Print

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

[G-Flex]

The only thing that got me was the ASCII graphics; i'm fine with low graphic games, but i need something to work off. There's plenty of graphic sets though; so that problem is solved for me.

To me, there's still a problem. DF could do a lot more with graphics.

For instance, it needn't be restricted to 16 colors, but that goes without saying.

I like what IVAN does with roguelike-style graphics. Transparency, multiple objects per tile, graphical overlay (so you can SEE the helm on your had), etc. Eventually, it would be nice if DF had that kind of thing, although I can understand it being very low-priority considering all the content that needs to go in.

[bombcar]

Here's an actual suggestion that could be used to make life easier for new players and allow fun challenges for existing ones.

Support simple script-based things, like this:

Code: [Select]

DISPLAY "Press [d]esignation [d]ig and dig a hole in the mountainside"
WAITFOR HOLE SIZE 10
DISPLAY "Press [b]uilding [w]orkshop [m]ason and build one - you may need to dig more"
WAITFOR MASON

And so on. Such a language could be used to make simple interactive tutorials, but also be used to make "scenarios" like the original SimCity had.

[tourettedog]

I think I've made a good case already for how the game is moving in a direction far more complicated than that, and why that's a good thing.

I think you've restated the conventional wisdom on the part of all the people who like the text-based facial feature simulation that you have faith that this will all converge into something that has deep and interesting ramifications on gameplay.  My point is that huge amounts of detail are being added at an extremely intricate level that -- assuming it can all be integrated -- may still not end up having a noticeable impact on gameplay. 

Even if we do have it impact gameplay, I'd rather not dig through four levels of keypresses to finally figure out that -- for instance -- the reason I'm getting bad deals from the caravan is that my broker is hideously deformed.  That would be cool exactly once: the first time I realized that that was what was going on.  Then it would quickly become annoying to have to sort through all my dwarfs to find a good-looking broker from that point forward.  I realize that may be right up some people's alley -- and bully for you if it is, I don't get the fascination, but if it's your thing then great -- but fact remains, it's a turn off for me.

You're committing the exact same fallacy that tourrettedog is. You're assuming the the "fluff" has no gameplay relevance due to short-sightedness. You have to keep in mind the kind of gameplay it's going to make possible in the near future.

Could we leave the "shortsighted" thing out of it?  We're raising practical, immediate concerns that respond to the question "what turns you off about DF?"  I imagine anyone reading this forum has, at some point, read the dev pages and knows what Toady has planned.  Acting like you're transmitting some sort of revelation when you write "Oh, this will all pull together into a glorious confluence" misses the point that a) we know that that's the plan, and b) right now, today, what's turning us off about DF is the fact that there are major gameplay issues that are being 90% ignored while we get fine-tuned text-based beard growth hidden away under four keypresses.

[change name please]

I think the problem we are facing here is not unlike that Will Wright suffered while Spore was in the works...and we all know how that turned out.

There are some here who are literally asking for a dumbing down of the game...I have said this before, and I will repeat: DF is all about pointless details. Take this from it, and we will have a Dungeon Keeper with worst graphics and an anemic nethack.

Is this some kind of troll?  Are you trying to make me scream?  The reason Spore was so bad was not a lack of pages of text describing a creature's physical features and religion and personality, it was because of a lack of challenging and compelling gameplay, as well as a dearth of meaningful player interactions.  I am asking for this gameplay and this idea of player agency.  If you'll read my posts with an open mind, you might discover that "obtuse and obscure" is not the same as "intelligent".  It's hard to say that Dwarf Fortress is "all about pointless details" when none of these details contribute directly to the player's experience and, historically, the game did not provide quite so many "details" a year or two or three ago.

God, do you remember how long we went with dwarves that would willfully pick up & wear burning items?  How about even now how dragons will burn themselves to death on their own flames?  "All about the details" indeed.

[Neruz]

God, do you remember how long we went with dwarves that would willfully pick up & wear burning items?  How about even now how dragons will burn themselves to death on their own flames?  "All about the details" indeed.

Features, not bugs. The difference being that these events are hilarious.


I have two friends who started playing DF entirely because of things like this.

[G-Flex]

I think I've made a good case already for how the game is moving in a direction far more complicated than that, and why that's a good thing.

I think you've restated the conventional wisdom on the part of all the people who like the text-based facial feature simulation that you have faith that this will all converge into something that has deep and interesting ramifications on gameplay.  My point is that huge amounts of detail are being added at an extremely intricate level that -- assuming it can all be integrated -- may still not end up having a noticeable impact on gameplay. 

Look, now you're just intentionally misrepresenting my argument. Please don't do that.

