyway, returning to the weird optimization assertions being made here: be aware that you're discussing potential constant-time subsystem improvements, not magic pixie dust. Even if Toady were to implement a route caching and thread pool system so efficient that it could quadruple the average pathfinding speed on high-end processors (and do far less on commodity hardware), the improvement would still increase your FPS by less than a factor of four. You'll likely be hard-pressed to find any other game using a tile map larger than one which represents a 4x4 map in DF, and DF's pathfinding frequency is ridiculous by any standards I've ever seen. While you might eventually reap some constant rewards from time-consuming and aggressive optimization, you need to realize that there will never be a magic bullet that makes large maps with hundreds of dwarfs as viable as more modest undertakings.

In reality, most games avoid this sort of problem by disguising coarser tilemaps under cleverly-blended terrain which bleeds into surrounding tiles and by using steering to navigate within and between tiles. Unfortunately, this sort of approach is generally only viable when you have some form of isometric / 3D terrain representation, and is effectively impossible to accomplish in roguelikes. The only other way to avoid the inevitable endgame slowdown is to reduce the number of dwarves which constitutes an 'endgame state' by reducing migrant waves and increasing specialization, akin to the abstraction found in many RTS titles. I seriously doubt we will ever have our cake and eat (all of) it too.

[Shurikane]

In reality, most games avoid this sort of problem by disguising coarser tilemaps under cleverly-blended terrain which bleeds into surrounding tiles and by using steering to navigate within and between tiles. Unfortunately, this sort of approach is generally only viable when you have some form of isometric / 3D terrain representation, and is effectively impossible to accomplish in roguelikes.

Can you re-explain that in other words?  I'm not sure I fully understand that part.

[G-Flex]

since there is this big, nebulous update that's coming out "soon" (read: in the next 1-6 months) that will purpotedly incorporate the layers system and the military and a rich-content underworld and serve you a cold beer.  Me, I'm banking on there being far less to this patch than most people are expecting, and I'm not expecting the changes to enrich gameplay that much.

What, do you think the developer is lying or something?

The gameplay changes are pretty clearly listed in the next-version dev list (the one toady is colorizing as he finishes them), and more are alluded to in the daily dev reports. Reading Toady's answer posts helps, too.

The military changes and underground critter changes ALONE are going to solve two very serious and immediate gameplay concerns: hard-to-deal-with military and lack of persistent challenge from special features. HFS is getting an update too, but Toady's been keeping the details to himself, understandably.

I understand hype being not necessarily a good thing and all, but this isn't like a normal commercial game's development where promises are broken constantly and you have no idea what's actually going to happen, or what's going on. We pretty much know what Toady has planned. It's itemized and he tells us what's going on almost every day.

And when people DO assume something false about what's going to be included in the next version, they're usually corrected by other members of the forums.


[edit]
For the record (and I'm not sure this'll matter to you), Toady has said that after this release, he might try working on some of the top suggestions he's seen here, particularly on the Eternal Suggestions list. Obviously it probably won't be a totally-democratic/populistic thing, but he does pay a lot of attention to what people want.