Dwarf Fortress: An actual look at graphical improvements
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I myself still play both DCSS and DF in ASCII mode, but it seem reasonable to presume that the reason that old hands like us are fine with the ASCII look is because everyone who wasn't fine with it has self-selected themselves out of the sample. If their goal with the DF Steam release is to bring in new players (and compete with the likes of e.g. Rimworld, whose players are accustomed to graphics), then I see this as a sound decision.
(And of course, seconded that DF's nonsensical command UI is going to continue to stymie their efforts here.)
https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/
It does, however, also have the fanciest abstract ASCII graphics I've ever seen.
(the other reason is that it's just a damn good game)
Adding graphics to DF means more new players give it a try, but most of them are going to bounce off of the wildly inconsistent menus. It's an acquisition funnel thing; the total players will be incoming players times the percent that are okay with the graphics times the percent that are okay with the menus. My assertion is just that in DF's case the menus have room for a bigger lift, because they're really that bad.
Maybe because they're not used to ASCII look? What are the stats for old players? The tiles version has laughably low information density, I can't imagine playing it for any extended period of time.
Well, the stats for old players are subject to survivor bias.
> The tiles version has laughably low information density, I can't imagine playing it for any extended period of time.
I cannot speak for DF specifically, because perhaps the tiles do indeed have bad distinguishability, but from purely an HCI point of view images can contain a lot more visual information than a single character glyph + a color can, so that does not hold up generally.
What may apply to you is that you have already learned to "read" the ASCII mode, and therefore have to spend less conscious effort to make sense of it than of the tiles version, and that it therefore is indeed easier for you to play in.
In any tiled implementation of roguelike, Tiles are way larger than equivalent characters, so clearly in practice they don't.
Humans are very good at recognizing different letters. Images that differ by a few pixels, not so much. At the resolution at which the letters are displayed it's impossible to have an equivalent image that is recognizable in any way.
The fact is that in ascii mode I can see a large chunk of the level, including the entirety of my character's field of view. In tiles version, my screen is not large enough. I have to scroll just to see what my character is currently seeing. How is this better, or playable at all?
I'd say I played a lot of Pixel Dungeon on my phone compared to this.
Not everyone who grew up with DOS games has fond memories. I'm not one to chase the latest 3d graphics, but sometimes new things can be better for some people.
Remember, each creature has a bunch of parts with individual health, each tile can get stained by various materials (that can spread disease) and everything is made of various materials with all sorts of mostly-realistic properties. I mean, DF is the sole reason you can find the solid density of Saguaro rib wood on the internet and the value came from an empirical test of a small cube of Saguaro rib wood. It's in the DF raws.
So yeah, you might enjoy DF with a tile set like the LNP if you like the mechanics. But it's a super-complicated game so it takes a while to learn to control things, to learn the requirements to make various items, etc. It's not a game for everyone, you do have to sink quite a lot of time into learning it to enjoy it.
Consider Battlefield or COD Warzone, which simulate the effects of actions by multiple players (including projectile travel) in real time and still manage upwards of 100FPS of near photorealistic graphics.
Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.
Dwarf fortress is a very interesting game and a very deep simulation, but the idea that it's such a detailed simulation that graphics would not be possible is just untrue.
Honestly the UX in dwarf fortress is generally just insanely user-hostile and graphics are only a tiny symptom of that. And I say this as someone who plays and enjoys the game - I've had forts with upwards of 100 idiots^Wdwarfs in them, magma moats, breaching multiple cavern layers, surviving necromancer seiges etc. But every time I play I have to go through that thing over again where I try to figure out how to assign a pet to a person, when I set up a military squad getting them to wear the right equipment is a total chore, minecart UX is completely baffling. Also the simulation is very detailed but kind of broken in lots of annoying ways, like female dwarfs randomly dropping their babies while working, forgetting where they put them and then freaking out, random tantrum spirals because someone went out in the rain and so just decides to murder their colleagues etc.
>Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.
Compared to DF, both of those are an incredibly simple simulation that doesn't lend itself to emergent game play. If you're trying to make the argument that they're just as complicated and still have fancy graphics, that's not the case. DF is far, far, beyond anything in those "simulations" in terms of the back end.
