Print

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

[TheCze]

DF got me in the first moment, but my attempts to convince friends all have failed. Most got scared away by the embark screen which is really confusing in the beginning. Shipping a graphic set with the game would be also nice but Mike Mayday already does a great job on that (and I usually send people the link to his page instead of bay12).

I think if the game would come with a pregenerated map and some dwarfs already embarked would help many people to just download the game and start playing.
Just add some more notes for the most important stuff like explaining (d) (b) and (q)  (maybe also (u) and (v) ) and give them a start direction like "build bedrooms for every dwarf".

[Caesar]

I gotta say, I was in the same boat as Amitabho a few years ago. I hated Halo, just because it was such a fad. EVERYBODY loved it, so I just decided I hated it. These days, I can play it, and even have fun, but I don't drool over it like so many people do. If somebody says, "lets play Halo!" I'm much more likely to say "sure," "okay," or "naw," than "yeah!" or "dood, I was just thinking of plastering your brainz with a sniperz rifel!"...

What I'm trying to say is, I think a lot of things are over-rated. More than the general public realizes. It's our job as individuals and responsible play-testers to sift through threads like this, determine what the general public is begging for, reason why or why not those features would be good, and come up with some kind of logical argument in favor for or against these features, or even for some other thing that would solve the problem in a creative way that sets this game apart from all the others.

SO... I'm not gonna sift through +98 pages of repeated posts here, just cuz that would be unnecessary and I've seen the trends of complaints already. I'll just give you my little bit on what small bit I've seen and let someone else handle the rest.

I'll start with Amitabho's post, as it caught my interest. First off, while technically ANSII is correct, most people will just say ASCII. if you say ANSII, you sound like an elitist turd who thinks he knows everything. So remember; it's ASCII, not ANSII in your PANTSI. Second, you're thirteen. You need to realize the world doesn't revolve around your opinion, and if someone finds it more enjoyable to look at a 6x6 pixel comical representation of a dorf than a simple colored smiley, then that's their choice, freedom, and right, and it in no way makes them more shallow than you, in and of itself. Their motives for doing so MIGHT, but you can't read their minds so don't judge them on that preference alone.

I'm 19. I like the mayday tileset. I also like to play stock nethack, without any graphical additives. Knowing those things alone, would you say I'm a shallow, Halo fanboy, who only cares about graphics? Would you still say that, if I told you I was about to join the Air Force, go Special Forces, and never even see a computer game for up to nine months at a time?

I think I've made my point.

Now, my opinion is that it should be *much* easier to configure df, from editing the init.txt, to adding graphics packs, to even upgrading to a newer version. I don't much care for having to splice a new version into an already configured older version, realize I accidentally overwrote my init.txt, forgot to replace the raws folder in my save folder, and after I fix those, low and behold my plump helmets look like trees! (still don't understand that one.)

As far as interface goes, I'd like to see consolidation of options like the [k], [t], [v], and [q] menus. I had trouble starting out when I'd loo[k] at a workshop and not be able to see what my moody dorf already had.

For tutorials, I think an easy fix would be to choose a safe biome, embark, spend a year or two digging out and setting things up for a basic fortress(maybe turn off migrants), load the place up with notes("this is your sleeping quarters, make sure you have enough rooms for all your dwarfs! use [q] to set up bedrooms like these!" or "see how I channeled out this reservoir for my well?" or "make sure you embark with this stuff. Its called 'lignite,' and you use it at your foundry to make coal, so you can make metal stuff"). then save it, and bundle it with the game. Add some stuff in the help files pointing to it, and presto, you've got a tutorial. Also, the help files should be reorganized. I think windows help might even be better than that thing right now, and that's saying something.

You just said pretty much anything I was about to say, with the only thing I am sure of that wouldn't be the same in my post being that I'm not about to join the army, and that I am fifteen, not nineteen.

One of the funniest persons that I tried introducing to Dwarf Fortress was my father.
He's always telling us about how he used to play pong and how he loved and still loves games like that.
But, when I pointed at my screen, my Mayday dwarfs running around doing what they do, he backed away as if scared; "That looks ugly!".

Afterwards especially his expression made me laugh.