I've already said how the new body systems and such can have an impact on gameplay. Creatures' bodies will respond realistically to combat, material/part choice for things will make sense, and health care/injury considerations will make more sense as well. Things like facial features are only a very, very small part of it. Please at least understand that before you start saying this stuff.

Even if we do have it impact gameplay, I'd rather not dig through four levels of keypresses to finally figure out that -- for instance -- the reason I'm getting bad deals from the caravan is that my broker is hideously deformed.  That would be cool exactly once: the first time I realized that that was what was going on.  Then it would quickly become annoying to have to sort through all my dwarfs to find a good-looking broker from that point forward.

Of course. I definitely agree that things that seriously affect gameplay need to be put at the forefront of the information that's displayed to the player. Nobody's going to disagree with that.

You're committing the exact same fallacy that tourrettedog is. You're assuming the the "fluff" has no gameplay relevance due to short-sightedness. You have to keep in mind the kind of gameplay it's going to make possible in the near future.

Could we leave the "shortsighted" thing out of it?  We're raising practical, immediate concerns that respond to the question "what turns you off about DF?"  I imagine anyone reading this forum has, at some point, read the dev pages and knows what Toady has planned.  Acting like you're transmitting some sort of revelation when you write "Oh, this will all pull together into a glorious confluence" misses the point that a) we know that that's the plan, and b) right now, today, what's turning us off about DF is the fact that there are major gameplay issues that are being 90% ignored while we get fine-tuned text-based beard growth hidden away under four keypresses.

The major gameplay issues are only being "ignored" because the development paradigm of DF simply doesn't allow Toady to jump around like an idiot doing a hack-job patching up every single system the game has. If he did that, he'd be up the creek NEXT year when he has to do those systems properly.

And thanks again, with the "fine-tuned text-based beard growth" you again find the most insignificant example of what I'm talking about and using that as the basis of your argument.


Look, I understand that it's annoying that a lot of irritating (and sometimes nearly game-breaking) things about DF stand while other things continue to get updated. I'm just trying to make the case that, for the game to be developed in any reasonable fashion, a lot of this is bound to happen. These annoyances about the game will go away slowly because the systems which RESULT in them take so long to work on.

[Capntastic]

Yeah.   If Spore generated huge scores of text for your race's culture, it would still be a terrible game.   Those aren't 'details' so much as, again, 'mad libs'.   The lineages and hair colors, etc, as they are now, are effected very little by the player's decisions hardly at all, and they in turn effect the player's choices as they play the game even less.

Edit: 

Features, not bugs. The difference being that these events are hilarious.

No.   They are things that are clearly not working as intended, and while funny in an ironic sort of way, they're pretty much the opposite of the realistic cause and effect illustrated by the power goals, etc.

[The Mad Engineer]

I'm worried that, as the AI gets improved, there won't be as many hilarious in-jokes and stories.

Case in point:  Elephant.

We will miss your glorious rampages 

[Guy Montag]

Well I might as well interject my opinion here.

Graphics/interface I don't give a shit about. Once you learn it, you learn it, its not big deal for me. If you don't know what that symbol means, push the "k" key, drag the cursor over the tile, and drag your eyes over the text on the right.

One thing I'd like is the .int file be accessible from the DF menu like the key bindings are. That way you can change the settings without killing DF, opening the file and manually typing in what you want, and restarting. Thats just a minor suggestion of mine.

What turns me off is a lack of incentive for anything you do in DF. A big part of the game is amassing wealth, but to what ends? You can buy everything you need from a trader's caravan with a single decent stonecrafter making mugs.

Mature fortresses get boring, and there isn't a reward system for the "progress" you do besides your own satisfaction, besides making tons of neat shit for your adventurer to wear/ throw at people once you abandon.

Also, and maybe most importantly, the FPS killers. Pathfinding, Flows, temperature and weather. They take up WAY too much CPU power and they are a HUGE part of the game. All these things need to be optimized or something. Yeah, I'm aware you can turn them off, but you should'nt have to. Something as simple as "magma burns the kitten, its raining outside" should be able to be modeled without making my computer melt.

I realize the game is an alpha, and there is tons of awesome stuff on the way, and some of my complaints (15 years into my fort, bored) will be fixed with new content.

But something has to be done to improve the strain temperature, pathfinding, weather and flows put on a CPU. optimizing the code or, instead of EVERYTHING generating heat, which is neat, simulating body heat and all, but its ultimately useless because it doesn't effect anything at all, and eats up CPU cycles for nothing.

Otherwise, I don't have much to complain about, really.

[Gertack]

1. Release early, release often.

You often say that donations are better in release months.  People like releases.  Is there a compelling reason there cannot be a Dwarf Fortress release when the underground features are finalized?  Why couldn't there have been one before that section of work started? Especially 7 months since the last release there should be another release before the save compatibility is broken.  Is the gain of not releasing sufficient?

