Comment by tom_rath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tom_rath | Hacker News Reader

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For those of you who might be looking for something similar in a strategy/empire-building game, Dwarf Fortress is available for free at: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

With a free graphics front-end for the game at: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php

It's donation-ware, still under development, and the learning curve is a right-angle, but the game is really fun and addictive.

A wiki has been put together in lieu of proper documentation with this page: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Your_first_fortre...

providing everything you need to start.

If you enjoy the game, please donate. This is a startup which really deserves to succeed.

I downloaded Dwarf Fortress last Thursday. Worst decision I ever made.

After having no idea what I was doing on the first fort, I spent an hour reading the Wiki the next day. I then proceeded to spend 6 hours straight playing it.

This game is great, but you really have to read the documentation, otherwise it's pretty much impossible. I found that the more games I lost the more I learned for the next game which made it just that much more fun. Learning new things also had the side effect of causing my games to run longer, so.. be careful :)

Dwarf Fortress doesn't seem to work on Linux. Which is strange, since the GUI is ASCII. It is not open source, so I can't jump in and fix this either. All that said, it looks like a cool game.

It isn't just plain ASCII; DF actually uses OpenGL (!) to render ASCII characters.

I believe it runs under WINE.

Yes, it runs under wine, but in my experience you have to turn off sound.

That makes it easy: There is no in-game sound.

If you would like the DF music to play in the background, just fire up the game's mp3 (under /data/sound) on your player and you're off.

To be honest, I turn off the sound anyway. That one single tune on repeat gets slightly annoying after a couple of hours.

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