The sheer amount of thought that has gone into this thing boggles the mind. It could never, ever be a commercial product, even if you put a slick GUI on the front end, but damn if it isn't a shining example of what one twisted hermit depraved codemonkey sick hacker dedicated developer can do.

But if you put ANY useful UI on it, you'd have a sellable indie game. Instead of that impenetrable dreck that requires you to use fartillions of key combinations and no less than three separate programs tapping into the data to even play.

After playing some more, I have to agree that the UI has serious design flaws. The Designate, Zone, and Stockpile tools really should be consolidated, and it desperately needs mouse support.

It kinda has mouse support. Kinda.

I actually offered to do some UI/UX shit for Toady at one point, since we both live in Seattle and I love Dwarf Fortress. But true to form, he said there were more important things to work on, and that he wants it to be his baby without other hands in it. I can respect that kind of dedication, but man. Even if the interface itself wasn't reorganized, the FLOW should be.

From Paradox, the publisher of Magicka and Europa Universalis, comes: "A Game Of Dwarves". "G.R.D.R.R. Dwarfin" jokes aside, it looks like it'll be complex and fun at the same time, and it will have dwarves and their fortresses.

I just came across that, nice trailer that shows that they are close enough to the gameplay of DF for it to appeal to those of who desperately wanted in on the crazy stories DF help generate but found the UI to much a flight sim-esque hurdle to surmount.

Video gives more details than the screenshots did http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyexilq-yCA

But I want to be clear on something, A Game of Dwarves isn't the only title to have found some inspiration from Dwarf Fortress (or has claimed to). I'll be the first to admit as well, I did purchase a few of these games and plan to purchase the rest that were inspired by DF:

. Delve Deeper

. Dwarfs!?

. Survivors of Ragnarök (alpha-funding)*

. Towns (alpha-funding)*

It also reminds me, part of the appeal of Minecraft was the aspect that it could get crazy detailed in the future (when I pitched in for my copy of the Alpha and future versions) like Dwarf Fortress.

* Found those on Desura. The other two I picked up on Steam.



Oh wow. Seriously, he turned you down? Did you meet with him IRL? I am just asking because I recall reading of other offers on his message board to help with mouse support, UI, and graphics but Toad turned them all down. I am pretty sure his donations would sky rocket if he made even mouse support a priority for a while, let alone UI and graphics.

And now, thoughts for food:
If Dwarf Fortress had any kind of useable UI/Graphics, it would have been Minecraft before Minecraft.

Pretty much. I know I would have tossed in a donation Toady's way had been able to overcome the UI and barely there mouse support. Tilesets helped overcome the ASCII, I think I used Mayday's. I use Dwarf Fortress Lazy Newb Pack when I feel like wishing really hard once in a while. And have you seen how bad ass Dwarf Fortress looks with Stonesense?! *drools*

Oi, you kids and yer darned tilesets and nonsense. Real men in my days knew how it was supposed to be done.

Nah, not in person - via the board. I keep meaning to go to the Bay 12 Meetups, since they're like a mile and a half from my house, but I never do cuz I always have something else going on those days.

In fact, I have. If Toady integrated Stonesense directly into DF and made the game playable from that view, that's a complete game right there.

Heh, I confused this one with Terraria, both are 2D and allow all those funky things with blocks. However, as far as this one goes, I believe that an old strategy game called "Diggers" had more to do with it than DF.

And that, while being pretty far from DF (at least at first) looks neat on its own. Am I getting this right that there are more towns all over the game world and you can connect them like in SimCity 4 or even in a more advanced way?

...apparently the guy doesn't know what "market needs" are.

Stonesense is actually the best visualizer out there. Sure, there's that 3D one, but it's bugged and damn near useless. Stonesense could even be used as main UI if someone wanted it.

Haven't heard of Diggers before, I'll have to google that. I was just going from what it reminded me of in addition to who I recalled the Devs said they were influenced by, like what it says in their summary on Desura:
"Survivors of Ragnarök is a city-building-management-survival game inspired by Dwarf Fortress. Manage, create, and survive through dynamic and deadly worlds. Losing is a fundamental core aspect of design."

