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[Aqizzar]

Thinking about it, I guess the point to take from most of these comments, is that the game shouldn't be so obtuse that a player needs to keep the wiki tabbed open in the background in order to run an industry.  Pertinent information should be visible in-game.

[Volfram]

I know this isn't exactly the place for it, nor am I the proper person to pass judgment, but I find the full username "Hitlers" is using to be extremely offensive on several levels.

That aside, he makes some very valid points.

I did have an idea for a graphical representation that I don't really have time to outline immediately, but will get to once I do have time for it.

As for UI help, I would stress the explanation of Z-layers very early on, as well as linking to the Wiki more readily from the site.

Also, I don't really see the point of using "HFS" as a spoiler tag.  DF has no fixed storyline, ergo there can be no spoilers, and any dwarf properly raised in the Mountainhomes would have been told stories as a child about things which come from the deep.

[Neonivek]

Thinking about it, I guess the point to take from most of these comments, is that the game shouldn't be so obtuse that a player needs to keep the wiki tabbed open in the background in order to run an industry.  Pertinent information should be visible in-game.

This is true of so many Roguelikes. Though don't get me wrong it is a flaw rather then a feature. I agree Dwarf Fortress should be capable of being learned in game within an hour (Though scientifically I think the actual time frame in which someone will chose if they will keep playing a game is 30 minutes)

-Though I guess the flaw is also a virtue. Because Roguelikes require wikis so much the community have to pull together to gather all the secrets of the game so people can start winning. I mean, how many players playing/hacking Nethack/IVAN/ADOM do you think it took before the knowledge base was large enough to allow people to win?

[change name please]

Consider this before tracking individual dwarf genealogy and beard hairs:  Is the game fun to play?  Is there a point to continue playing?  Is the player ever challenged?

It is an attempt to keep Save Compatability for a long period of time rather then Toady believing it is a vital aspect of gameplay that needs to be in the game NOW! Then there is the fact that often to get to the gameplay improvements you have to revamp the whole game at once rather then in a steady stream over long periods of time (because balance isn't one sided). This is a good reason why the "Combat Arc" likely exists rather then being part of the Army and Dungeon Arc.

Consider this, though:  The average fort will lose all interesting things to do after about 2 months tops of real-world gameplay, about 10 years in-game, and that's being generous.  That being the case, is it really necessary that the bi-annual update preserve save compatibility?  I know there are some of you out there building a titanic obsidian pyramid or something like that, but 1) what's the point? and 2) if your megaproject is that important to you, then you will abstain from the update until you lose interest in your project.

Can somebody explain to me the holy mandate of Save Compatibility?  Because I remember when "losing was fun" and the average fort was supposed to collapse under its own weight and after two months real-time everyone was on fire or dead.

[penguinofhonor]

Community fortresses. Succession games. There's more going on than just normal player forts. And some people (myself included) don't like constantly restarting forts.

The updates are far more than biannual, this one is just slow. Sometimes they come out every week or two, and breaking save compatibility that often is what Toady is trying to prevent now.

[change name please]

Community fortresses. Succession games. There's more going on than just normal player forts. And some people (myself included) don't like constantly restarting forts.

The updates are far more than biannual, this one is just slow. Sometimes they come out every week or two, and breaking save compatibility that often is what Toady is trying to prevent now.

If you're playing a succession game then you can sit out the particular patch or start a new fortress.  It's not a big deal.  Whenever I bring up DF's extremely convoluted dev process everybody always cries save compatibility at me, but gee guys its not like having an extra page of word salad about what [adjective] [noun] of [nouns] this particular dwarf worships is making the game any more interesting.

[Neonivek]

Can somebody explain to me the holy mandate of Save Compatibility?

No freeken idea... but there is apperantly quite a few people who do like to keep it.

Whenever I want to keep my fortress when a new version comes out I just keep the old version. So I guess I am not a good person to ask when it comes to "Why is Save compatability so important" other then once reading a topic where most people did want to keep it.

[Aqizzar]

Sometimes they come out every week or two, and breaking save compatibility that often is what Toady is trying to prevent now.

"Sometimes" doesn't really apply when you've only got three iterations of a near-yearly cycle.  DF was released, enjoyed weekly bugfixing updates for four months; nine months later the 3D version comes out, followed by weekly bug fixing for four months; five months later the "Army Arc" is released, then about a month of weekly bug fixing.  Now it's been eight months since the last bugfix update, with the next release still nowhere in sight.

I know Toady commented once that even he acknowledges that stalwart preservation of save compatibility doesn't really mean all that much.  I for another have to contend that it's just not important.  Break saves every month, I don't care.  If you're so attached to a fort that you don't want to lose it to an update, then don't update.

