Comment by oortoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oortoo | Hacker News Reader

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Dwarf Fortress's Steam UI is by far, my least favorite thing about the game. Does anyone else agree?

After playing with the Lazy Newb's Pack and other similar tools for years, I found the Steam version to be a maaaaasive downgrade. The mouse was tied to the framerate, everything felt sluggish and hard to control.

It really irks me because I had been telling everyone for years to play this game, and finally it gets an "official" release and I found it to be... the worst version of the game I'd tried yet.

Maybe its improved since I last tried it. But it would be hard to outdo what the fans had done with the UI, IMO. Even features like seasonal color schemes felt almost vital to me. Not to mention customizing your own preferred sprites...

I almost wish Tarn and Zach had kept to building core gameplay and let the fans handle the UI, with some sort of official team-up to bring it to Steam.

I'd recommended Lazy Newb Pack to almost anyone but I don't think I'd recommend the Steam version, at least the version I tried.

I also experienced performance issues when it came out on Steam, but that seems to be resolved now, and they've fixed a huge number of bugs related to things like squads, crossbows, etc. I'd give it another shot.

Has anything changed where the original version of the game no longer receives updates? I understood that the whole reason for the initial release of the steam version was to get more people exposed to the game and to allow the creators to actually start making money from their efforts.

If anything, I would recommend purchasing the steam version to support the creators. Continue to play the game any way that you like afterward.

The free version got it's entire UI changed, matching the Steam version, just with ASCII graphics. Obviously you can still play old versions, but if you want to play with all the new features, you can't go full keyboard anymore.

I don't mind the UI so much but my biggest issue is they got rid of the keyboard controls.

I really wish they'd put some actual effort into the graphics of the game. Even some minimal animations would be nice.

I actually think this type of suggestion/thinking is not good for the game. the mystique of dwarf fortress is that it's a game that plays in your imagination, not on the screen. the point of the ascii visuals is to give a player enough context to understand the state of the world, but it's intentionally obtuse so fun arrises from your brain having to color in all the details. any suggestion that tries to add more polish to the graphics brings you farther away from where the fun lives

Going to have to agree to disagree here. Graphical polish would make it much more enjoyable for me, and I spent enough time with the ascii version back in the day to get used to it.

Good thing is they can and do have both styles.

Granted I haven't played the steam version in awhile, I didn't have a ton of issues with it, and the non-steam version was just not for me. Additionally, I believe they hired another dev who was cleaning up a lot of things, so maybe better now?

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