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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

For all their advancement in storytelling and worldbuilding, it is still so frustrating to try and play DF today. I did not grow up with Roguelikes and ASCII characters or backwards-ass vim-style key-memorization GUI patterns, and the nostalgia that surrounds these things is simply annoying. The noob pack helps but what it really needs is for that isometric graphics mod to become a full UI layer. Mid-90s WinForms would be an improvement over what DF's got.

It is painful to see people so smart pooh-pooh something so obvious as a useable UI (I won't say "decent", because "decent" nowadays is this brightly-colored material-design garbage) that isn't super painful for people who like to come and go.

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Anything worth doing takes a lot of work, and Dwarf Fortress is no different. It really is a matter of putting in the hours. But thanks to dozens of radical tools, you, too, can turn your fortress into a 3D, moving world.

Treat the experience more like playing with some sort of odd micro-kernel in a VM, with tools for poking and probing it. Approach it like a software development tool, or a Linux server and it becomes a little less daunting, especially as all the letters are on the screen for quick reference, rather than in a man page.

Still, the beauty of Dwarf Fortress IS that it doesn't care about the UI. It's not for you. It's not for anyone other than it's creators. It's for Zach and Tarn. Yes, it's also for the game's fans, but the brothers have always been building the game THEY wanted to play, and doing exactly what they wanted to do. They're not beholden to a schedule, or some massive revamp required in order to make the game more accessible. They're true to their own desires and souls.

They're artists. This is their art. Yes, it is truly impenetrable, but as with almost all art, taking the time to delve deeper is uniquely and spiritually rewarding. Yes, spiritually.

> Anything worth doing takes a lot of work, and Dwarf Fortress is no different. It really is a matter of putting in the hours.

And this is why, fascinating as it sounds, I'll never play Dwarf Fortress. I already have a job, and I get paid for it not only in satisfaction but also in money. It's awesome that they're able to devote their lives to their artwork, and I like reading about it from time to time, but in the end it's an unappealing value proposition for someone with limited time.

I agree 100%. I am very fascinated by Dwarf Fortress, but with a full time job, a family, and hobbies, I only spend a few hours every other week playing games. I donated money to them, but every time I think about actually starting to play I get intimidated by the incredibly steep learning curve. There are many other games that I can start playing and having fun immediately

That being said, I'm glad that I donated. I feel that I've gotten my money's worth just from reading about it every few months and knowing that I am supporting indie game developers. Hopefully at some point it will become more user-friendly so I can actually play it. Or maybe I should drop some hobbies...

Does anyone know how long it takes an average new player to get to the point where Dwarf Fortress is more fun than confusing and frustrating?

Honestly, just put in one long day. Throw 8 hours at it and by the end you should be having fun. Honestly. it only takes an hour or two to get going and learn the basics. The complex things are around specific functions, like military management, or the complexity comes from a task being difficult, like irrigation. Honestly, I fell in love with the game on the first day, and it took me a week or two to really learn the ins and outs so that I could begin doing complicated stuff. Again, a lot of the difficulty isn't from the UI, it's from the fact that finding out how to manage things is tough, and the fact that some of the things you're expected to do are extremely difficult to pull off, even if the UI were great. Perfect example is dealing with an acquifier: you have to dig a large, 3d plug into the ground: like a vertical box. You dig it out, but leave it connected by a small piece of land, then you dig out underneath it completely for a few Z-levels, then you dig out the last piece holding it up, and it drops into the Acquifier, making a sort of horozontal bridge layer through which you dig a staircase to the area under the acquifier.

Or, like me, you just turn off acquifiers in the Lazy Newb Packs launch options. Newbs should probably also turn off invasions.

Finally, a quick hint to help your fort flourish: ALWAYS kill the elf traders. You get all their stuff, and they never invade or get angry. They tend to come back again, actually, bringing you more cloth and food for free!

I tried the newb pack not too long ago... the experience was too clunky for me. The graphics packs are nice but they always feel incomplete... and even when I had this nice visualization (in a separate window...) it would frequently crashed and I really wished taht I could interact with the game with it.

Yes, they're artists and this is their art, but software rarely -- if ever -- exists in isolation, yet DF acts like it does. You've all these nerds with too much time on their hands building all this ridiculously complicated infrastructure just to play the game in a way that is more comfortable, when instead the DF guys could simply allocate X amount of time and then be done with it. And this isn't a demand that the DF guys make the UI better, just a wish that they would put in a minimal amount of effort so that the community could hook in their own GUI code with a minimum of fuss.