[penguinofhonor]

I see your point. Although I enjoy save compatibility, I would gladly sacrifice it for better updates. Just trying to show Mr Offensive Name why people want it.

I still don't agree with his argument that these appearance updates are useless, though.

[Neonivek]

I still don't agree with his argument that these appearance updates are useless, though

It is a sorta lack of Foresight and well as an overestimations of the ability for Toady to immediately fix Sieges, Combat, and other aspects of the game. Tunnel Vision if you will.

"the next release still nowhere in sight"

My original guess was June... uhhh... I think I want to change it to November.

Ohh well I probably should get back on topic.

[change name please]

I still don't agree with his argument that these appearance updates are useless, though.

Why not?  There are fewer interesting traps to build and less combat now then there was in DF2D literally two years ago.  Conversely, there are now three or four pages of words words words attached to every dwarf, stuff you'd never notice unless you went three or four levels in to dwarf examination ([v], select dwarf, [p], [y], [space], i can't remember all the steps it takes to look at thoughts and preferences).

Meanwhile, forts are nigh-impervious, sieges happen once in a million years (and thank god with the way all those rat leather socks bog down my framerate), trade is broken, and the main pasttime of the community seems to be cranking out hundreds and hundreds of worldgen files trying to find a location with decent feature density.

Can you tell me why these appearance modifiers and beard length modules are more important than effective & challenging sieges, or a fort that can import sufficient flux to support smithing, or a farming system that doesn't drown your dwarves in food after one year?  You say they're not useless, so tell me what the use is.

[Footkerchief]

The thing that irritates me most is that all of the advances made to DF ever since it went 3D have been primarily focused around making a big mess of Mad Libs that you'll never pay any attention to.  Dwarf religions, preferences, personalities, none of these influence gameplay.  Now we are being treated to a six-month dev arc about making the already complicated wound system even more complicated.  It does not make good sense to add all this fluff while the game itself is so boring compared to what it was in 2D.

As usual, you are right about current gameplay lacking long-term interest.  However, also as usual, you're choosing to ignore that current development isn't just hair and compound fractures but also reviving some of the better 2D features (rich underground, endless chasm attacks, both of which will be a lot more interesting and diverse than the hacked-up crap from the 2D version).  You're also dismissing stuff like the new wound system as lacking gameplay value when the next version will have new producable items, new professions, new buildings, and new nobles all built up around it (for the health care system).

And you're not helping your case by claiming wounds took six months when they got worked on for... just over one month.  A lot of the other time has been spent on stuff like the new material system, which enables crazy shit like creatures that spit blister agents at you, and the new announcement system which fixes several longstanding complaints like the lack of fortress mode combat reports and the neverending "You have struck Microcline!" messages.  The new tissue system (in which the hair growth stuff was basically incidental, it took like two days or something) will make creatures, especially megabeasts, harder to kill in much more interesting ways than just increasing size and damblock.  The military will be nearly unrecognizable after the squad rewrite, with a lot less tedious micro and a lot more actual tactics.

Finally, you still have this attitude is that you're the one who's finally telling it to Toady like it is.  Yours is not the first or the most eloquent expression of those sentiments, and even if it was, he knows much better than you that Armok-style bottom-up development has major problems, and that the current game is seriously lacking in cool things to do.  He AGREES with you there.  So why the refusal to acknowledge that the next version is going to introduce at least as much, if not more, new stuff to do than the 2D -> 3D switch did? 

[Appelgren]

You know, even though I agree that actual gameplay has changed very little since the 3d version, I'm quite enamoured with the impractical way DF is developed. I like how religion creates a reason for all the future wars stuff. And one of my favourite memories is how a dwarf with the "Lives for risk and excitement" personality trait was totally ecstatic, while everybody else was going mad from grief after a dragon wiped out most of my forts population.

But I do miss a lot of the stuff from the 2d version. I got into 2d quite easily but was quite turned off by the 3D release. Where starving to death in the winter was a real and exciting threat in 2d, in the 3d version farming was easy and when winter came it felt mostly cosmetic. And I didn't make much sense of the new mechanisms (windmills, axles etc). That, coupled with the dwarves dragging mud everywhere (which has since been remedied) made me give up fortress mode for a long while. The new underground features currently being worked on I think will bring back a lot of the 2d-feel. And late game challenges will most likely come with the other army arc changes planned.

And I can wait. All the odd details is what makes DF DF.

For a totally new player? I guess a tutorial and a less counter-intuitive interface would work wonders as many people here have already said.

