Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

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I always take the opposite view of the development of Dwarf Fortress. I think it is a shame how much the game has stagnated, and it is frustrating when the creator brags about not bothering to use version control.

I love Tarn and I think there is some wisdom in the way he develops, and he is clearly brilliant.

But I look at the state of Dwarf Fortress now, and Dwarf Fortress 5 years ago, and I do not see a huge amount of additional features and design space that has been explored.

Even when Tarn decided: "Hmm, maybe making some money for a product I am proud of and work extremely hard on" when he decided to add the Steam version, it has been a long load to make it there.

The game still has FPS death when fortresses get to a certain, actually relatively modest, size. This is a big deal, it means people cannot dig in as deep as they want with their fortresses. Imagine if your Skyrim game choked to death after investing months into a character because of an unspoken, undetectable limitation.

It is an impressive project, but the lesson I always take from his talks is: "Take your time. Build it right. Someday you may have to make a new GUI front-end, and I don't want that to take multiple people multiple years to accomplish."

> Even when Tarn decided: "Hmm, maybe making some money for a product I am proud of and work extremely hard on" when he decided to add the Steam version, it has been a long load to make it there.

Not quite. It's health concerns.

Quoting https://www.polygon.com/features/2019/3/14/18264569/dwarf-fo... :

"Not long ago, he explains, Zach had a cancer scare. Even with a good insurance plan, the costs to tease things out were high. When Adams looked at his own plan he was shocked.

“We were looking at the health care prices,” Adams says. “If it had been me — we grew up in the same town, right; we have all the same doctors and everything — I would have been wiped out.”

“It’s just scary,” Adams says, referring to the health care system. “The whole thing. So that was on our minds. But also, the whole crowdfunding environment has been a little bumpy, just in terms of how Patreon changes. [...] That’s just how it is in games in general. People just feel kind of a little squeezed right now.”

And so the brothers at Bay 12 are doing something they thought they’d never do. Nearly 16 years into the project, they’ve pulled the trigger on a plan to make a proper commercial release. But how they’re planning to do it is the remarkable part."

FPS issues is what eventually killed dwarf fortress for me. If you want to do anything interesting be prepared to watch the game slow to a crawl.

That and construction of anything being a nightmare as your dwarfs will get stuck in every conceivable way trying to build even a simple wall more than a meter high.

That said, I have spent hundreds of hours on the game with some great stories to tell so overall I can't complain too much.

>because of an unspoken, undetectable limitation.

It is certainly not. It's a well-known limitation.

And it's not even specific to Dwarf Fortress: with most "simulation" games you really can't have your cake and eat it too.

Some games sidestep it with "make-believe" simulation, where they reduce simulation resolution to arrive at something plausible, but not necessarily correct.

But that's not what people are playing DF for. I like my pinkies damn well simulated.

But your pinky doesn't have to be simulated every frame, right?

That entirely depends on your objectives; pragmatically, of course there are worthwhile optimizations to be made, from _my_ perspective, but my idea of optimization is not Tarn's.

I've followed DF since 2010. Tarn treats his game more like a hobby than a business. Of course, that is his prerogative, and maybe his objective.

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