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[Wang Commander]

The main thing that turns me off about this game is the slowdown from unoptimized pathfinding.

[zwei]

And worst thing? If you designate it different spot, list is in different order. It is guarantted to change order randomly. You have to find whatever you want to use every single time.

It is not random; the list is made in order of increasing distance to the location of the task you are assigning. So if you don't care what material it is, you can just pick from the top of the list.

Unfortunately most players do care...

I knw it's a workaround, but if you know what resource you want to work with, place a stockpile nearby and limit the contents to only that type.  Forbid it from the "main" stockpiles and let the extra dwarfs ferry the goods to where they are needed.  I tend to do the same thing for workshops.  I make two rooms.  One for the workshop and another for the resources for that shop.  Sometimes I get creative and make the storage room surround the workshop which can also help with the noise factor.

Yes, it means having people that can shuffle resources around, but your builders don't have far to go and can keep busy.

...

Honestly, that's barely even a "workaround". Keeping materials where they're likely to be used often is pretty much a standard thing you should do whenever possible. In real life, it's kind of silly if the pantry is on the other end of the house from the kitchen, or if you keep your clothes in an armoire in the basement instead of your room.

It is different from worshops: Workshop product/raw material stockpiles are going to be static and are worth it to set up: tinker with it once, it is go for rest of fortress lifespan.

If you set up nearby stockpile for each construction you have to select item type (sometimes stockpiles like bar/block one do not have enough controll to set up specific material), possibly set up 'take' from other stockpile. Then wait for hauling job, then you just designate your construction and destroy stockpiles And if you want to build somewhere else, repeat. That is hardly convenient.

I used to make it that way, but waiting for stockpile to fill is not really that good. You could use 1x1 stockpile to just get your chosen material to top (again, not always possible), but then overhead of setting it up is ... awfull.

[Deon]

It belongs more to a "DF mode discussion", but I agree. This is a good way to go. And a few more clicks are OK considering we're nowhere close to an Interface Arc. Burrows will help a lot too.

[Karnewarrior]

Let me put my newest unhappieness in a storylike format.

Urist McFisherman stands by a tiny river. he is dangling his beard in the water, pulling out hundreds upon hundreds of turtles. all of the sudden, the water begins to bubble, and a mass of medium sized fish drag McFisherman into the water, where he is torn apart. Karnewarrior McGod looks on as the last source of food for his fortress is torn apart by "benign" fish.

On a happier note, I havn't struck microcline in a month!

[Iban]

We have tried changing the Carp to be less aggressive and deadly, but the game's hardcode has taken a life of its own and will rewrite the RAW files to include them once again. Further attempts result in the game sending you threatening letters in the mail.

[Rykah]

I know this thread is old but other people seem to be posting here so...

Let me start by saying I have only been really playing about a week. I have been trying to get into this game for about a year because everything I read about it is awesome but I was so confused when starting out I couldn't get the hang of it and just didn't put the effort in. After doing a bit more searching I found a tile set that made everything easier to understand, but I still didn't know what to do or how to use the controls properly. I looked at the wiki which was helpful but it involved a lot of effort on my part which a lot of people are not willing to put in when starting a game. Then I found captainducks  youtube tutorials... they were amazingly helpful. I haven't finished them but I use them as a reference and figured out how to go ahead on my own a bit from the first 10 or so.

What I suggest as a solution to some of your problems is maybe directing players to popular tilesets and in depth tutorials at the start. As far as interface goes, you have such a complex game it isn't easy to make the interface more user friendly. I think if people just started out with the right amount of help they would bend to the harder things to pick up on.
Oh and you should totally let me make you a website... pretty websites always draw in the gaming crowd! :]

[Zalminen]

This is actually the second time i've started playing DF.

The first time was maybe two years ago, don't remember exactly. I found the whole game a bit confusing then, failed miserably in creating a well and ended up playing something else and forgot about DF soon.

A month ago I ended up reading the Boatmurdered saga and decided to give the game a new go.
And this time i'm pretty much hooked.
I've read the tutorials, most of the other stuff on the wiki and found the facepalm thread more than helpful 

I don't mind the ASCII too much as I've played nethack but using a tileset does make the whole game a lot more clear.

Currently my biggest gripes with the game are:

• Hard to create what I want - I need to fiddle with custom stockpiles, locked doors etc. to make sure the mason uses the correct type of stone, jewelers encrust the right stuff and so on.
• All the info is too widely distributed. I'm constantly having to think whether I should start from v, u or m to check something about a single dwarf or k,q or t to check on material stuff. Why can't there be a single 'look' key with submenus for the various types of info?
• Wiki structure - Even when I know exactly what page i'm looking for, it often takes a while to find it.