Remember when DF was just a 2D thing to dig into, not the 3D it is now? Perhaps that is what this is referencing. But I could totally see why it would remind you of Terraria at first glance. I should fire up the alpha again some time, last time I did SoR wasn't even really a game in my estimation it was such an early build but I am fine with that, I remember the early days of Minecraft, I am fine with something actually being in a alpha state when I pitch in for a copy.



I'm just going on sources like this review I found on Desura where it mentions:
"It is a game with great potential. The gameplay is like DF Lite (If it existed), which is not coincidental because the developers said they had Toady's masterwork in mind while working on this game."
Sorry I didn't find a quote directly from the developers, I'm being lazy in that regard.

Having watched its videos, it does make me think of Dwarf Fortress as well. But I have yet to purchase my copy of this early version, so I don't know if there are more towns. Its more or less a game I am watching from the outside with interest because it recalled it referencing DF as inspiration and it does remind me of DF.

Oh man, if you add up all the money I have spent on (It doesn't add up to much to be honest, Steam and Desura sales are awesome on my limited budget) or plan to spend on things that remind me of Dwarf Fortress, had Dwarf Fortress just been more accessible, I think I would rather have sent that Toady's way - at least from my point of view, even if something is feature incomplete and buggy as hell, if it is accessible I am willing to wait for those features and bugs to get fixed. I love alpha funding.

Oh well, maybe one day Dwarf Fortress, I will feel like I get to access more than just watching the embarking dwarves go mad from the neglect of my confused or lack of instructions as to what they should do with their new found base of operations other than starve/sober up or be eaten by the local wildlife or unlife.

Oh, he definitely does. Don't mistake not caring with not knowing. Toady is a very smart guy, but he personally would prefer to keep total project control than focus on things he feels are less important and lose control of aspects of the project.



Eh, not really. It would improve the visual understanding of users, but that's not the whole of the problem. In my opinion, it's not even the main sticking point. Actually interacting with the things you see is the main problem, as is the organizational structure of all of the menus. The immediate WTFery of what you're seeing is a huge problem, yes, but once you move past that, there's all this stuff you can do but don't know you can access. How is a new player to understand that if they don't have a Cheese Maker but they want to make cheese, they have to enable the Cheese Making job on someone? Maybe they'll have to enable Milking, too. And Animal Care, or the cow will die. Or that they don't even need a cow - they can milk a Camel.

Or say, the difference between zones and stockpiles? After all, garbage can be placed in a garbage stockpile OR a dump zone.

It's that kind of conceptual information organization that remains a huge sticking point even after the visuals make sense.

I very much agree with this, the visuals are a small sticking point to having clarity on what input and where will result in something closely approximating the desired result. I guess I am spoiled by more polished interfaces, but how ideal would it be to right click on an object so you can bring up a menu of all the things that the dwarves could do to it, possibly with hints or a flow chart to describe that if you click here, you may be able to guide the dwarves to do this or that?

Heck, just feeling like I don't have to relearn what keys do what just about everytime I change to a different menu would be a welcome bit of accessibility, let alone being informative. Does anyone remember those huge cheat sheets we had to use to play flight sims? This feels like I need several of those littered around my keyboard to figure out the DF interface. It is very confusing and cumbersome.

I think I could even get used to the dwarf matrix if one could gather information on what a symbol means and can do more readily.

Less important than improving playability?

Yes. Playability is, for him, and abstract quality - he could get bogged down improving the "feel" of the game, or he could add more features and make the game do more things.

It's a very programmer-oriented way of looking at development.

Kinda like SR4 versus SR3.
Either you streamline or you have more rules for stuff.

Sheesh, I played Towns. It's a horrible, horrible clickfest. It's not as clunky as DF, but there are some stupid things that need addressing.

It's really not even that complicated. It's just a difference of priority. Look at it like this - let's suppose I'm making a game that's large and complex. For the sake of argument, let's say I'm making a game a lot of us are familiar with: Civilization.

Currently the game is in a state where all of the tech trees are only 5 discoveries deep, only 5 types of military units exist, you can't change the production priorities of cities, and there is no diplomacy. All of the art is obviously grossly unfinished. You can still build buildings, invade other people, explore, sail ships around, etc.

