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[Granite26]

I don't see how 'limiting a beginner's choices' translates into 'limiting everyone's choices'.

I thought that Starcraft's way of "limiting choices" consisted of a tech-tree, which not only limits everyone but is completely ridiculous in its own right.

As to your (and Granite's) suggestion of "tutorial" save games, I think http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/ sort of takes care of that business without giving more work to the devs.

It would need to be distributed with the executable to really work.

As far as StarCraft goes... DF has a tech tree too.  It's just largely invalidated by the fact that you start with several of the techs by default.  In the first few levels of the tutorial single player campaign, you can't go all the way up the tech tree.  Most of your units are unavailable in the first few missions, so your options are limited to fewer 'wrong' choices.

[assimilateur]

By "tech-tree" I meant the system where you need to "research" stuff on the fly, during a mission. By that definition of a tech-tree, DF doesn't have one, I'm happy to say.

[Tormy]

The game, even with the wiki, is really hard to get into.  I found myself unsure of what I was supposed to do or how to interact with the interface.  Right from the start I was asked to make a really huge number of choices, and I didn't know what to do at all.  Even after reading the wiki I'm still not sure what's going on.

Yeah it's the biggest problem with DF right now. The game is not for everyone in it's current state. Just one word: Presentation Arc.
Toady will upgrade the interface, he will separate txt/gfx etc. while he will work on that Arc. That will make DF much more "newbie friendly". 

[Idiom]

Given that Toady's pretty adamantly against adding this, I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you.

Dunno what these "realtime 3D displays" are that you're talking about, but as you noted with your own quotation, anything that relies on examining the memory of another running program is going to be incredibly hard to program.

Face it, Toady doesn't like giving lots of power to third-party developers, which means that, at least for the forseeable future, scripting, alternate interfaces, and all that is not going to happen.

A man can dream.

There was one or two real-time 3D displays, the rest weren't real-time. They're all dead right now. I recall it was hosted off-site on some guy's webpage as a pet-project. Buildings and objects and such were simple blocks, he was planning on better 3D objects, and you could at least designate things in the 3D I remember. It was only mentioned once or twice around here. Fell out of the light to a local project with the same goals.

Just one word: Presentation Arc.

Fingers crossed it's isometric old-school and looks like it was originally for the SNES. I would wet myself with nostalgic glee.

[SolarShado]

Unfortunately, IIRC, presentation'll be the last Arc for v1.0.

And I expect it'll still be top-down 2D then, to be honest. I haven't extensively read the dev. notes tho.

[Tormy]

Unfortunately, IIRC, presentation'll be the last Arc for v1.0.

And I expect it'll still be top-down 2D then, to be honest. I haven't extensively read the dev. notes tho.

That's impossible to tell. Toady doesn't have a schedule like that. 

[Byakugan01]

I think it's simple logic:right now, he's still programming the main game, and most importantly making sure everything works. Presentation's going to take the backseat to that, aside from interface improvements that are directly related to further development of the in-game features (such as, for instance, the updated military interface that's going to be in the next version).

[Slogo]

There's some pretty simple stuff that can be done to help people get into the game (some already mentioned).

1- Bundle a pregenerated world with a few 'example' forts at various stages so players can get into the game right away seeing what it actually looks like when a fort is going along).
2- I'd scrap the 'play now' option entirely. Instead provide some starting profiles and have them actually make sense. The Play Now is troublesome not only because it's not a very good starting mix but it also doesn't show players what a starting mix looks like.
3- Possibly provide some overall option to find a site... where newbies can click one button and find an 'easy' site. Something like peaceful, trees, no aquifer, flux stone, etc.
4- Have [VARIED_GROUND_TILES:NO] the default option. One of the most confusing things about playing Dwarf fortress in no graphics mode as a newbie is the 'tile vomit' of varied ground (and stone, see below). When you first start playing and see something like this http://www.indiegames.com/blog/images/timw/dwarffor3a.png it's just a lot of visual noise that you have no idea what it is. The varied ground makes it a lot harder to learn all of the important symbols.
5- Group rock/ore/gem icons better. All flux stones, metal ores, Adamantine, obsidian, bauxite, bituminous coal, and gems should have 1 single icon per group and just vary in colors. Soil should all be one icon (I think it mostly is anyways). For 'normal' stone have them have icons based on type (like sedimentary) and occurrence (clusters vs veins vs layer). As a new player you spend a lot of time just trying to figure out what each rock is and if its useful to you.
6- A better 'tech tree' on the website or in help. Possibly a list of recipes. The dwarf fort wiki is good for this but having a single cheat sheet would be helpful. Just things like what type of processing each plant can go through, growing requirements, building requirements (ie anvil for metalsmith forge, 3 bars for platemail, etc.) and a quick reference of where to get items (e.g Cloth from Loom, Charcoal from Wood Furnace).
7- An F.A.Q or quick guide somewhere a little more official. Mostly just explaining some simple tasks that are a little buried in the UI like how you need to enable/disable labors for your dwarves if you want more things done.

