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[Aquillion]

I would say that better management for immigrants is a major way the interface could be improved.  In the long run I think the best plan out of those that have been discussed is to have a noble (possibly the manager or overseer) greet new arrivals in a big meeting; after that, a list is formed and presented to the player of all the dwarves that are seeking citizenship, and the player can view their stats, set up their jobs, and try to send some away (although they may get offended and throw a tantrum, or whatever.)  Some form of border control and a more sophisticated naturalization process is logical once the fortress reaches an appropriate size.

The current rules for immigration are...  something of a placeholder, I think.  Like most things dealing with other nations and so on, they let the game be played as it is now, but don't really represent the player as a nation, or the larger circumstances around immigration and emigration.

In any case, the people who like the current "totally unexpected" immigrants have to realize that it's not going to be like that forever.  Look up Core28, "control of territory"; eventually, the Fortress will be able to keep track of what's going around it, which will let you see migration groups moving through your surrounding territory -- or, say, to send your army and turn them away if you feel you've got enough people right now.

As far as customization goes, it has always been the plan to let users customize their game experience using data files, to the extent that it is feasible.  Saying that a particular thing is part of THE RULES and should not be modifiable is silly, because Dwarf Fortress was always intended to be a general framework to represent a wide variety of possible fantasy worlds and scenarios, not one fixed set of challenges.  It is as much a simulation as it is a game, and it is meant to be 'played' in many different ways.  Want to play without goblins?  Edit them out of the data files.  Want your dwarves to be twenty feet tall, breathe fire, and immune to pain?  Easy.  Want the goblins to be twenty feet tall and breathe fire?  Easy!

The actual difficulty or disruption involved in implementing a particular suggestion is pretty much only something Toady can know, outside of vague guesses on our part; I think we can safely leave any necessary triage based on that up to him.  But disabling or fiddling with immigration parameters seems like it would be a comparatively easy config setting to implement, and would allow for a wide variety of alternate challenges or gameplay styles at relatively little effort.  I am confused why it seems to have engendered such vicious hostility in a game where, with a few data-file tweaks, you can make your dwarves breathe fire.

[kutulu]

Deal with it. You knew that the game includes immigrants, and either you take it, or you leave it. If I don't like the combat system of, say Crystal Caliburn, I don't play the game, instead of complaining about the combat system during play.

Not to mention that DF is still an early Alpha. It is no-where near feature complete.

Those are all incredibly silly arguments to make in a thread that started with one of the developers asking what people wanted to see changed about the game.

[Neonivek]

that started with one of the developers asking what people wanted to see changed about the game

That isn't exactly it. He is asking what frustrating people and turning them away from the game.

[Hydra]

That isn't exactly it. He is asking what frustrating people and turning them away from the game.

Yeah, indeed. He wants to make those items worse so even more people are turned away!

[Neonivek]

Yeah, indeed. He wants to make those items worse so even more people are turned away!

Well the difference is that change/improvement can be made to a system without flaws/frustration.

This topic is only dealing with frustrations.

[CynicalRyan]

Devs have the option to let an alpha pass or to reject it.  If it's satisfactory, it goes into beta stage.

The devs have no say about whether or not an application is okay. Q&A has.

[Footkerchief]

The devs have no say about whether or not an application is okay. Q&A has.

Could you at least try to pretend that this conversation is still about DF development?

[FistsOfTinsel]

I just started playing DF a week ago.  I had downloaded it about a year ago, and tried to play the game via the wiki instructions, but I didn't really have time to understand the intimidating startup instructions, what with world building & such; once I got into the game proper, the confusing controls (I was playing on a laptop) killed it for me.

That said, when I started last week, I did so with the "Utter Newby Guide" I found here: http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/ .

I cannot stress how useful something like this is.  For a game like DF, a step-by-step set of instructions on creating your first fort is absolutely mandatory if you want to attract anything beyond the most rabid gamers.  The guide is not perfect; it digresses a little too much, but it allowed me to play the game without feeling like I had to take a college course to do so.

Now that I've been playing a week, and still haven't been attacked yet, here are my beefs:

1.  MICROMANAGEMENT.  It's been repeated by many others, but here's this n00bs views.  DF is basically a Simcity game with RTS elements.  What it's missing is a high-level view of what's going on.  The Status screen is a start, but I need reports on demographics as well.  In fact, that should be my starting point for running my fort - see everything from a global view, and drill down when necessary.  DF takes the opposite approach - everything is bottom up.

A big confusing factor for DF is in figuring out what "my" role is in the game; am I a leader, directing minions?  A god?  The distributed consciousness of all the individual dwarves?  The fact that the dwarves self-organize makes me think it's along the lines of SimCity, but too often I need to intervene in the most trivial details of their lives (e.g., determining whether their left mitten matches their right one).  An example:  I want some digging done, I don't have enough miners.  I designate some peasants as miners, but I see that they show up with "No Job" in the roster.  Why?  They have no picks.  How am I supposed to know this?  Nothing in the game tells me (that I can see), and it is unclear where in the wiki I would start.  At the very least, I would like to see notifications or reports when tasks are blocked due to some resource constraint, with an explanation on what needs to be done.  Same goes for workshops & such - I don't want to have to visit each empty workshop to see what the problem is - I want a global view.

