The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress

It's actually not that hard to get the basics if you're used to ASCII graphics or using a tileset. I was able to figure out how to play it (with the help of the wiki for laptop-friendly controsl) in only half an hour of poking around, mostly.

I used to play a lot of Dwarf Fortress but like you I realized that it takes a lot time. I ended up quitting the addiction because I needed to get some real work done. One thing about DF: there is never a lack of things to do with your world. In my last game I built an engraved obsidian cast tower. In Dwarf Fortress terms this means I built a powered pump system to extract magma from the earth and water from a nearby river and used the water and magma to cast obsidian for a stone tower which I then hollowed out with rooms and storage areas as a dwelling place for my dwarves. Around the tower I built a magma moat for defense from the marauding goblins and zombies. The fortress has survived more than 15 years of attacks so far. I just don't open it up for fear of getting hooked on DF again. ;)

I was going to say: I admire Tarn's exquisitely esoteric sense of taste, which informs his art and makes both him and others happy, but I try not to shame other people for being addicted to achievement. We are all addicted to achievement. Some of us are just much, much kinkier about it than others. ;)

I have yet to definitively locate the bright shining line between a great game and an evilly addictive game. I certainly believe the people who say that WoW, Minecraft, and now Dwarf Fortress are excellent games, yet I don't play them because I don't want to be addicted. And the fact that, say, bridge and chess are socially approved addictions, requiring much more practice to attain skill, doesn't make them harmless. People get addicted to Scrabble, ice hockey, knitting, model making, composing tiny essays on Hacker News, mathematics, and of course programming just as they get addicted to Angry Birds. Is it the fact that these hobbies are less accessible that makes them less "evil"?

Hostile, thank you for posting this, Do you think that any other designers are like him?

My point was, from a "how well-known are they" standpoint, these other guys earn a lot more points for just being rich and famous than they do for being great hackers.

No doubt many of them continue to do great technical work that constitutes "great hacking" in anybody's book. But that's not why (by and large) people buy the books and become fans.

If you are focusing on the technical skill of hackery then you are going down the wrong trail. I'm talking about living the life of hacking, as most hackers understand and would actually practice it, as opposed to being a famous hacker. Let's face it, odds are you'll never be a billionaire with your own rocket company. But you just might spend 20 years of your life working on a pet project. These guys are our guys. They're us.

These days he splits his non-Ferrari-driving-time between hacking on next gen. cross-platform game engines and hacking on rockets (at Armadillo aerospace). He may be a successful hacker, but he's most definitely a hacker right down to the core.

To be fair, Gates was more business man than any sort of hacker. While Zuckerberg may have actually coded his first product, unlike Gates, making a web app, no matter how popular, is far cry from what Carmack and Wozniak have done.

Perhaps it's an illustration that it's often not fancy maths and algorithms that pay, but rather being in the right place at the right time with the right product. That said, there are instances like Google and Carmack where it really was the algorithms that made the difference.

Second your disagreement.

Woz is a real hacker, if not one of the best ever.

Long excerpt from his amazing Founders at Work interview.

"This was two weeks away and Mike Markkula said yes. So that was my motivation. I always had these little fictitious motivations that motivated me and got me to do such great work. So I sat down and designed the floppy disk, and Randy Wigginton (he was the guy just out of high school) and I came in every single day including Christmas and New Years for 2 weeks. I came in every single day leading up to, I think it was January 3 or 5, when we went off to Las Vegas. I almost had this floppy disk done.

I got it to where it was writing data on a track, reading the data on a track. Then I got it to where it was reading the data in the right byte positions. Then I got it to work with shifting tracks, and we wanted a simple program where we would say "run checkbook" or "run color math" and it would run the programs that were stored on the floppy disk. So we went off to Las Vegas, and Randy and I worked all night and we got it done to where it was working. At the very end, it was 6:00 a.m. and I said, 'We have to back up this floppy disk." We had one good disk that we prepared with the data hand-massaged to get it just right. So I stuck it in the floppy and wrote a little program, and I typed in some data and I said "read track 0," stuck in the other floppy and said "write track 0, read track 1, write track 1." There were 36 tracks—I had to switch floppies back and forth.