I lament the lack of graphics in DF not because the UI is awful... I've played worse, and in fact Fallout 4's builder interface comes to mind... but because it's incomplete. Certain things that have shown up in third party utilities like Dwarf Therapist are nearly impossible to do without, making the base game more or less unplayable after a release until the third party stuff catches up.
A lot of what you mention regarding tantrum spirals has been fixed in the new release... the issues with dwarf emotions are much more balanced now. It's still the same game, though, so I haven't gotten decades into a fort yet, but I'm hopeful it'll be worth playing beyond the point it was in the past where things spiraled into angsty dwarf death.
I called this Kerbal or Skyrim Syndrome amongs friends.
Games that are no longer playable vanilla after you've had the luxuries of some of the simple convenience addons.
Thats why most have a GPU and that is why there are graphic engines, who do the rendering only of what is needed and produced by the simulation. So no, unless DF uses the gpu for simulating which I doubt, better graphics will not really affect simulation speed, if done right.
But yes, that is much harder.
There is also an ncurses renderer with plain Unicode text output for use in a terminal emulator which may be GPU accelerated, but most term software is not.
Nonsense. Rendering a grid of 2D tiles is exceptionally fast, so much so that converting font data into tiles is how you make text grids go faster!
And even if you do have a slow method, you can just run it on a different thread.
Also hopefully there's a pathfinding thread at some point.
The things that would actually help to split out are also the things that would be difficult to split out.
Pretty amusingly, DF used to spend most of its CPU on graphics. There was a graphics rewrite at some point that fixed it.
This was not written by the game's author, ToadyOne, but someone else. ToadyOne complains that he cannot understand the code anymore. For this reason, he will not open the source code again until he is dead.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/dwarf-fortress/dwarf-fortress-sourc...
Why do you think they had time to develop those features in the first place?
I'm itching to know how they are going to come up with graphical representations for all the randomly generated forgotten beasts. A character is abstract, but when you have a drawing, it conveys more meaning. I wouldn't be happy with a dragon picture or similar, while the forgotten beast was a corrosive gaseous entity.
The presentation may be a bit busy at times (if you embark on a forest, for instance), but it is otherwise fine.
Dwarf Fortress UI ergonomics is another story.
I could spend some more time learning the DF glyphs, but a picture is worth a thousand words.
I killed the Balrog in uMoria* back in the day, so I'm not a stranger to ASCII graphics. The difference between rogue-likes and DF is the extremely huge variability in the glyphs.
Edit: To continue the comparison to books, Dwarf Fortress is like an interactive textbook, Roguelikes compare to genre fiction.
*I'm a dirty save-scummer, but I still put in a bunch of time.
While I cannot speak for the developer, I can understand why they would go that route. Unless you have an interest in computer graphics, implementing them can be dreadfully dull. Unless you have an eye for design, creating the various graphical elements can lead to some interesting results.
I think this is a general feature of software that is very 'techy' for a lack of a better term. Dwarf Fortress is a pretty niche, hardcore game and people who build this sort of stuff don't always have the best sense of what a UX design ought to look like that appeals to the general user. A lot of Linux desktop software is like that too.
and the ux is not going to change radically.
Seems fairly obvious to me. The creator is playing to his strengths.
Tangentially, I remember the MoMA devoting a large chunk of a wall in its video game exhibit to the Dwarf Fortress ASCII display. The graphical tiles look great but the sheer density of ASCII definitely had retro appeal.
I don't dislike the keyboard approach used right now but DF hack and it's digging templates has clearly demonstrated that folks feel the lack of good dig designation sorely.
It shows a disregard for users and a self-imposed barrier to adoption. DF is horrid for usability. Just because I can screenshot notepad, print it out, and send mail on a turtle, does suffice to say I support an e-mail feature. Military squad mechanics are as byzantine as you can get.
I hope Dwarf Fortress will have a similar refit over time.
There are other issues that are much more important. Like the jobs interface. I don't want to have to run Dwarf Therapist alongside it, when games like Rimworld and ONI manage just fine.