Still, none of these are dealbreakers for me and i'm more than willing to wait, especially having read the future development plans.

[James.Denholm]

• Hard to create what I want - I need to fiddle with custom stockpiles, locked doors etc. to make sure the mason uses the correct type of stone, jewelers encrust the right stuff and so on.

I think Toady said something about this in one of the DF Talks, something about being able to "commission" things. Sadly, I don't remember which one it was, but it was during the questions. I think he used the example that the player should be able to commission a bunch of goblets and have an engraver engrave the king's face on them or something. And then there was a little bit of a discussion of the engraver involved in the process becoming unhappy after a while of the constant repetition, due to him not being able to express himself or anything. This won't be in the next version, certainly, but I'm expecting this to be in before the 1.0 release.

So, don't be too worried. Someday, we'll be able to have our graveyards filled with granite statues of each individual dwarf, each one with rubies in place of their eyes.

[Fikes]

I spent 20 minutes typing out a point by point response, but it kind of went all over the place and sucked in general so I'll respond to this:

Of course, they also might be complaining about development time they think is being "wasted", but I'll say this: If it weren't for the amount of detail this game has in it already, it wouldn't have the kind of dedicated fanbase that it does. The most popular stories, Let's Plays, etc. that have happened probably never would have, and one of its most compelling and important marketing hooks would be vacant.

#1 If DF was less complicated, it could have the same number of fans (I would bet more), they just might be different people. Battle for Wesnoth, Mount and Blade, Spelunky, ect are all indy games, with pretty low levels of detail (and pretty bad graphics). It would also have a hell of a lot more releases

#2 Boatmurdered happened in 2D DF. In 2D you always had magma, you always had HFS, you always had a river, you always had the makings for steel (I hope all that is accurate). 2D was no where near the complex beast that the current version is and way way way way way less complicated than the next version, yet it is the most famous story of DF.

I am not saying the systems aren't awesome, I am just saying they are far more complicated than they need to be, far more "realistic". I am not going to understand when my legendary armor smith gets poisoned by some vermin and dies. But I am going to get very angry and probably turn the game off for a while.

And I am going to get really tired of going through 4 pages of stone just to find Microcline because I want the statue to have blue shoes.

[James.Denholm]

And I am going to get really tired of going through 4 pages of stone just to find Microcline because I want the statue to have blue shoes.

Wait. Let me get this strait: You don't want complicated, but you want to specify not only a statue of a dwarf, but a multi-coloured statue, and the ability to specify which colour goes where?

[Noble Digger]

I see what you're getting at, Fikes. A lot more time and understanding of the game must be invested before you can even get a decent fort started. In 2D, you would indeed always have an appropriate, homogenous site with everything. The current 3D version certainly is more complicated and difficult to start out, but offers much more diversity and possibility and takes the game from the "Oregon Trail" feel it used to have into more of a "Simcity" feel where you control the entire environment... It has "sacrificed" "simplicity" as you say, but as I say, it has "acquired" "complexity" which enriches its depth and challenge and possibilities. Beyond a certain number of years invested playing 2D DF, and you can look at a fort like Copperblazes to prove this, your skill rises to a point where making any possible 2D fort is only slightly more diffcult than doing the same image in MSPaint (albeit, time investment VASTLY differs in the former case!). I think for some of the older guys, and myself included, 2D really couldn't be the dead-end for Dwarf Fortress.

What we need next is a much more consistent underground such that finding water and magma are more reliably located, and to my knowledge the next release has these things. 2 other things valuable in 2D are also returning: endless attacks from underground caverns, water sources, magma, and the map edges, and fuckers like the gremlin and the roaming megabeast. 3D df runs out of steam pretty quickly and devolves into more of a "make whatever you want forever" state cuz you can't really lose beyond a certain point barring a few major events, and in this case your map is BORING.

I think people may start losing again soon that can make any map interesting, right?

To me, the grammar rules necessary to get statue customization working to sufficient depth for everyone to be happy would take a lot of time to develop, code, and test. That seems like high-hanging fruit to me when we're closer than we've ever been to sending armies out to attack other civs... (That's in dev_next after this release) Which is a much more interesting and interactive gameplay element than having a huge clunky workshop ui for adding the line "Its shoes are made of microcline" to the text description of a statue. :|

[Durin]

One problem I have with this game, and to a certain extent the fans, is that it is not realistic.  Water takes literally days to drain down a hallway.  That is a crapton of processor cycles to be wasting on something that does not work.