2. Include a few community graphics packs in the official download.

The largest problem I had with the game when starting was figuring out what was what. I almost immediately switched to the Mayday graphics pack and have not stopped since.

Keep the official graphics as ASCII, but also provide a popular selection of other graphics packs in the official release.  There should also be an in-game way to switch between these sets so people have easy access to that.

3. The lag monster, as someone in the thread termed it.

I'm not talking about multi-threading.  Once your fortress reaches a certain size in dwarves or items the frame-rate takes a nose dive.  I have a 1x1 fortress with 128 dwarves running at 7 FPS on an Athlon 64 X2 4200 and it even has a magma pipe in the center taking up most of the space.  Algorithms that work great with 10 dwarves in the beginning break down horribly later.

Let us supply game saves that you can profile to find the spots making even the most powerful computers crawl.  This isn't a total optimization of the game but finding and eliminating the top 2 or 3 worst abuses of time to give us a little relief. (Ever tried viewing "stones" in the Stocks screen with 238,000 of them? Or even waiting 10 minutes for "Cleaning game objects" with that many?)

4. Tasking

I once had two doors that refused to budge from the ground in my fortress.  It took me weeks to realize that the doors wouldn't move (or dump) because they were tasked for building but it was suspended because some dwarf was walking through the door square when another dwarf tried to hang the door.  In fact, there's no way to know how many things are currently suspended except by remembering what you have tried to do and noticing.  The announcement message is nice, except that you can miss it or forget, plus the message doesn't give any hint as to where the building was suspended so you have to go figure out which one.  Even a blinking red background on the items tasked and the building spot suspended would help some, especially if the item tasked could Zoom to the building spot.  Also, tasked items should be allowed to be moved for other buildings on that spot, otherwise that square is off-limits for any future building until the other one finishes.

5. Jobs

Dwarf Manager is essential.  Toady may not want to be subject to third party needs or breaking essential tools but it is already too late for me due to the job interface.

6. Stockpiles

I wish there was a Stockpile Manager too, but alas.  Ever tried to figure out how many of your stockpiles accept armor? Or how many squares of stockpile are left for weapons? Or how many plump helmets are decaying because you're out of stockpile space?  Ever needed to disable seeds from all stockpiles except the current one?  Ever had to increase the size of a custom (not the custom template) stockpile and be faced with either wiping it and recreating or trying to duplicate the settings in a tiny adjacent stockpile?

7. Trading

I dread the trade depot.  Once your fortress gets larger you're stuck with 100 times <down><enter> or using a third party utility like AutoHotkey.  The categories are insufficient so things like prepared food and mechanisms can only be found via the Search mechanism, which re-filters (and thus lags) on every keystroke instead of waiting until I hit Enter or pause typing.  Having a mandate knocks out entire bins of goods by default even if only a single item in the bin is forbidden, so turning off culling is essential.

The trade depot move goods screen should use a screen similar to building weapon traps. Key differences would be the items are not sorted by distance, but instead should be sorted by category, then item type then item value. This would be similar to how the actual trade screen apppears, although it isn't quite as neatly sorted. We could mark goods to go to the trade depot screen by hitting + a few times, each time it picking the nearest of that type ("* dolomite grate" or "-=*=- dolomite grate" being separate types, as well as from "- dolomite grate"), or with > letting us increase by 10 items, or < reduce by 10 items, or shift+enter to mark all of that type. Bins should be transparent and not traded to the merchants since we rarely wish to rid ourselves of actual containers.

8. Building materials

Almost always I want to use a specific stone (or block) type when I'm building something.  Almost always I have to hunt through 5 to 8 pages of materials to find the one I want because they're sorted by distance rather than alphabetically.

On a related note, I'd really, really like to be able to pick a specific rock to make crafts and buildings out of, an eternal suggestion.  If I'm trying to make my bridge out of pure dolomite there's no way I can reliably ensure only dolomite blocks are used, especially if I have active mining going on and thus can't even mass-forbid everything else.

9. Job Manager

Not being able to designate more than 30 of any item or clone an existing request for more of the same item is a real pain.  As it stands if you want to collect a lot of sand, without repeat, then you have to repeat the item search multiple times to make a bunch of 30-item jobs.

10. Replace liaisons

It is really tough on trading to lose a liaison because you can no longer request any specific needs.  Also a pain to lose a liaison when you become a Mountainhome -- you should be able to make requests still, with it presented as your requests of the lesser forts to provide to the home.