Granted, it ends up essentially just turning on every profession for every dwarf, but it's still possible to restrict workshops to certain dwarves. For example, you might have a carpentry workshop set to produce endless amounts of wooden shields, but only allow skilled carpenters access to it.
I've never liked any of the full graphical tilesets. I find it a lot harder to keep track of everything on the screen, even when I figure out what the different tiles are supposed to be. The black background with clear discernible symbols of the ASCII and mostly ASCII tiles make it a lot easier to get information from a screen at a quick glance while you're scrolling around the map.
That being said, I do like firing up stonesense and taking a look at the fortress from that perspective just because it's awesome and I still hope for the day some enterprising miracle worker creates a real time 3d renderer for dwarf fortress.
The graphics serve the game, that's critical. If there was a choice between a fantastically complicated ASCII-only Dwarf Fortress and a graphical version with half the features, that's a clear win for ASCII DF. But here the only downside to graphics is that they're very slightly more effort on some systems and the pay off is that the game is better in practice even if only slightly.
In these present circumstances Board Game Arena https://boardgamearena.com/ is getting lots of extra attention because those of us used to playing board games socially can't go to someone's house to get infected with this virus and incidentally play board games. So we have to find another way (to do the latter obviously).
Sites like Tabletopia virtualize the physical environment of a board game. A game that comes with forty wooden pieces now has forty 3D objects. Can you stack this cow on a house? Tabletopia doesn't know what rules are, so sure, just grab the cow 3D object and balance it on the house. This is amusing for a few minutes, then you realise it's every disadvantage of playing a "real" board game, but without any advantages. Who got most settlements in this game of Clans of Caledonia? Well, let's painstakingly count the 3D pieces, then argue about it. Over at BGA there's no problem, the machine is implementing the actual game (not just providing a generic 3D simulation) and so it shows exactly how many settlements you have at all times.
The trade offs are different than for being there in person, but since we cannot be there in person it's an easy win right now for Board Game Arena in the opinion of myself (and apparently thousands of other people since they're having to do emergency scaling to handle several times more players at once in their lobbies).
I used tilesets when I was learning the game which I would recommend since it can be a lot to take in all at once.
People talk about the subjectivity of beauty, but I've never felt like the sheer polarity of opinion gets enough emphasis...
(For the record: Dwarf Fortress's controls never bothered me, and I've never been able to play without a tileset. The same for NetHack and other ASCII games.)
I still play DF (and DCSS, for that matter) with graphics. It's just so much easier to parse, doesn't require me to spend months "getting used to" the ASCII display (in addition to the rest of DF's arduous learning curve), and it's prettier to boot.
Having a consistent menu system would be frickin' fabuluous. Art does very little here.
I know the regular version has been available for free forever, but the ASCII graphics have always been a turn-off. I'm not opposed to MUD-style graphics in general, Dwarf Fortress is just so dense with stuff that I found I spent most of my time just trying to figure out what was going on.
I'm definitely looking forward to this graphical version, though. And hoping that one day the game will even support multiple threads, but that's probably wishful thinking.
So, I'm just waiting for them to fulfill their end of the bargain. Then I will pay.
I found Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead much easier to get into. As a new Cataclysm DDA player I spent most of my time learning how to survive in the early days of a zombie apocalypse. Finding food, learning how to craft weapons, what the zombies are capable of.
In one game I found a large mansion in the woods. There were a few zombies inside but not too many to prevent me from clearing it out. I set up camp in one of the bedrooms. The mansion had loads of food, water, materials for crafting. Good times!
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead https://cataclysmdda.org/
The game is supposed to be hard, but if you at all know what you're doing it's very easy to keep your fort well, and the only real risk of losing your fort is from you intentionally doing stuff that puts your fort at risk. You literally can defeat entire enemy armies by capturing them all with cage traps, for example.
This I can forgive.
Dwarf fortress is all about the crazy stupid ideas you can come up with after all. Want to build any interesting structures? Prepare for your dwarfs to get stuck every conceivable way one could possibly get stuck trying to build a simple wall. It can be incredibly tedious to accomplish something that ideally shouldn't take more than a few simple commands.