[Draco18s]

You just said pretty much anything I was about to say, with the only thing I am sure of that wouldn't be the same in my post being that I'm not about to join the army, and that I am fifteen, not nineteen.

Man.  Just wait 10 years.  You'll find posts like this and go, "what an immature moron.  Wait.  That was me."

[silantrath]

heh, maybe I got carried away. I just don't like seeing people rip on other people just because of their preferences. That's how I was with Halo, and I feel kinda dumb about it.

And its the Air Force, not Army.

Please don't confuse the two.

I gotta say, I never had much trouble picking up DF. I was used to ASCII graphics from NetHack/ADOM, I find most rts games too simple/action based, and I knew full well that it would take some dedication and reading to learn an interface suitable for a game with so many features. Honestly, the hardest part is keeping track of my dwarfs' assigned jobs. If the [*u] menu could be switched between showing assigned jobs and most skilled jobs, or even both side by side, I wouldn't really have any problems. Maybe the [z] status screen could show assigned jobs+skill levels in those jobs+any notably high level skills (e.g. best glassmaker in this fort) that way you could open the [*u] menu, and rather than zooming to the [c]reature, then flipping between skills and jobs pages with several button presses each, not to mention remembering which dwarfs out of the 200 you've already looked at, you could just open the [*u]nit menu and hit [z], get all your info at a glance, then [space] back to the [*u]nit menu and keep going through the list. possibly even allow the player to turn jobs on/off from the [z] screen.

as a side, I'm glad to see so many young teens playing more mind-challenging games. I was homeschooled, but my local highschool has a ridiculous drop out rate(I think it was like 70% or so)... they diagnose every single white male with OCD just so they can get more money from the government, something about special needs costs. If all those kids learned the basics of DF they would breeze through school, and the world would have more competent record keepers/organizers as opposed to stark raving mad peasants.

edit: 'u' inside [] turns on underlining... changed all instances of that to [*u], hopefully the post makes more sense.

[huhu]

The military-related bugs turn me off about DF the most. I know it's a test version, but I can't help playing, and I die a little inside each time my fort goes to boom because of a crash. Another fort I played for four years without enabling any squads, and that has been the only method that worked so far. I've been trying to think of the latest DF as a 'demo preview version' of sorts... Arg.

[nil]

The military-related bugs turn me off about DF the most. I know it's a test version, but I can't help playing, and I die a little inside each time my fort goes to boom because of a crash. Another fort I played for four years without enabling any squads, and that has been the only method that worked so far. I've been trying to think of the latest DF as a 'demo preview version' of sorts... Arg.

People asked for a release as soon as possible and they that's what they got.  But I'm with you--I haven't even made a real attempt at a fortress yet, I'm waiting for a few bugfixes and the d17 merge.

[Nanban Jim]

More specifically, what problems did you have before learning the ropes of the game?  We figure we are losing 90% of the players because of the UI and other barriers, and that doesn’t even count the ones scared away by the ASCII graphics.  Now, this doesn’t mean we are about abandon the rest of the game to start the presentation arc.  It is just as important to have endless monster attacks from the underground, and challenging sieges. 

What do you think is scaring people away?  The building placement?  Designations?  The embark screen?  Or maybe its finding the right tile sets and setting them up.  We are hoping at some point to build easier commands and tutorials to help bring in more players.  We have to identify the main culprits first.  So what is frustrating you the most about Dwarf Fortress?

I just started playing 3 days ago. Let me start answering the question by positing a solution: Add to the distro a small saved game showing a basic fortress with the most necessary constructions for survival. In other words, a template I can work from. Failing that, a tutorial that does not assume I know how to do anything other than press exactly the keys I'm told. "Build a bed and place it" doesn't tell me squat. (I'll allow that it was fun to find out how to do that, but only because on that third embarking I'd had a string of successes figuring out how to do what the wiki tutorials were saying to do.)

So, what turns me off about DF? Lack of approachable documentation, be it Wiki, PDF, interactive like a saved game, or even a canonical set of YouTube videos. I understand it's very easy to become so familiar with a system that breaking it down into the basic steps is as difficult as figuring them out was. That's not the new player's problem.

