Print

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

[Lac]

But couldn't the DF dev himself correct this?

The rules of the game are that Toady makes it as hard as possible to deviate from his ascii curse, and the players have to think of ingenious ways to get it looking decent. And lxnt's is pretty ingenious.  Personally I'm waiting for the lazy noob pack to bundle it with a unix stick install

[Baleur]

That's exactly my point, also ties in with the upcoming way that rail tracks will use the same tile as walls.
I dont understand this logic from him, why make it harder for basic graphics mods?

I know if i could program and had a game i was proud of, i'd want to embrace anything people essentially do for "free" to make it even more popular, perhaps even leading to a paid version in the future.

I'm pretty sure the tilesets on these forums are a big big draw for new players compared to just seeing ASCII.
So again, i really do not understand this. Why wouldnt he want to do everything to make it EASIER for modders to basically add free graphics to the game while he can focus on the gameplay coding?
Heck, it actually ADDS to gameplay since you can see wtf is going on on the screen.

It just seems like a rather, i dont know if unresponsible approach is the right thing to say.. It just seems odd not to embrace any help and benefit to the games popularity and success he can get, for free. No salary paid, no graphics artist hired. Other indie devs would love that. Maybe there's some sort of "this game must be old-school" mentality, but again that would be rather unresponsible, in terms of what is good for the game itself.

Then again, i have no clue how DF is developed or what the future concept for it is. But from a new players perspective it seems as if the modders have to hijack any sliver of possibility for the most basic of graphics. I'm still surprised that the main DF website itself still boasts ASCII in the background and screenshots. If anything, it should show a selection of tilesets.
It is such a wonderful game in terms of gameplay that it is a real shame to see true opportunity NOT being siezed, just letting it crawl in the mud as modders desperately try to find ways to improve upon it. It also feels a bit arrogant, to ignore such potential for the sake of "must be old-school, cuz i say so".

The day when an ambitious indie comes along and actually flat out copies Dwarf Fortress, but does so with a proper context sensitive logical interface and basic rudimentary graphics that at least show enemies from hostiles, grass from mud, DF won't have a chance. He's lucky it's been relatively unhindered by any competition so far. Just look at what happened with Infiniminer compared to Minecraft.

When a competitor finally shows up, with the same game concept as DF, but with a better presentation and mod friendly support, it's over for Toady. I'd think he'd wanna cherish any advantage to evolve the game he could get.
Rant over, i apologize.

[Blakmane]

Then again, i have no clue how DF is developed or what the future concept for it is. But from a new players perspective it seems as if the modders have to hijack any sliver of possibility for the most basic of graphics. I'm still surprised that the main DF website itself still boasts ASCII in the background and screenshots. If anything, it should show a selection of tilesets.
It is such a wonderful game in terms of gameplay that it is a real shame to see true opportunity NOT being siezed, just letting it crawl in the mud as modders desperately try to find ways to improve upon it. It also feels a bit arrogant, to ignore such potential for the sake of "must be old-school, cuz i say so".

The day when an ambitious indie comes along and actually flat out copies Dwarf Fortress, but does so with a proper context sensitive logical interface and basic rudimentary graphics that at least show enemies from hostiles, grass from mud, DF won't have a chance. He's lucky it's been relatively unhindered by any competition so far. Just look at what happened with Infiniminer compared to Minecraft.

When a competitor finally shows up, with the same game concept as DF, but with a better presentation and mod friendly support, it's over for Toady. I'd think he'd wanna cherish any advantage to evolve the game he could get.
Rant over, i apologize.

Dwarf Fortress exists primarily as a creative outlet for Toady's imagination. As long as Toady has enough money to pay his bills and put food on the table he is entirely uninterested in commercial gain. As such he focuses on what *he* wants to see in the game, not what will get him the most players or make him the most money. Toady plays without tilesets (as do about half of all DF players, mind you) and is not particularly interested in graphics support at this point in development, so that is just what we have to live with. Is this good business sense? Most certainly not, but Toady doesn't care about money and in a way we should be grateful he doesn't and is willing to make this amazing game for free.

There are already DF-like games out or in development, but none have ever impacted on DF's niche popularity. What Toady has done in terms of depth of information, simulation and procedural generation is simply impossible to commercially replicate. By not focussing on graphics, toady has kept the game engine perpetually open to change, allowing a constantly evolving program with few constraints and an utterly unique outlook. If he was limited to a normal videogame development cycle of a few years, and had effectively handcuffed his engine early with graphics (see Armok 1), none of what we have now would exist.