When I got done, I'm looking at these 2 floppies that look just the same. And I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I did. So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my head and my listings, recreated everything, got it working again, and we showed it at the show. It was a huge hit. Everybody was saying, "Oh my God, Apple has a floppy!" It just looked beautiful, plugged into a slot on our computer. We were able to say "run color math," and it just runs instantly. It was a change in time.

But the real eureka moment for me was the very first time I ever read data back. I wrote it on the floppy, which was easy, but read it back, got it right. I just died."

The whole interview (and book) are inspiring:

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

Bravemule (http://www.bravemule.com/matulremrit/) is the best Dwarf Fortress-related writeup I have ever read. It is fantastically illustrated, and captures the black humor and horror of Dwarf Fortress better than anything else I have read. Check it out.

haha! that's awesome.

there's an ncurses mode in the linux version. i use it to play over ssh, as my laptop is weak. the opengl is mainly for tileset support.

It has half a dozen rendering modes too, due to various driver bugs and GPU performance profiles. There are massive threads on the forum of people trying different settings to squeeze out a few more FPS, especially on lower end hw.

While I have never played it, I have heard good things about the complexity of the Europa Universalis series. IF author Adam Cadre wrote a mini-review of it a few years ago:

http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/10898.html

I can vouch for Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, and Victora (all from the same developer as Europa Universalis: Paradox Interactive) as having the kind of beyond-Civ levels of depth and complexity you're looking for. Each is tailored to it's own slice of history in a way that Civ by nature can't be.

From what I've heard, not really. He tests a lot (he posts about it on the devlog), but I've heard he doesn't use version control even.

Supposedly his code is pretty rough. That would explain why development is slow and the game pretty bug-ridden.

The only thing he's missing out on is romance and sex. His occupation and lifestyle appears to satisfy all the other typical human needs. Taking a DSM perspective is not the most enlightening perspective.

The sex thing is a big problem.

In the past, great artists were able to find companionship and sex despite poverty and oddness. Why is it that hackers have such difficulty? If Richard Stallman's medium was anything other than computers he would have to fight off the women, but somehow hackers are girl-repellent despite being devoted artistic geniuses?

I don't think his devotion will last long or stay fresh unless he starts fulfilling sex and romance needs. Exposure like this NYT article should help, and also a rising income would help a lot. Then he still has to make time for women and he might find the intimacy too threatening.

Anyway for the sake of Dwarf Fortress and his art ambitions I hope he figures out a way to fulfill sex needs. Other than that I don't see anything unsustainable or obviously unhealthy about his lifestyle.

> And I wonder if the level of dedication he has demonstrated requires Asperger's.

People always jump to Asperger's the moment they hear this was all put together by one guy. It is as if they refuse to believe a normal person can have willpower enough to accomplish so much. It is simple: take a single step every day towards a single goal for several years.

Listen to his podcasts[1]. He is about as chill/normal/well-adjusted as people come.

[1] http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/df_talk.html

The early civ games were susceptible to the mongol hord method, which the designer never considered.

There are a lot of releases, and fairly often; I've had versions go "out of date" on me within a week of its release. The forums are very active, and when they say something is unbalanced or broken, it tends to get fixed. Some things are not serious game-breakers, even if they are mildly broken (see: elephants in the versions that Boatmurdered used), and those tend to stay in until it becomes a pain to deal with.

Basically, it's just trial-and-error. But it makes for an interesting game, because you're never quite sure if everything will work as expected.

I still can't get a grip on Nethack. I think I need to print out the list of key bindings in order to actually play.

I liked nethack, angband, and rogue.

