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[Atian the Elephantman God]

I tried to turn on the computer and it turned off...

[Putnam]

open source games have to be carefully managed with regards to what features to merge. crawl is a good example of properly managing an open source game.

there are a few arguments against open source but "the code quality would go down" really isn't one of them lol

[Arcvasti]

Eh, don't know about open source DF. I'd personaly be a bit miffed if whats basically the work of ~10 years of my life was just given away to the public. I can understand why he wouldn't do it.

Latest Toady interview I checked, [One of]the reasons he doesn't make DF open-source is because at that point he'd basically be managing a dev team and that's something he doesn't care for. So he doesn't. I can respect that.


I'd also say the DF GUI is becoming better. Having recently played 23a, the newer military system is far far better then it used to be. Of course, the only military button being "All dwarves grab a random object and immediately charge to their deaths in glorious battle" would be better then 23a'system in a lot of ways. And I never found things terribly obtuse, or at least not resistant to "Try every button on the leopard and see what works" style learning. And the new workshop and work order stuff sounds incredibly convenient.

[Teneb]

Yeah, the GUI may be ugly and intimidating, but hard it isn't. And it has been getting better, for instance: we got reaction descriptions now.

[penguinofhonor]

Who cares what Toady wants? It's about what's best for the art. If Dwarf Fortress would be best as an open source game, then Toady needs to suck it up and become a manager. Anything less is selfish.

[Wolfhunter107]

Who cares what Toady wants? It's about what's best for the art. If Dwarf Fortress would be best as an open source game, then Toady needs to suck it up and become a manager. Anything less is selfish.

You're joking, right?

[penguinofhonor]

I am always serious. He's basically sacrificing the good of the game to get a more enjoyable job that pays more, since all the donations get funneled to him. What gives him the right?

[TheBiggerFish]

Uhh...
He's making the game, he can do what he wants with it?

[Criptfeind]

Penguin is just a troll, don't take her too seriously.

Also clicking though links takes me back to people talking about the military system god knows how long ago. To randomly chime in on a probably dead conversation, although it takes some getting use to I really like the new military system. The power it gives you is worth the upgrade in my opinion (could it have been done better is another and probably valid question, but taken as a whole, I think it's a solid upgrade)

[Sirus]

The planners are on something illicit.

They're got me down for two trips on Friday. It is actually physically impossible to get them both done in the allotted time-span. By the time I could possibly best-case-scenario finish the first assignment I would already be late for the second one.

Unless I can somehow get those limos to maintain 90+mph (impossible, especially with traffic), Imma have to politely point out their stupidity tomorrow.

[Akura]

Damn, I think my email account may have been hacked. I'm seeing a bunch of spam-like emails made out to somebody named Anthony(which is NOT my name), all very recently. This also partly odd due to the fact that Gmail prominently displays the users real name during the attempt to log in, and there's not way to keep it from doing that as far as I know.


...Actually, it looks like somebody used my email to sign up for one of those surveys-for-cash things, because a lot of them appear to be asking for a real address to send the checks to. Still obviously a phishing scam. But I can't find the report button.

[TheBiggerFish]

Literally move them to Spam.

[hops]

"Ahah! I am finally in his email! Now what... ooh, I know! I'll sign up for surveys!"

[scriver]

I don't think the DF UI is too hard either and taught myself it just by exploring, but I will give that's it not very agile. I liked the new military system because of the new control it gave me over squads, but I also think that the game might benefit from a "turn this one dwarf into an ungrouped soldier right now" switch though.

I've been playing DF since 2008 or 09, though, so I've learnt every new interface addition as they've come along. And there's been a lot of those additions. I'm not sire how bad it would appear to a complete beginner starting up the modern version.

[Orange Wizard]

The modern interface is mostly intimidating, I think. Things aren't well explained and even the help menu is overwhelming in terms of all the stuff being thrown at you. There's 31 different menus accessible from the main screen alone, all of which have a number of submenus and have no indication of how important each one is other than guesswork.

Once you get used to it you can punch in hotkeys without really paying much attention, and still do everything you want to do with accuracy. It's helped by the fact that everything is available in two or three button presses.
In my opinion, for a game like Dwarf Fortress, where there is a myriad of things to manage and address, it is better to be able to navigate hundreds of menus in a small amount of time than to make everything friendly and organised. If it's possible to make things less intimidating while still maintaining the fast navigability (I'm not sure that it is, to any significant degree) then absolutely Toady should look in to it, but if it means sacrificing two or three key presses then it's not worth it.

The other things would be consistency and quality-of-life changes.
It's better now than, say, 0.40d, but there's still a lot of inconsistent hotkeys and layouts through the game. These are mostly just annoying to learn and I'm happy with the rate at which Toady is clearing it up. I might need to re-learn a key or two each update, but that's not too bothersome, and it makes things simpler for newcomers.
Quality of life changes, like the vein-automining, less crappy (but still pretty crappy) squad system, and the changes announced for whatever our next version is, are really cool to have in that they reduce the amount of key-tapping we have to do. And again, I'm happy to have these added one or two at a time as new versions come along. Adding a whole bunch at once would probably just result in me forgetting they exist and doing things the old way.

...

My WTF: I stopped playing DF for ~15 minutes to type this out. This game, it's a curse, I swear.