So, would bundling a graphical tileset that doesn't have an anorexic font in it be helpful? Yeah, as much as I love MUXes and ADOM, it's nice to have at least Atari graphics. (Got to say, though, the use of ASCII graphics in this is nicely done and quite well thought out for all the variety of things it has to represent.)

Would fixing military stuff help make the game more approachable? Not in my experience. It's easy to avoid fights (or I've been insanely lucky).

Would basic descriptions of objects help? Sure, whether it's by pulling them off the wiki through a game-side client or clickable link in the game, in a manual, or as someone else said a Dwarfopedia...

Would starting off all 7 Dwarves with all jobs enabled help? Sure! Or, again, put this in documentation. Having to read between the lines in 3 different "tutorials" at the same time to figure this out is absurd.

So the final answer: A scripted tutorial, as has been suggested before, would really help. It needn't ruin the DF experience of learning by "funning" by giving everything away. Start with a default save game right after Embark, packaged with every distro. Show me how and where to build a sleeping area, carpenter's shop, mason's shop, kitchen, brewery (since these dumbass fucking alcoholic imbeciles Dwarfs can't just drink water)... just the basics. Maybe even one trap. Just enough to teach the new player how to use most of the menus and the basic concepts.

And FFS could you just add in a damn "dig the whole fucking staircase from here down one level" command? Honestly, having these dumbass fucking alcoholic imbeciles Dwarfs dig HALF A DAMN STAIRCASE and then having to dig the other half? You may think it's clever and logical. The rest of the world doesn't.

In closing, you don't have to change the core gameplay mechanic of exploratory problem solving. Stop hiding behind "Losing is fun!" and just say the point is to learn by trial and error. Then introduce us to the general ruleset of the universe by example. As it stands, the game has no learning curve, just a sheer cliff face to ascend. If you want to appeal to people beyond those who see a sixty storey wall of glass and think "cool I want to climb that!", you've got to work on that initial learning curve. If the endgame needs work, that's a much smaller hindrance to initial attraction.

PS: Playing as humans or elves with their own preferences would be cool too. But seriously. Half a staircase, are you fucking kidding me? 

[Cespinarve]

More specifically, what problems did you have before learning the ropes of the game?  We figure we are losing 90% of the players because of the UI and other barriers, and that doesn’t even count the ones scared away by the ASCII graphics.  Now, this doesn’t mean we are about abandon the rest of the game to start the presentation arc.  It is just as important to have endless monster attacks from the underground, and challenging sieges. 

What do you think is scaring people away?  The building placement?  Designations?  The embark screen?  Or maybe its finding the right tile sets and setting them up.  We are hoping at some point to build easier commands and tutorials to help bring in more players.  We have to identify the main culprits first.  So what is frustrating you the most about Dwarf Fortress?

I just started playing 3 days ago. Let me start answering the question by positing a solution: Add to the distro a small saved game showing a basic fortress with the most necessary constructions for survival. In other words, a template I can work from. Failing that, a tutorial that does not assume I know how to do anything other than press exactly the keys I'm told. "Build a bed and place it" doesn't tell me squat. (I'll allow that it was fun to find out how to do that, but only because on that third embarking I'd had a string of successes figuring out how to do what the wiki tutorials were saying to do.)

So, what turns me off about DF? Lack of approachable documentation, be it Wiki, PDF, interactive like a saved game, or even a canonical set of YouTube videos. I understand it's very easy to become so familiar with a system that breaking it down into the basic steps is as difficult as figuring them out was. That's not the new player's problem.

So, would bundling a graphical tileset that doesn't have an anorexic font in it be helpful? Yeah, as much as I love MUXes and ADOM, it's nice to have at least Atari graphics. (Got to say, though, the use of ASCII graphics in this is nicely done and quite well thought out for all the variety of things it has to represent.)

Would fixing military stuff help make the game more approachable? Not in my experience. It's easy to avoid fights (or I've been insanely lucky).

Would basic descriptions of objects help? Sure, whether it's by pulling them off the wiki through a game-side client or clickable link in the game, in a manual, or as someone else said a Dwarfopedia...

Would starting off all 7 Dwarves with all jobs enabled help? Sure! Or, again, put this in documentation. Having to read between the lines in 3 different "tutorials" at the same time to figure this out is absurd.