I love the details.  The game can have tons of details.  The memory and processor load on the details is minimal.  The pathing and sim portions are the parts that need an overhaul, and someone needs into this thing that understands how to code for multi-core processors as well, assuming that is not already done for next release.

Just repeat after me... it's not realistic water flow.  It's not realistic water flow.  It's not realistic water flow. 

I wish I knew enough to be able to tell you how to go about fixing it, but I don't.  I just know the current process is not working and is a processor killer to boot. 

[MrWiggles]

Spoiler: Fikes Post (click to show/hide)

I spent 20 minutes typing out a point by point response, but it kind of went all over the place and sucked in general so I'll respond to this:

Of course, they also might be complaining about development time they think is being "wasted", but I'll say this: If it weren't for the amount of detail this game has in it already, it wouldn't have the kind of dedicated fanbase that it does. The most popular stories, Let's Plays, etc. that have happened probably never would have, and one of its most compelling and important marketing hooks would be vacant.

#1 If DF was less complicated, it could have the same number of fans (I would bet more), they just might be different people. Battle for Wesnoth, Mount and Blade, Spelunky, ect are all indy games, with pretty low levels of detail (and pretty bad graphics). It would also have a hell of a lot more releases

#2 Boatmurdered happened in 2D DF. In 2D you always had magma, you always had HFS, you always had a river, you always had the makings for steel (I hope all that is accurate). 2D was no where near the complex beast that the current version is and way way way way way less complicated than the next version, yet it is the most famous story of DF.

I am not saying the systems aren't awesome, I am just saying they are far more complicated than they need to be, far more "realistic". I am not going to understand when my legendary armor smith gets poisoned by some vermin and dies. But I am going to get very angry and probably turn the game off for a while.

And I am going to get really tired of going through 4 pages of stone just to find Microcline because I want the statue to have blue shoes.

#1 Less detail, and less complication wouldn't be DF, it would be some other fantasy game. A good deal of fun comes from the details of DF that it has, the issue in understanding them, the triumph of mastering them.

#2 G-Flex didn't bring up Boatmurder, and there are plethora of game play stories that are not boatmurder that have been on the current more complicated  3d version. I dont see this as a rebuttal. Yes, it is the most well known, even then DF was a rather complicated game and the events that happen Boatmurder arose due to DF complexity.

A lot of the complication could be managed better with a better ability to display the information and a rebalance of marco and micro management. Its a good thing the game is in active devilment, so these issue can be addressed at later time.

Dwarf Fortress is a cool game because of the detail, because of the what it portray. There are many games that have several game play that DF, but they dont have it it combined as DF does nor the level of details.

Your turn off of DF is DF.

The game is with issues, its not perfect and due to itself, may never be, but it suppose to be a detailed fantasy world generator. The more details in the more that can be done with it. No, we dont need to know that those statues are of dwarfs spiked with microline, we dont need to know that the engraving is of a dwarf surrounded by goblins and the goblin is striking down the dwarf. We dont need to know that the oak bed is well made and banded in gold. You're right, we don't. We don't need to make make plumbing systems for wells or irrigation systems for farms. We need to know that the goblin left soak is of poor quality.

The assertion that less detail would be better, is nearly insulting to Toady, who seems to be a fairly capable game designer. If he so wanted to, he seems to be perfectly capable of making a game that a larger audience would play and makes DF in the way he does knowing that it will have a niche audience.

All the mountain of detail, and options the none restrictiveness of its implementation is what makes Slave to Armok: God of Blood II: Dwarf Fortress, Slave to Armok: God of Blood II: Dwarf Fortress.

[zwei]

And I am going to get really tired of going through 4 pages of stone just to find Microcline because I want the statue to have blue shoes.

Wait. Let me get this strait: You don't want complicated, but you want to specify not only a statue of a dwarf, but a multi-coloured statue, and the ability to specify which colour goes where?

Ya, why not? I mean, there is not reason why such selection has to be complicated.

'u'-'m' menu allows 'find as you type' interface. It holds thousands of orders, but I can always find the one i want in few seconds, just start typing part of order name ...

Majority of interface calls for such simple filter option.

And once you filter on string, little effort can be expended to make filter more awesome.

Code: [Select]

select stone from stockpile where material=microlite

Code: [Select]

forbid wood from ground where material!=oak and distance> 200

Code: [Select]

melt armor where size=narrow

[MrWiggles]

Yea, the interface could use a lift, most defiantly, we should all totally vote for that when the eternal suggestion gets whip and started over.

As it it might be hard right now to topple the current top ten.  Interface is like number 45 or so.