[Granite26]

4 is a good one... it's hard to think back to when looking at that screen wasn't random noise, but in retrospect, it took a long time before I could see the blondes and brunettes

[Slogo]

Well fortunately I think I'm in a good position to comment about DF newbiness. I tried picking up the game maybe a year or two ago and found it interesting but couldn't really get into it from all the stuff to pick up/figure out. Then recently I came back to the game, armed myself with a graphic set, and found that the game a lot easier to get into. I don't think you need the tile set, it's not the graphics that made the game easier, but the 'cleanliness' that the graphics brought in, especially in outdoor terrain, really helped. When I first played in ASCII the hardest thing for me was making out outdoor terrain. When I first played I would just designate large swaths of land to tree/shrub gathering because really I couldn't tell what was a shrub, what was a tree, and what was ground. There was just too many ground symbols to try to 'parse' visually.

Also the same with mining. First go I just couldn't be bothered to pay much attention to stone type and I certainly didn't know when a stone was valuable or useful. It's just too much information overload to parse and you really have to learn each stone type individually (there's a few groupings of symbols but not much). Second go around being armed with the graphic set and the wiki helped tremendously with learning the stone types.

[Craftling]

Would it be possible to put the wiki into DF? When you download the game it could come with the important parts of the wiki as well...

[Felblood]

Toady could cut/paste some articles from the wiki into the in-game help, but if he's going to do that he'd be better off just soliciting people to write help articles, specifically for the in-game help system, instead of stuff intended to be read in a cross-linked wiki.

Pointing players to the wiki, in the first page of the Getting Started page would probably be a more effective use of the wiki.

I have to agree about the varied tiles. They're much nicer looking once you've gotten used to ASCII, but until you do they make it even harder to learn.

I learned with a graphics set, but now I use raw ASCII. It really does get easier.

[Antsan]

I don't really understand, why Toady shouldn't implement a possibility for scripting - as I recognized, he doesn't want to make the game open source, because he wants to keep the source code clean and in his own programming style. The raws are fully editable, why shouldn't he implement a scripting interface too?


But the game is not that hard to learn.
It might not
Take you by the hand
and lead you to the land
and help you understand the best you can
but the wiki definitely provides everything you need, basic tutorials linked directly from the main page.

But the idea of disabling varied ground tiles as standard is really good - this was the most irritating experience for me when starting to play DF, although I have been playing many diverse kinds of roguelikes before. It is one kind of tile, why use different symbols for it?


Another idea: Although the interface of most roguelikes is very minimalistic (even more minimalistic then DF on pseudo-ASCII) it is easier to understand, because tiles of the same look have similar uses. I think the non-graphical interface should use real ASCII-symbols. Those are easier to understand and to keep in mind then a bunch of symbols, which aren't even used consistently.

[Rowanas]

It was hard for me to get into DF at first, and the first time I tried I actually gave up and uninstalled. The thought of such a great game eventually dragged me back in and I spent about 10 minutes learning the basics, and then 3 weeks learning advanced stuff, and I'm still not done. The freedom of choice coupled with the potential for extra fun stuff if you play it a lot is really cool. This game shouldn't become more restrictive or easier to get into because it's awesome the way it is, and easier is not "fun".

[Granite26]

for windows, it would be dumb easy to have the '?' key open up the wiki in a new window.