Besides, I write code and debug fussy computer shit all day for work. Games shouldn't require that kind of advanced hackery just to play.

And who cares if they're artists? Neither the artist nor his art are immune to criticism (or, wishfully thinking, critique).

Well, that's something I think the Adams brothers consider to be work. They aren't into doing work. They're into doing the fun stuff. Maybe that's immature and not to the liking of the audience, but once again, the whole point is that they don't care about the user. Frankly, that's a good thing, kinda like a film maker not caring about the mainstream audience, or making an accessible film. Like Harmony Korine...

And how is that mode of expression anything higher than selfish indulgence?

In cinema that sentiment has resulted in some of the most vapid, unwatchable trash ever created. In music this results in experimental, unlistenable noise that never seems to appeal to anyone enough to be self-sustaining. It's like an emotionally repressed teenager crying out, "you don't understand my pain, man! you'll never understand!" We do understand, we've all gone through it, and we've moved on.

If DF's creators want to be avant garde, then fine. But it is a lonely, and possibly pointless path, and again a damn shame, because oh how amazing it would be if it weren't!

It is ABSOLUTELY selfish indulgence. And plenty of people love every bit of it. Just because you find these sorts of things devoid of meaning does not mean they are meaningless to others.

Game development, these days, is so focused on hand holding, genre, and accessibility that it is only by truly following ones heart that something unique and new, like Dwarf Fortress, can be created.

Plus, it's still not verion 1.0, so who knows, maybe someday they'll fix the interfaces! But since other things are always in flux, it'd be a premature optimization now, anyway. Those pave the road to Balrogs, or something.

The game is over a dozen years old and from what I have experienced seems relatively complete. Sure, it's not 1.0, but at this point it is not hard to envision a functional ncurses-like interface built around the concepts that DF's current UI establishes, to say nothing of more exotic (or modern) alternatives.

But, as you say, it's their project. They can do with it what they want. I can sit here and critique and wish it were better, and you can defend it, and together we change nothing. I just really want to play a game as inspired as this in a way that doesn't require the kind of devotion and study this game does, because its a friggin videogame and I need to devote my studyin' time to shit that actually matters (to me, touche).

(And besides, I think we human beings have a fetish for complexity that we really could do without)

The version numbering scheme for DF is based on a percentage of desired features that have been implemented. The most recently-released version of DF is 0.43.04. It's not even half-way done!

So, guys create a ton of work for themselves and post up a public tracker. They scope the game to be WAAAY larger than what it could reasonably be, but this scoping allows its creators to put up this multi-generational progress bar that slowly-but-surely inches to completion, and in the process eke out a meager living. The elation, when that progress bar does move, is borderline orgasmic.

I call BS

Not everyone is out for a big score, and not all plans are short term.

They've already been working on it for a dozen years, so what's another dozen?

Anyway, back to the UI: they can rethink or polish it in the run-up to 1.0; no need to spend too much time on before then.

> The game is over a dozen years old and from what I have experienced seems relatively complete.

The original link for this thread is basically a huge list of the things that are not yet implemented.

Complete for a game, that is. All the pieces are there, the interactive feedback loop is in place, and one can currently get lost in it for hundreds of hours, should they so choose. That is a complete game to me.

The rest of that list? Stretch goals. Or the entire vision. What, you think I've never seen that list? It's a big list, and it's stupid because it is so impossibly long. The entire vision is never 1.0...

"Selfish indulgence"? What game did we make?

Several. But they never went anywhere, because they were never more than selfish indulgences. To say nothing of other art...

I think we should choose better words than "selfish" for the personal choices of people who make games that they give away for free.

I wouldn't generalize that any deviant, avant garde self indulgent artistic work that doesn't care about its audience and doesn't care about maintaining some conformity is necessarily "unwatchable" or "unlistenable" trash. I personally think that sometimes it's not such a pointless path, and helps push the boundaries of art, of what is accepted, and is essential in bringing new ideas forward.

It prevents everything from having the same esthetic and feel. The graphics of DF is also what makes it unique from the rest.

Also, only the fool thinks nearly all art is worth it, or that nearly all art can be "spiritual". Art is 99% crap and 1% gold -- whether music, or the visual arts, or the performing arts, or code -- and DF is one of the few cases in my mind that lands in both categories.

