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Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

I always find amazing what one can accomplish when the scope is reduced enough. I don't think Dwarf Fortress would have a fraction of its features if it had sprites, non-tiled graphics, multiple visible layers, sound effects or a sane UI.

By taking those sacrifices we now have a game to behold.

I'm excited to try the new features.

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I don't think "limited scope" is a phrase that accurately describes Dwarf Fortress at all.

It has an extremely limited scope in particular carefully chosen ways, enabling an incredibly expansive scope in other much more important ways.

I really doubt the graphics would have much of an impact; after all (IIRC) they haven't really been updated in forever, meaning most of those 12 years were spent on the programming.

Graphics would have an impact on development - not having graphics makes it trivial to add large quantities new content, things, creatures, etc.

Even simple sprite graphics would require to be created/modified/maintained at every modification, thus increasing the barrier/cost of such changes and causing less changes/experiments to be done.

Currently, the author publishes the changes, and fan spritepack maintainers do all the work of maintaining those sprites and their relation to the raw datafiles - it's a lot of continuous work; if Toady would have to do all of it himself then it wouldn't scale.

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