10. Running out of seeds

I once accidentally cooked all my plump helmets because I didn't have enough barrels to brew anymore and  I didn't have any seeds until the next dwarven caravan arrived.  If I had been a Mountainhome then I would've been in real trouble.  Ideally I could set an absolute floor of seeds that must never be cooked/planted/etc. just in case I do lose all the other seeds. At that point I'd drop the limit to let the reserve be used to restart the process.

11. Running out of wildlife

Really makes fishing and hunting not worth it because it cannot last for more than a few seasons.  That cuts out a lot of jobs and activities that would otherwise be considered staples of civilization.

12. Wrestlers disrobing each other and then unable to train because of holding armor

Frustrating for litter and productivity.

13. Nobles

Dwarf Manager eliminated my burning hatred for their non-working, space-wasting, useful-dwarf-killing sacks of flesh since I give them hauling jobs now.

14. Dwarves fleeing into enemies

When you are faced with an enemy in front of you and the fort behind you, do not run straight ahead!  Or into more enemies to the side!  This was especially bad in my 1x1 fort as all the dwarves in the above ground tower would freak out and run out of the building into the unprotected grass instead of heading down the same steps into the fortress proper.

15. Interface

Many people have commented on this so it is redundant.  I didn't even know about 'T' for the longest time.  When using the unit list, it needs to return to the unit list at the dwarf you viewed when you hit space on that dwarf.  Preferably also divide the unit list into separate categories to avoid carpal tunnel page down activity, such as: Dwarves, Animals, Friendly, Wildlife, Hostile, Deceased.


... that should do for now.

[Footkerchief]

1. Release early, release often.

You often say that donations are better in release months.  People like releases.  Is there a compelling reason there cannot be a Dwarf Fortress release when the underground features are finalized?  Why couldn't there have been one before that section of work started? Especially 7 months since the last release there should be another release before the save compatibility is broken.  Is the gain of not releasing sufficient?

In this particular case, an early release won't be possible because there's gutted code all over the place from Toady's first pass at the beginning of this release cycle.  But yeah, in general it would be nice if new features got released as they were implemented, although it'll be cool when this version finally does get released and there's a massive amount of new stuff everywhere.

[Neruz]

A faster release cycle would definitely be an improvement.

[codezero]

I personally think official tutorials are a big mistake, it will ruin all the fun of finding out what such and such a workshop is and actually end up turning away new people. The thought process will become, well i need a still to produce beer and a masons to produce trade goods at the start of the game because the tutorials told me, rather than, I wonder what this shop does, I'll build it and see!

The best thing to do IMO is just to expand the help already in the game, it's quite old. And as I mentioned link it in to the game screens.

And a graphics pack might lure more people into actually downloading it instead of dismissing it as ASCII trash. (As there'll be better screenshots floating around)

One of the greatest things of getting a new game is exploring it, don't sacrafice that for a marketing gimmick. A far better marketing approach would be putting it on linux repos, those guys are strapped for games and it would be like the next nethack for 'em. Eternal followers.

[The13thRonin]

I agree with the posters who say things get too easy once you know what you're doing. I used to play a lot but I've retreated into mainly modding (at the moment creating a HUGE mod to improve base game-play with more variance) but I can't bring myself to build another fortress myself. Traps just dispose of enemies too easily (I always tried not to build them) and nothing really explosive happens unless you hit HFS. The game is GREAT but I'd like it much better if it was still a struggle to survive for us old players  . If crops failed (bad harvests) and enemy attacks were more frequent and natural disasters, perhaps even proper Dwarven crime and stuff like that I'd get drawn back into it.

If you're worried about drowning the new players you could perhaps include options in the INIT file to turn these functions on and off much like weather and cave-ins?

[Rockphed]

Even if we do have it impact gameplay, I'd rather not dig through four levels of keypresses to finally figure out that -- for instance -- the reason I'm getting bad deals from the caravan is that my broker is hideously deformed.  That would be cool exactly once: the first time I realized that that was what was going on.  Then it would quickly become annoying to have to sort through all my dwarfs to find a good-looking broker from that point forward.  I realize that may be right up some people's alley -- and bully for you if it is, I don't get the fascination, but if it's your thing then great -- but fact remains, it's a turn off for me.

But what if the elves, in their fascination with your freakdwarf give you incredibly good deals on some diverse and useful animals?  Or, even more bizarre, offer to trade you several useful animals for your hideously deformed dwarf?  Not saying that they would, but what if?

Also, in response to Gertack's #13, I have my current batch of nobles trained to clean my traps.  Nobles also cage creatures and fill ponds.

Back to Three Toe's original question:

The biggest obstacle I had when starting to play was that I couldn't figure out how to go up and down Z levels.  After that was that I couldn't figure out how to farm so my people kept starving.  I once got a dungeon master before I figured out how to farm.  I miss that fort.