Fans who clamor for UI are, as far as Toady is concerned, asking that he focus on developing final art assets before he can even implement things like diplomacy, famous people, full tech trees, Wonders of the World, Multiplayer, etc - not that DF will have any of these, but we're still operating under the Civilization example, here. He thinks this is nonsensical, because that's stuff he wants to worry about after the rest of the game is "done" or at least "done enough", because he recognizes that done is a goalpost that keeps moving further out as he approaches it. It is, from the perspective of a developer - any developer - crazy to focus on polish before all of the major features are implemented. In big game companies like mine, that's not so much of a problem, because art teams can crank on polish while developers and designers implement other things. For instance, we can have the tutorial missions for a given game and the menu and all that done and looking really good while there's no multiplayer, because otherwise we'd be twiddling our thumbs.

But if you're one guy, you gotta set goals and move toward them.

I think that's a false dichotomy in this case. I don't think a proper UI for Dwarf Fortress would have to entail streamlining anything; it's just a matter of presenting information in a way that doesn't make the player's brain hurt.

You know, I just realized that the last post in the DF thread was months ago. Ya'll've missed some important, and more importantly huge, updates.

We did?
Tell us more.

I haven't! I grabbed the DF2012 .11 update a couple of days after it came out and proceeded to create a fortress wherein I named every dwarf after one of my co-workers. But I had to give up on that fort because I was never attacked by anyone, it was peaceful, and nothing bad ever happened. In other words: boringggg.

So this time I did it again in a more threatening region and have enjoyed near constant baby thieves and the occasional War Cave Dragon-enhanced siege, which nearly destroyed me the first time it happened, because I was relying on a floodgate-based front door.

Does adventure mode work properly right now? Last I remember it was broken for some reason.

Building a huge mazelike fortress with insane death traps and treasure to be found sounds like fun. Who knows if the lever opens a treasure vault, or starts pumping the room full of magma. Maybe both. Plus the automatic traps (or door locking/unlocking) powered by water and pressure plates would make for an interesting environment.



Although attacks being less trivial to defeat would also be nice.

Knowing my fortresses, pulling the lever would either...
A. Raise the drawbridge.
B. Open the trapdoor for the feeding chute for the prisoners.
C. Open the trapdoor to dispose of garbage in magma.
D. Flood some place with water and/or magma. The most common places I would flood are listed below.
D1. The basin surrounding the entrance to the fort. I would take pains to dig out a large basin except for a rise in the middle which would be the entrance to the fortress. A pump would be used to flood the basin with water or lava in case of pesky elephants, elves, or goblins. I would also have a trapdoor to drain the basin into it's retention pond....
D2. The lower levels of the fortress. I would construct the fortresses in such a manner that I would have airlock door between the upper and lower levels. I would keep a certain number of dwarfs down there for mining or constructing lower level necessities (such as pump systems). In case of an invasion, I would flood the lower levels with water/magma. The dwarfs were expendable.
D3. Nobles rooms. Self explanatory.

I really wish the game was more accessible. I gave it a good effort once, but all i ended up doing was following a tutorial without really knowing the steps I was taking.

The tutorials really need to be short videos for setting up different industries (butchering -> leather and food, weapons and armor, medical, training soldiers, etc.). Choosing a location isn't as important now that magma and metals are guaranteed. Maybe start yourself out somewhere with no hostiles so you can get used to what you need to set up without being bothered. I'd like to think I could do it, but I don't have video capture stuff, microphone, video posting account, or any idea how to record a video. Trial-and-error gets you there over the course of a weekend, and each failure is a learning opportunity. Start simple, keep adding on, , then do something horrible to the survivors when you get bored.

The start is easy enough: dig a tunnel wide enough for a wagon and an area for the trading post, dig stairs (down, then all up and down), every few levels build areas for doors on each side of the stairs, then wide hallways to add rooms later, get a farm established as soon as possible, have dwarves who aren't busy bring everything in to my food or workshop stockpiles, and build some beds. At first, all I care about is surviving, and having the miners make room for future expansion (lots of bedrooms and lots of workshops that can be sealed off from each other). I try to keep space around everything and between levels that I'm using because I will need to expand later, or probably forgot something important.

Then I make a still and food processing shop, with space for a few other workshops nearby, and a huge dining room on the other side of the stairs or a level down. Normal bedrooms are 3 spaces: a door, a bed, and a dresser. They also own the walls on either side of the "room," making it a 3x3 area. Walls are 2 squares wide so I don't have to worry about having 2 dwarves owning the same wall. Noble rooms are larger, and in an area that can be expanded/locked down in case of "accidents." Luckily, the difficulty is based on population so you can keep things simple while you set up by having immigrants stand on the trapdoor above the lava pit or explore horribly dangerous areas. If you don't know how to do something, don't worry - walls and dwarves can both be replaced easily.