So the final answer: A scripted tutorial, as has been suggested before, would really help. It needn't ruin the DF experience of learning by "funning" by giving everything away. Start with a default save game right after Embark, packaged with every distro. Show me how and where to build a sleeping area, carpenter's shop, mason's shop, kitchen, brewery (since these dumbass fucking alcoholic imbeciles Dwarfs can't just drink water)... just the basics. Maybe even one trap. Just enough to teach the new player how to use most of the menus and the basic concepts.

And FFS could you just add in a damn "dig the whole fucking staircase from here down one level" command? Honestly, having these dumbass fucking alcoholic imbeciles Dwarfs dig HALF A DAMN STAIRCASE and then having to dig the other half? You may think it's clever and logical. The rest of the world doesn't.

In closing, you don't have to change the core gameplay mechanic of exploratory problem solving. Stop hiding behind "Losing is fun!" and just say the point is to learn by trial and error. Then introduce us to the general ruleset of the universe by example. As it stands, the game has no learning curve, just a sheer cliff face to ascend. If you want to appeal to people beyond those who see a sixty storey wall of glass and think "cool I want to climb that!", you've got to work on that initial learning curve. If the endgame needs work, that's a much smaller hindrance to initial attraction.

PS: Playing as humans or elves with their own preferences would be cool too. But seriously. Half a staircase, are you fucking kidding me? 

it wasn't until you mentioned it that I realized how much the staircases annoy me. Yeah. Or better yet, how about being able to designate on multiple Z levels. You know, select s down staircase, hit enter, bump down as many z-leves as you please, and then enter again. Simple

[Kay12]

As far as I remember, ANSII would be the default graphics as they are actually a modified ASCII set/go beyond ASCII.

DF uses Code Page 437 (CP437 for short) as the default graphics, to be precise.

To get the current version working, I'd need to tinker with several libraries. Normally I would bother, but I won't, since the current version has several bugs that I want fixed first. That's what's turning me off right now.

[Xenoc]

Is it just me that actually enjoyed the steep learning curve and trawling through the wiki? 

Some excellent points raised though - particularly the default military options currently being off rather than on, and the various selection menus needing coalescing.

The one picked up on this page, however, that really stands some extra looking at is the embark screen problem.  It is currently very difficult to understand to a new comer, and a simple key would help enormously.  A bit more explanation of what the three windows are would also be a bonus.  Even better would be a panel of 6 windows which gave you all the information you needed in one go, rather than having to tab-scroll through several pages, many of which are mostly displaying the same information. e.g.:

Top row
1. Regional overview
2. Local overview
3. Embark point selection (same as current default, i.e. vegetation, river channels etc)

Bottom row
4. Embark point elevation
5. Civilisations
6. Embark point summary data - rocktypes, river and volcano names etc

As far as gameplay goes there's a few things I might change:

Gather plants and cut down trees should be on by default. If you want to turn it off you can, but default to on.  As a new player entering the world it's one more thing you really shouldn't have to worry about.

If a job gets cancelled because it's lacking a barrel or something, send an order to the job management page.  That order has to be confirmed by you to go ahead, but if there's a lot of cancel spam it's easy to miss one.  If I go to the job management page later and I can see that barrels are being requested, I can simply activate the order. Furthermore, rather than a job being cancelled due to a missing material, it should be suspended, and reactivated once the requirement is fulfilled.  Saves endlessly going and turning workshops on and off for whatever reason.

The [escape] menu should have a help dialogue,  all it needs to do is open a browser window pointed at the wiki.  Another in-game link pointing at the forums would also be useful to the newcomer.

[Jiri Petru]

And FFS could you just add in a damn "dig the whole fucking staircase from here down one level" command? Honestly, having these dumbass fucking alcoholic imbeciles Dwarfs dig HALF A DAMN STAIRCASE and then having to dig the other half? You may think it's clever and logical. The rest of the world doesn't.

Is there even a single reason why stairs currently have two parts instead of just one? In other words, why not to have them the same beautifuly simple way as ramps?