> * I did not grow up with Roguelikes and ASCII characters or backwards-ass vim-style key-memorization GUI patterns*

I did. They were still easier to learn and play than Dwarf Fortress.

A lot of people like to say that Dwarf Fortress is too deep and complex to ever be "easy," that making it more usable would dumb it down. This is silly. No one is saying that it should have fewer variables, fewer controls, that the underlying model should be changed any way. None of those things are necessary to build an interface which e.g. doesn't assign different keys to the same options in different menus.

To compare it to another famously unforgiving game, would Dark Souls be better if the controls reversed themselves every time you opened a menu? Would people consider that an exciting challenge?

I've worked with people like the DF developers, and even when they're skilled enough to tolerate their eccentricities, no one would ever pretend that it's a good thing. I think that's my real beef with it. As a programmer, I don't like shitty design. Dwarf Fortress is an awe-inspiring concept and engine buried in the shittiest of shitty design.

My sentiments exactly. Brilliance doesn't excuse bad design.

I think git is a great example of this. Amazing tool, I can't imagine software development nowadays without it. But that doesn't mean the interface couldn't have been more consistent.

> what it really needs is for that isometric graphics mod to become a full UI layer

Ugh, no. Isometric views are a nightmare for usability. They look nice, but they obscure things and make for particularly error-prone tile selection, which is just poison in a game where that's the main thing you're doing.

I'd look to Prison Architect and RimWorld for UI inspiration, not Stonesense and Gnomoria.

Alright fine, whatever, minor details. Isometric, fully 3d, 2d, who cares? Nearly anything is better than what it is right now.

I'm happy for people to augment DF with things like Armok vision and all the other tools, but I don't want DF to change in itself. That would totally ruin it. It's perfect how it is right now. RimWorld is fantastic, but it is a grain of sand compared to the beach that is DF. Which game would you prefer? The good lucking shallow one, or the feature-rich but slightly-less-sightly one?

Why is it always this binary comparison?

It doesn't have to be good looking. It doesn't have to pretty. It doesn't need to be 3d, or need all these fancy bells and whistles. Nowhere has that been suggested (at least in anything I've written), yet people nonetheless frame their answers in this artificial contrast.

Once again: just make the UI intuitive. Make things behave as normal. Grant a few hooks into the GUI code so the community can create their own without having to reverse engineer your game. That is all!

> It doesn't need to be 3d, or need all these fancy bells and whistles. Nowhere has that been suggested (at least in anything I've written)

You literally just suggested a pretty isometric visualiser become the new basis for the game UI.

That's a bit like complaining that vim is obtuse and to fix it we should switch its rendering engine to use proportional fonts.

> just make the UI intuitive

Oh yes, "just" do that.

If you actually have something new to suggest, feel free to contribute: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?board=5.0

Generally the attitude is perpetually "yes, it'd be nice, but then we also want all this other stuff". And at the end of the day, Toady does what Toady does, he doesn't owe us anything.

Then you should play DF's predecessor Slaves to Armok: God of Blood which has procedural 3D graphics. (see http://www.bay12games.com/armok/screens.html)

The reason he transitioned to Dwarf Fortress (aka Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress) is that developing the graphics and UI took so much time away from gameplay.

Of course. It doesn't change anything about DF though, and it's DF that made it into NY MoMA [1].

The problem with DF is that the UI runs off in a completely different direction. Playing the game requires untangling a mess of counter-intuitive mental contexts, using controls that seem to make little sense. It is an experience wildly different than the way one expects-slash-wants UI to behave. Artistically, one might say that DF's creators are making a statement against modern UI and its inherent complexity, but then I think that falls flat when you realize that the alternative (as in, what is it right now) requires considerable study to enjoy.

Is it artistic statement, or laziness? Or something else? Software, like all interactive mediums, has a functional component that you can't just ignore. If this were a painting, or a sculpture, or music, and I could only interact with it through perception, then that's fine -- entire art movements are built from challenging prevailing norms. But software is experienced through use, and no artist is immune to the practical considerations of their medium; rules which are best heeded. (Or not, but very veeery carefully and with great discipline.)