[bepo5]

The game's problem for new players is also it's greatest strength imo, it is far too complex for newbies and most people in general. It took me a month with the help of the wiki just to understand how to use floodgates and levers, and I still do not know how to use pumps correctly.

What I think makes DF incredibly hard for newbies is that the hardest part of the game is generally the starting of the fortress, you need to quickly start farms and get booze production up and running before your dwarves start killing each other, yet once you have the beginning down, the game is too easy, trap yourself with a moat and you are safe from everything. What I personally would do to make DF more accessible to the average person would be to make the early game a bit easier and the later game a bit harder.

Whatever you do imo do not touch the complexity of it all, that is what makes DF awesome, you just need a few tutorials and maybe an updated interface and that alone would make it far more accessible.

[Volfram]

So a suggestion about display and challenge that I've thought over a bit.


That display idea I promised earlier
I had thought for a while that a good way to make the display easier to approach, especially with the new graphical tweaks, would be to draw not one layer at a time, but to draw the layer the player is looking at as well as every layer below it(to a certain point.  Ten to fifteen layers should be sufficient.

Things such as unmined stone and open areas would be rendered as transparent, so that the next layer is visible below them.  The exact render depth should be an Init value.

Every layer is rendered at 80-90% scale of the one above it, with the top layer rendered at 10%.  Every layer is centered on the XY cordinate of the tile the player is looking at.

This allows a clear way to show the 3D aspects of the world as well as allowing players to see into those massive pits they've dug out, and in my opinion allows multilayer monitoring better than an isometric viewpoint would allow.  I also anticipate that it would lead to more interesting fort design, such as balconies and overpasses, since such structures would now have a visual impact on what the player sees, and it has a minimal impact on the rendering pipeline, because ultimately, it's only an expansion on the viewport settings currently in place.(Render the current layer, the 10-15 layers below them, and have them stacked and scaled in the draw thread, which is almost entirely desynchronized from the game thread)

Another idea I had for this layout was the idea of making the opaque stuff on the current layer semitransparent, with a value in the Init files to let the player set how semitransparent it is.  This allows the player to monitor stuff on both the current level and the level immediately below.  I wouldn't advise more than one layer of X-ray vision of this sort, as it would get visually confusing, but in my opinion, the DFMA already shows the effect off nicely, so it's been shown that it can work.

An additional idea would be to have fluid layers --that is, magma and water-- be highly(or completely) transparent below the surface, so that a player can see to the bottom of a pool of water or magma at a glance.  Perhaps making the surface layer of a fluid normal(or perhaps 30% transparent.  It would be another Init value), while the underlying layers are all 90% transparent(another Init value) would produce a nice "haze" effect.

The idea here is to compress as much useful information into the screen as a player can make sense of, in a way that the player can make sense of it.


A couple of ideas for late-game challenge
Have Adamantine occur in nearly all tiles of the world, but restrict it to very deep underground, like under 2 or 3 layers of caverns, occasionally with a spire bubbling up like a magma pipe.  This makes it a challenge to get to, particularly owing to the new cavern system being implemented, but also reduces the desperation of players such as myself looking forward to the endgame challenges which it brings with it.

Actually, I would like to see this treatment for both Adamantine and Magma.  This would re-ignite one of the features of the 2D version, namely having Adamantine and Magma on nearly every map, while still making them challenging to get to unless you stumble upon a convenient pipe bubbling up through the strata.  I believe this would also make for a more realistic representation, as in the real world, there is a layer of magma under the ground at all times, but it's usually too deep to reach.  Digging deep is what Dwarves do best.

A special nod to semi/megabeasts
Megabeasts, to me, implies the creatures which are the world-creation legends.  Dragons the size of mountain ranges, and other things like that.  These are deities.  Deities shouldn't die but once in a thousand eons.  I propose toughening up Megabeasts to such levels, and after a certain point in worldgen, have them all look for deep caverns to go to sleep in.  If you embark on a square with a Megabeast sleeping in it, the Megabeast replaces the magma or adamantine usually found in the hidden depths, and is orders of magnitude more frightening than any horde of demons if awoken, but you would usually find it sleeping as part of the terrain itself.(This could be represented as stone which is impossible to dig out, but would be better represented once creature sizes are properly added, with the megabeast waking up if you try to mess around with it too much.)

Semimegabeasts would take the place of current Megabeasts, but they too should have lifecycles.  They should be allowed to reproduce only once every hundred or so years(with some variance, naturally), with fairly small litter sizes.  They should be fairly reclusive and highly territorial, so that if there are too many of them, they will force each other into the open and get killed until there are few enough to hide in caves for a while, mate, have offspring, and begin the cycle again.