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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea that this game is essentially their life's work. Playing that looks like the equivalent of reading raw Matrix code.

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I don't see code, anymore. I just see dwarves, goblins... cats...

But really, the graphics aren't that bad. No worse than any other roguelike.

Suppose so. Have you seen Caves of Qud? That's a good middle ground.

I was actually pretty impressed by Dwarf Fortress's use of the extended ASCII set (or whatever the technical name is). Most of the non-creature symbols were easy enough to guess based on appearances.

And for animals, it's mostly the first letter of the animal's name, colored like the animal, and upper- or lower-case based on the animal's size.

The stock character set is modified code page 437.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

My first roguelike was Mission: Thunderbolt, on Mac Classic.

Even back in 1992 it was hugely easier to play than Dwarf Fortress is now. And, IMO, way more fun.

I don't find the graphics to be too much of an issue, and there are tilesets and whatnot you can use to replace the ASCII with something a little more friendly. However, it's the UI itself that presents the real barrier to entry. Absolutely nothing is obvious or intuitive, so every single thing must be learned via wikis, tutorials, etc. Worse yet, it's not at all clear what is possible without exhaustively looking though all the menus. Crucial functionality is buried all around the UI, and many veteran players will simply concede that other programs are needed to manage the dwarves; the UI simply isn't up to the task for anything but a trivial fortress.

Contrast this to a game like Angband which shares the funky UI and ASCII interface, but is still perfectly functional. And I certainly understand why it's like this; making an effective UI would be a significant challenge and distract from making the game itself, a monumental task. Still, they could release something like a DF API that lets others write UIs to access/play the game. Tarn has said he's considered this, but thinks it's too much work:

> I've thought about it. It seems like it would take a lot of work to maintain. I ditched the crappy 3D graphics of Armok 1, and adding features is so much faster now. This seems similar. There are lots and lots and lots of data structures, and the API would not be a simple thing, and it wouldn't be something I could just do once and then forget about.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_...

FWIW, DFHack is basically capable of this, but it's not something you can build on too much.

Perhaps when (if) the game is feature complete, they'll release an API and open source UIs will flourish.

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