DF is a game, and games are meant to be played. This is a fundamental tenet of games. Play happens through approachability, among other things, and approachability is the product of an equation that includes good interface design. A game seemingly opposed to even a modicum of approachable design (something as simple as remapping mouse and keyboard controls to behave intuitively, as one would expect an ncurses-type app to act) runs opposed to very fundamental notions of game design. It is also terribly ironic, I think, and irony really is one of the basest and most-overused cliches in modern art.

Again, even the barest of olive branches extended to the community -- a simple, low-level API to hook into, or better default mapping of controls, or a recanting of their weird ideas of how windows should work -- would satiate this critic, as I really do want to enjoy DF. It is a shame that such brilliance is locked away in such a homely and unapproachable exterior.

[1] http://www.moma.org/collection/works/164920

> Is it artistic statement, or laziness? Or something else? Software, like all interactive mediums, has a functional component that you can't just ignore.

Of course it can be ignored. Given the depth of the feature list (see the original link), and the vagueness of the items on it, it's not surprising that they haven't gone through and come up with a comprehensive and perfect UI before anything else has actually been implemented.

Instead the UI grows to accommodate the features as they are added, like every other program in existence.

If I understand correctly, you say that software as an art form must by default have a conventional and easily usable UI or means of interaction, ("practical considerations of the medium") before considering anything artistic such as the gameplay itself?

But what if, beyond working on the gameplay itslef, it was artistically interesting for someone to play around with the practical necessities of the medium and try to diverge from the norm? Everyone believed in a standard, approachable reading format from left to right until poets and writers started messing around with that (I'm thinking ee cummings and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski). People tried to defy conventional ways to listen to music or watch movies too.

The DF UI is definitely a pain on the practical side and it's made it difficult for me to really get into the game yet, but from an outside perspective I think it's interesting that way too.

> If I understand correctly, you say that software as an art form must by default have a conventional and easily usable UI or means of interaction, ("practical considerations of the medium") before considering anything artistic such as the gameplay itself?

Yes. Exactly!

And in many cases (especially with games), people DO play around with the practical necessities and often stumble on something inspired. Like HomeStarRunner's "Virus" SBemail, or fourth-wall-breaking adventure games that comment on their own interface. But I think in DF's case it falls flat.

Western music is written in a consistent scale for practical considerations: it was discovered that writing music in a mathematically consistent format made it easiest for musicians to play and reinterpret. Sure, people deviate, but the vast majority of those efforts are terrible. Cinema -- even avant garde -- is constrained to the limits of film, audience attention, and patterns in storytelling, and the viewer generally expects certain things. Literature is constrained by the practical considerations of books and the written word, and so written text is formatted consistently per reader expectations. How is software any different?

Or the thought-games played by the Espers in The Demolished Man.

Personally I don't think the UI was planned out that much; maybe "it gradually got so" as the song says.

I think it's a bit like the qwerty keyboard. Maybe there was a rational for it at one point, but now it's just a thing you memorize and then don't think about much. In DF the 'loo(k)', '(v)iew', and '(q)uery' commands do similar but disjoint things which could easily be combined if Tarn really wanted to stop working on features for a while. Since he doesn't, it's just a thing that you memorize and then no longer need to think about; it becomes very much like touch typing.

There is no reason any game developer has to follow any particular established norm. That's a bit of an entitled point of view.

And I totally get their feelings against UI. Low level UI is a bitch to write and difficult to get right. I have abandoned ideas when I realized just how much work it would take.

These guys are clearly really smart. I agree with the other posts here in that I have no beef with the gameplay in any way. But god damn it would be nice if they would get off their high horse and learn from some working engineers.

If someone thinks they're better than you because they use the ASCII graphics rather than a graphics pack, then they are being a jackass. It's about the game, not about what it looks like.

That being said, I play it regularly and I found its learning curve incredibly similar to learning Vim. Videos really help in this regard - plus reddit's dorf fort community is really welcoming. Watch videos, pause a lot, and practice. A huge part of the game is !!FUN!!, which can be directly translated to "you will lose quite often". And that's okay!

From what I remember, the developer has said that he doesn't want to put much effort into the UI until the very end of the project, because he's constantly redesigning large subsystems and reworking the game mechanics. Any UI tied to any system or mechanic that gets ripped out, redesigned, or otherwise turned inside-out is going to have to be reworked every time that happens. So it gets a barebones UI until the underlying game mechanics are stable.

I feel like the only way anything you want is going to happen is in DF2.

Play it in text mode then, it is only menus.

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