I make sure the miners don't have secondary jobs I'll be needing for a while, maybe let them be soldiers or mechanism-makers. I don't really have any other preference for how jobs are organized. Maybe a farmer/brewer and farmer/chef so they can go get more ingredients when they run out.

If I was smart, I would probably make a tree of how to make each kind of workshop. I know there is one magma building I can never find, even though I kind of understand how the menus are organized.

Is a 3 square wide entrance tunnel even required? I was under the impression that traders used transdimensional compression to slip through a 1 square wide tunnel to get to the trade depot.



Aren't bedrooms supposed to be 4 spaces? Door + Bed + Cabinet + Chest? And the ownership of the same wall isn't so much an issue last I knew. I wonder if maybe the problem you were having with rooms was that you were making them 3x3 rather than 4x3.



I found that once the 2nd migration wave hits you generally have enough dwarfs to support that population and specialize out the skills rather than stack them. It's necessary with the initial 7 to stack roles. I did find that my 4th and later migration waves saw most of my dwarfs being assigned as transporters or drafted into the military unless they had a skill that was better than the one my current dwarf job doer had. I only ever had 1 dwarf worker per workshop and I only ever really expanded the number of workshops if I found my production didn't match the demand. I did usually do 2-3 diggers, 2-3 engravers, and I would make sure to keep enough growers on hand to keep my pantries well stocked with plump helmets since they were the basic brewing ingredient and were good to use for cooking.

Last I knew, you had to have 3 squares open the whole way to the trading post or they wouldn't even send wagons.



Not sure on the cabinet and chest. I know the sharing space thing at least used to divide the value of the room by the number of dwarves sharing it. That probably only matters for nobles, but it's a small enough difference that I just do it for all dwarves.



Oh yeah. I meant that only for the starting miners. Nobody else doubles up in my fortresses, and I eventually make the starting seven only do one job. I let migrants with useful jobs be back-ups for other dwarves in case they are sleeping/eating/trying to get a sock during a goblin invasion. Unless they come with a pet. Pets owners get to go volcano-diving so I don't have to worry about pet overpopulation destroying my framerate. Although I do remember there being a way to hardcap the dwarf population, so maybe the same could be done with pets.

The pet problem, eh?


Wouldn't it be nice if you could just have the butchers geld the male animals?


As an aside, producing cojones as a cookable ingredient?



Hey, it beats mass kitten slaughter.

Them's good eating.

Not only that, they're an extremely stable and renewable source of meat.

I think the whole point of gelding is so that it *doesn't* grow back.

No point! Why cut off such a stable and renewable meat source.

Sure, the source of the meat may be addictive and habit forming to the point that withdrawal symptoms include suicidal thoughts, but that's why you keep it caged!

At least it's not mermaid farming...

What's wrong with that? The only problem I see with it is that value of mermaid bones that made them so desirable to farm got adjusted. Now the cost in time of creating the mermaid farm really doesn't justify the effort.

No... the best type of farming? Elf farming. Elf merchants are pretty useless anyway and they always just want to bitch about what you sell them. The best solution is to just create a pit under a trapdoor under a path leading to the drawbridge so you plummet the elves to their doom. Then you loot the caravan of their mostly useless goods and later you get elf bones for bone carving.

This is pleasing to the Ebon Dragon.

The problem with that plan is that my butchers are too picky. They only want meat that the hunters kill or they kill themselves. Now if there was a way to force attack with a unit (including hunters), we'd be good to go. Probably also useful when they run past perfectly good targets chasing something that can't catch, but it'd mostly be to get rid of elves.

Now the humans are reasonable people who understand that business is business. If you sell them totems made from the skulls from the last human traders to cut you a bad deal, they just take it in stride.

Well, mermaids were farmed for their bones and not their meat because in an old version objects maid from mermaid bone were vastly overvalued compared to most other bone objects.

Things which are Pleasing to the Ebon Dragon are also justly enumerated as Things Which Should Not Be.

Good to see another Exalted player.