I hope that helps answer your question. :-)

[lxnt]

To put it simple, (as far as I understand, of course) Toady does not find it interesting neither doing graphics code nor maintaining any semblance of an API to formally allow others to do it. The latter I would not, too. Either one is a significant time sink for marginal gains in (re)playability, compared to carts, vampires and whatnot, and I for one applaud this decision. I see how can a (completely different) renderer be grafted upon the engine, it can be done and I'm doing it. However it's practically impossible to, say, patch in carts. Or vampires. Or city generation. So I'd say, let Toady do what he does best, the rest we can fix or cope with.

Besides, doing whatever interests you, as opposed to whatever others want, is the key to maximum specific creativity. Which is the one thing that makes things truly outstanding.

[lxnt]

Status update.

• lwapi doesn't enrage gcc or valgrind any more.
• Dumper sort of works. Please see if it crashes for you. http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=6210.
• fgtestbed updated to work with 3407, converted to Python 3.

[arclance]

Status update.

• lwapi doesn't enrage gcc or valgrind any more.
• Dumper sort of works. Please see if it crashes for you. http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=6210.
• fgtestbed updated to work with 3407, converted to Python 3.

The dumper does not crash for me anymore.
What should I expect to see if I feed the dump to fgtestbed?
It looks like this right now, though I am using python 2.7 since I don't have any python3 packages for PyOpengl.

Also is the dumper the only thing you updated to 34.07 or did you also update the old SHADER mode as well?

[lxnt]

The dumper does not crash for me anymore.

Great.

What should I expect to see if I feed the dump to fgtestbed?
It looks like this right now, though I am using python 2.7 since I don't have any python3 packages for PyOpengl.

It should look something like that, since shaders themselves haven't been debugged yet.

I should have been clearer, it's not that code was 'converted' to python3, it's just I tried to make it run under both
versions. So python3 is not required for the fgtestbed.

Also is the dumper the only thing you updated to 34.07 or did you also update the old SHADER mode as well?

I did not port the old shader code.

[Jeoshua]

Just curious if this suggestion would be at all possible with this renderer:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=108489.0

If it is, you're free to use the idea with or without credit for it's imagining.  If not... well then I am sad but I'll live

[[NO_THOUGHT]]

Curses Jeoshua! When I saw a new reply to this thread I thought that lxnt had posted an update! However I think that the shader here is already somewhat like your idea... except without the use of the cyan color.

[Jeoshua]

HA!

I suppose it does!  I just looked through the thread very hard to find so much as a single screenshot, posted months ago.  It does do exactly my suggestion, only with Blue instead of Cyan.

Kudos, and this makes me want to make a USB stick mini-linux distro just to try it.  Is is working for 34.07 yet?

P.S. Post more screenshots.

[arclance]

Kudos, and this makes me want to make a USB stick mini-linux distro just to try it.  Is is working for 34.07 yet?

No not yet, lxnt did not update the old shader code for the 0.34.X series.

I did not port the old shader code.

[lxnt]

Well, t's time to let you all know what's going on.

I've been busy with other stuff for the three weeks, and then killed a week's worth of hobby time on tearing my hair out at OpenGL's HFS.
So, enough of this. From about now, the project relies on and uses only GL 3.0 forward-compatible profile, which means mostly no legacy insanity, and also means that SDL 2.0 (fka 1.3) is required. This is because there's no way to create a sane OpenGL context using SDL 1.2.

While I was at it, I also decided to move to Python 3.2.  This is because for one, I need to not forget its caveats, and for another, py3k is here for several years already.

This all means that future code drops would require somewhat bleeding-edge environment to run. I'll move to uploading more-or-less self-contained archives, including whatever latest PyOpenGL, patched pgreloaded, latest SDL-2.0 and whatever accompanying libs  my code would require. However, supplying compiled code will mean that it'd run only on ubuntu 11.04 or later, and I probably won't have any time to devise ways to run it under windows or macosx (which is absolutely possible though).

On the positive side, I've already updated the dumper to work with df3410 and most of GL's kinks combined with my own misunderstandings have been purged with fire.


NB:

This project isn't currently anything one can play DF with. It's just a prototype, and very nonfunctional at that.

The 'old shader code' never did anything but insignificantly speed up the game. Thus I saw no reason to port it to .34xx.

[Blakmane]

Awesome update lxnt - you have our complete support! Unfortunately I have a windows-only machine and cannot help test, but please let me know if there is any other way I can aid you.

[SalmonGod]

I'll still probably try dual-booting Linux for the very first time just to try this, whenever it progresses to a semi-usable state.

[Vattic]

Same here SalmonGod. Either that or I'll try installing it on a thumbdrive or similar.