This confusion about the role leaks into the rest of the interface/gameplay.  Why do I have to move a bed into a room, then tell it to make the room a bedroom?  Why can't I specify the space as a bedroom and let the dwarves furnish it with beds?  If I build a forge and it needs metal, and there are empty smelters and idle dwarves with appropriate skills, why can't they just go do it?  Again, the disconnect between levels of control; I can't tell the dwarves what to do, yet I seem to have to tell them exactly what to do.  A consistent level of autonomy would go a long way.

4. INTERFACE: Not so much the ASCII stuff, but why is managing lists of stuff so damn cumbersome?  DF desparately needs sorting features in the lists.  Sort dwarf rosters by profession, or health, or stats; sort bin contents by item type or quality; same with trading screens - sort by whether the item is up for trade, it's value, weight, etc.  Also, requiring an "F9" to exit the screen where we're moving goods to the depot (which is a relatively painless process, if you're using bins), but exiting the trading screen with "space" is disasterous - after setting up a trade for several minutes, to have it all thrown away by accidentally hitting space one too many times.

3.  SAVING THE GAME:  Maybe i'm just a dummy, but I am super confused about the save-game process.  Why is it different from pretty much every other application or game I've ever used?  I can never figure out which save game file is the one where I left off?  I have the seasonal autosave turned on, and I quit the game by choosing ESC-Save Game-Quit, but when I restart, I can never load up the game from where I left off; even if I choose the save game file that is the most recent (from looking in Windows Explorer), I still seem to be getting the N-1 file.  What gives?

[Neonivek]

3.  SAVING THE GAME:  Maybe i'm just a dummy, but I am super confused about the save-game process.  Why is it different from pretty much every other application or game I've ever used?

The Roguelike curse ("We can't let you cheat so we will just make saving as horrible as possible")... I personally wouldn't mind Dwarf Fortress differing from Roguelikes in this department.

[Footkerchief]

Again, the disconnect between levels of control; I can't tell the dwarves what to do, yet I seem to have to tell them exactly what to do.  A consistent level of autonomy would go a long way.

While I wouldn't call it one of my own major frustrations, yeah, this is important.  Good analysis.

[Caz]

Lack of challenges - goblins can be stopped easily by walling yourself in or making some wrestlers, animals on the map eventually run out, no 'guaranteed' challenges.

The interface really bugs me sometimes, but I got used to it.


Making the viewport resizeable was definitely a step in the right direction. It was TINY before.


Also, better graphic tile support would be great. And more colours. Yay.

[FistsOfTinsel]

3.  SAVING THE GAME:  Maybe i'm just a dummy, but I am super confused about the save-game process.  Why is it different from pretty much every other application or game I've ever used?

The Roguelike curse ("We can't let you cheat so we will just make saving as horrible as possible")... I personally wouldn't mind Dwarf Fortress differing from Roguelikes in this department.

So, what is the answer?  All I want to do is have the game save when I quit, and continue from where I left off when I start it again.  Am I doing something wrong?  Can you point me to a link or wiki page that explains how this works and what to do?  I can't imagine it is really this hard - it has to be operator error on my part.

[CynicalRyan]

So, what is the answer?  All I want to do is have the game save when I quit, and continue from where I left off when I start it again.  Am I doing something wrong?  Can you point me to a link or wiki page that explains how this works and what to do?  I can't imagine it is really this hard - it has to be operator error on my part.

Half of one:

Hit the Escape-key, choose the option "Save Game", and the game will save, and dump you to DF's main menu, from where you can quit the game completely.

[Footkerchief]

If you read his post, it's evident he already knew that.  Tinsel -- games get saved back into their save folder.  So if you load the save named "region1," your game will be saved into that folder when you save-quit, and it's the one you should reload next time.

[bjlong]

First: Framerate. I play on a laptop, and DF chugs along at 4 FPS with 50 dwarves. This... is pretty unacceptable. It's part of the reason that I haven't been playing recently.

Second: There's no macroscopic picture. I understand things by looking at both the big picture and the details, and seeing how things line up that way before I can really understand a system. If there was a big picture, I could make a lot more informed decisions. The status screen helps, but things like thus-and-such immigrant has training in this job, which you have x of would help immensely.

E: Another screen that could help is "show dwarves that have had x amount of non-hauling jobs in y amount of time." This would help us see the dwarves that are being overworked and the dwarves that are "unemployed." Bonus if we can hit a key to see what kinds of jobs the dwarves are doing, and how many of each.

As a note, tools like these would require some UI design stuff in the debugging, or else they'd be practically unusable.