Then I found ADOM -- (www.adom.de), which is great fun, but turned into a "second system" problem with JADE (development slowed so he could rewrite entirely in Java...). Still, amazingly fun.

I never got into dwarf fortress or minecraft, but will check them out more after 25 August :)

Reminds me of the experience of sitting around a table with some brilliant people arguing about what our role-playing-game characters should do next. Hey, we're in a heated, passionate, frustrating meeting, and we're not even getting paid!

We should start a company or something...

He makes all of the donation information public, so you can see for yourself:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=87996.0

June: $2374.03

May: $3010.58

April: $3018.42

March: $4220.20

February: $2113.11

January: $2158.91

I added January from the previous post, just to get the whole year in there.

If you're going about it for the first time, I'd recommend the Lazy Newb Pack:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=59026.0

Because of the somewhat eccentric nature of the DF menus, this contains a number of utilities like Dwarf Therapist that are, IMO, indispensable for running a fortress of more than about twenty dwarves. It also has a custom tileset built in and an isometric visualization tool.

I have learned the keystrokes, and have spent countless hours playing it. The interface is still absolutely awful. It's so inconsistent and needlessly convoluted.

Just to be clear, I'm not wishing that DF had a point-and-click interface. I'm happy that DF is keyboard-controlled. It's just that this keyboard control could have been made a lot less painful with a tiny bit of consideration for consistency and efficiency.

As far as roguelikes go, nethack has a pretty nice interface (except for the stupid # commands), though even there there's some room for improvement. DF should have been modeled on that, or at least with some input from players on how the interface could have been improved.

At the absolute least, the author could have let the same actions on different screens of the game be activated with the same keystrokes, rather than requiring completely different keystrokes for some perverse and unfathomable reason.

Another quite workable solution would be to let the keystrokes be user-configurable. That would go a long way towards lessening the pain.

From what I remember reading when I was frequenting the bay12 forums, it's a mixture of pride (the code is very rough, and it would probably take a huge amount of effort to get it into a form where contributions from others could be useful, or even where others could contribute) and control (he doesn't want it to get out of his control, and as it's his only source of income he doesn't want to deal with donations and community being fractured between several versions). The fanbase both doesn't care (based on donations) and sees it as a challenge (there have been some interesting analyses posted of what the game is doing, and there's a thriving modding community - both in the form of modifications to the game's files, which is supported and encouraged, and modifications to the game through memory editing, leading to the creation of invaluable tools like Dwarf Therapist).

If your only reason for not trying it is that it's not in apt, just go to the website and download it. It doesn't take any installation; just download it, extract the contents, and run the game.

a fusion between nethack and minecraft (and the sims) is a good description I feel.

Dwarf Fortress is, in many ways, the anti-nethack.

In Nethack, you can parse the source code to figure out nearly any situation, that is, it's a closed, nearly solvable system. (See http://sporkhack.com/design_concept.html for some commentary on nethack being 'solved'.)

Dwarf Fortress, on the other hand, is totally emergent. Toady logs in and plays to check if his coding worked well, that is he goes looking for the situations he is referring to in his code and observes them.

I love them both, but I'm enjoying dwarf fortress more right now.

I didn't realize DF had been around so long. Scala wasn't introduced until 2003 and Haskell certainly wasn't nearly as mature then.

I have not played Dwarf Fortress, but is the game really so processor intensive that a 1 GHz dual-core iPad 2 (with GPU) could not keep up?

Well you are making the assumption I am referring to a romantic relationship.

The article presents (and this may be the reporters bias) the picture of someone with minimal social contact. Whilst I accept different people have a different level of need for social contact, this certainly feels more than a little unbalanced.

I realise whilst writing this reply that "sad" can be construed by some people in a derogatory sense. I didn't mean it in that way. I genuinely feel upset that, for whatever reasons, the lead developer feels that almost anything would be a distraction from his life's work, especially a partner and children. Intimate human relations - romantic or not - offer things no personal achievement can.