All of this I could live with. The performance without fail is what eventually kills my will to play. Want to do cool stuff with magma? Watch the game slow to a crawl. Want to run a big society? Watch the game slow to a crawl. Want to do anything remotely interesting? Watch the game slow to a crawl.
People go to obscene lengths to keep their performance, such as generating atom smashers that will 'delete' unwanted stuff from their fort completely, so the game stops wasting energy rendering 5000 rocks and how each dwarf is reminded about their childhood traumas as every rock reminds them of how their father died from a falling rock.
This game is so close to being great but falls short at the very last mile because the basic gameplay is fundamentally flawed. This is a simulator first, game second and it shows :(
I mean, the pipe performance fix took one factorio dev half a year. I feel like having no forward motion apart from performance for that long might demotivate tarn, and that was just for one subsystem. In a game which already invested in multithreaded performance.
I bought the best single-threaded CPU perf I could find at the time (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html) and put it in the smallest case that could support it.
End-game Crusader Kings 2 takes two seconds to simulate each day on my 2017 Macbook Pro. My desktop PC can simulate half a year in that time. I can also play on the largest Stellaris galaxies.
Sooo much more enjoyable when you can run a simulation as fast as you want. Now I can actually finish games instead of bailing at mid-game when things start to slow down.
If you like this kind of game, but would want something not as demanding, try Rimworld. Out of all dwarffortresslikes (I don't think that calling them Dward Fortress clones is fair), it's got a good amount of polish, reasonable 2d graphics (nothing too fancy, but looks nice) and most importantly, you don't feel as if you have to manually tweak every little thing. You still can, you just don't have to.
And there's a vibrant mod community: https://discordapp.com/invite/rimworld
I've created a few simple mods and it was a pleasant experience.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/fpe522/tynan_is_l...
However - I found that many parts of Dwarf Fortress disappointed me (and I was hyped as heck to play it - given that I'm a fan of Nethack, DCSS, Cataclysm, and basically any rougelike or rougelite). The game just feels extremely unfinished. Adventure mode is a total joke. Performance is totally garbage. The creator refuses to open source his game (no one will laugh at you man!). The documentation is horrific (no one quite knows how some of the BASIC SKILLS work or what they do)
It's got the potential to be a true gem, but right now, it's like an uncut diamond in the rough.
Might as well just play Rimworld. Rimworld solved every single problem that Dwarf Fortress had and its world is more compelling to me.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Utility:Stonesense
It's not a complete front end. It cannot control the game, just provide a visualisation of the world.
There is more than one mod in this category, but you may be thinking of Stonesense: https://dfhack.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/stonesense/d...
DF is a bit rough as a casual gamer (me), but don’t many game designers consider it the greatest game ever made? The complexity of the underlying system of simulation is mind-boggling, especially for a two-person project.
Solution: https://github.com/mifki/df-twbt
This is included in various content packs, so setting this up manually is optional.
> The game doesn't actually use ascii output, it renders the text (windows terminals would probably be too slow)
Linux and OS X terminals are fast enough. The init.txt setting [PRINT_MODE:TEXT] switches the renderer to ncurses.
[1] Kruggsmash: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaifrB5IrvGNPJmPeVOcqBA
[2] Creature characters: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Creature
That said, DFHack is probably sufficient for this purpose.
Obviously there's no official API, but the developer has somehow managed to achieve something similar.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dwarf-fortress-remote/id100366...
A raytraced DF front end would be breathtaking.
- "Dwarves form grudges with animals"
- "Flying creatures stop flying, fall to the ground, and explode"
- "Knocked out teeth dont bleed"
- "Rodent men don't use their new teeth to bite."
- "Eyes can't be gouged out"
https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/changelog_page.p...
Looking at LCS source was a lesson in how unimportant good programming can be when it comes to making a fun game. But I still can't bring myself to shed all my hygienic programming practices whenever I sit down to hack on a toy. It's really kind of frustrating, since it does add significant time to the development process from waffling about good names and clean abstractions.
It will be interesting to see what they do with the interface. I've thought before that a complete mapping and redesign of all Dwarf Fortress screens and actions would be material enough for an entire thesis on UX.
Granted, it's been about 10 years since I played it.