OK, I know there's couple of reasons (to allow up/downs staircases, to allow pathing in all directions from the top level) but they're all technical and therefore can be changed or at least hidden. I don't think there's any gameplay reason to have stairs in two parts. And if you DO have them in two parts, there's no reason to designate both parts individually - a single designation could easily build the two-part staircases we have now without any internal change.

The way I see it, the options should be these:
- Dig up stairway
-----digs a complete stairway to the upper level
- Dig down stairway
-----digs a complete stairway to the lower level
- Dig up/down stairway (needs coming up with a clever solution, I'd suggest:)
-----if you designate just one square, it digs a complete stairway to both the upper and lower level... which currently is three parts (up stairs/up-down stairs/down stairs)... all of these in one designation
-----if you designate a longer vertical shaft of up/down staircased, the system is intelligent enough to build it correctly (eg. up stairs/up-down stairs/up-down stairs/up-down stairs/down stairs).


The current system feels it was designed to allow infinite up/down staircases, sacrificing simplicity of the simple ones in the process. Which, for me personally, feels like an exact opposite of what should have been done - have simple up or down staircases as thr default ones, and up/down as completely optional, more complicated ones(*). Not the other way around. And again we're talking meaningful defaults.

---

(*) Because infinite up/down staircases are stupid as hell. I mean... inuntuitive. Hard to imagine in real-life. Can someone explain me how is 3x3 shaft of up/down staircases supposed to look like? The fact that everyone uses such an alien, unrealistic thing just proves the system is badly designed (because the bad design encourages weird choices by making them optimal and most effective). If it was up to me, I would just get rid of them completely, and allow only the simple ones. If you wanted to have a staircase going both up and down, you would have to designate two stair tiles - an up staircase and a down staircase(**). Which may seem more complicated but is actually very intuitive and I bet no beginner would feel confused for a single second.

EDIT:
(**) Explanation: this sounds confusing. I meant, designation two one-part staircases next to each other on the same level, and they would automatically create access on both the upper and the lower level, as suggested. By designating two squares you would get (top view):

Upper level: . . . > . . .
Your level:    . . .< > . .
Lower level:  .  . . .< . .

[Kay12]

I think stairs are too... easy, in any case. Well, many wouldn't throw away their 100Z vertical shafts, but I think ramps are a better balanced gameplay element.

[Jiri Petru]

Thinking of it...
...I guess even now you could make a macro that creates the whole staircase in a single click, right? While macros aren't the ideal solution (this should be default in the game-menu, not hidden under macros), they just show it's easily possible to designate multiple squares in a single click.

[Psieye]

Tricky thing is, all posts in this thread are from players who overcame the hurdles and grasped Dwarf Fortress. The players you want to reach out to will have a clearer picture of what the hurdles actually are because to some of us they didn't even count as obstacles. Sure, ASCII graphics (solve with tileset) and user interface are big hurdles but so too is information overload. I skimmed through a few pages of this thread and noted embark location & preparation being a big hurdle of information overload. That part can at least be solved with tutorials and ready-to-play forts that have already been embarked for newbies. Those tutorials can also guide newbies on what they should do first.

But there's still a source of information overload not dealt with: the sheer level of detail. The average layman will not have a clue what the difference is between sedimentary and igneous rock, never mind "this here's Schist, that's Shale over there and we're standing on Diorite. We want Talc for these mechanisms and dolomite for steel production". So one idea I have is for that pre-generated already-embarked tutorial to have simplified raws just to ease players in even more. I dunno if this is unnecessary dumbing down or whether we want to reach out to people who need the game to be very dumbed down. I've got scholar's blood in me so sitting down and reading the wiki over a few days, memorising all sorts of trivia (values of gems) and experimenting with whatever isn't clear was second nature to me when I started. DF is simpler to understand than the stuff I work with in RL.

[Jimmy]

I don't think that level of effort is needed. Perhaps I'm spoiled by the fact that I started in 2D when everything was simpler, but this game's never going to be a mass hit. Hell, it's so niche it's amazing Toady makes as much as he does from working on it. The people who enjoy this game are used to complexity. They have problem solving minds that are entertained by challenges and find experimenting fun. They're here for the challenge. Dumbing it down might work for some, but the core player doesn't need that.