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Comment by zyxley | Hacker News Reader

To quote myself from the last time I commented on an article about DF:

I will continue to have no interest in Dwarf Fortress until it has an actual UI instead of whatever insane random combinations of controls the developer felt like adding on any particular day.

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In that case, you might want to give http://gnomoria.com/ a try, which is similar to dwarf fortress, but significantly less complex, easier to control, and looks decent out-of-the-box.

You might also be interested in https://www.factorio.com/ which is a game about building factories (free world, 2d isometric). Aside from being addictive, it is also performant, looks good, has a decent soundtrack and comes with all of it's ingame-stats conveniently embedded in Lua-sourcefiles (which you don't even have to parse-- just run them through the interpreter if you want to start modding/theorycrafting).

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with those games in any way, just promoting them because they're awesome (best entertainment/price ratio of anything I ever paid for).

I'm already a big fan of both, actually.

I loved Factorio, but had to give it up because it gave me worse eye strain than any program ever has.

There's an entire subgenre of games trying to make less ambitious, prettier versions of Dwarf Fortress. Banished, for instance. You could argue that even Minecraft attempts to be a 3d dwarf fortress, where you control your one dwarf.

The extra effort in the UI tends to leave far worse games than Dwarf Fortress though.

Minecraft was actually started as an explicit DF clone and then deviated from there

Minecraft was started as a clone of Infiniminer.

Infiniminer and Dwarf Fortress.

I don't know what definition of "clone" you use, but in my eyes you are using the word too liberally here. Was there any stage of Minecraft development that was even remotely similar to Dwarf Fortress in concept? When I started playing it it lacked, say, crafting, and the only concept it really shared with Dwarf Fortress was the idea of generating terrain procedurally; a concept shared by many games, and one that makes Minecraft compare to Dwarf Fortress like a propeller beanie compares to a wind turbine.

Notch has said so himself.

Which of course makes it so.

You're missing out. I mean, I assume that you're doing other things with your time and enjoying them instead, but Dwarf Fortress is a unique experience well worth a few hours every couple of years.

A few hours every couple of years? I admire your discipline.

If I wait a couple of years to play, I end up losing a weekend or two to a few forts. I have to get my fix by spending a day or two every few months. No other game does that to me.

At least many of these "insane random combinations of controls" follow a pretty OK mnemonic naming convention.

b>c to build a chair

b>d to build a door

b>w>l to build a still (type of workshop, many other things under b>w)

Exactly. Which is exactly like games like Starcraft or Warcraft, where there are any number of things you can "do" as a player. No one complained about those games' UI. DF has this and more. Therefore, the UI becomes more involved. I think what this really boils down to is "I haven't played the game and everyone says it's really hard, so I guess I won't try. Instead I'll go online and complain about the UI I've never used."

This is the first time I have heard someone suggest that DF has UI design of comparable quality to Starcraft or Warcraft (or any other major game for that matter).

This is the kind of stuff that always trips me up:

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Controls#Building...

Several different sets of keys to use depending on what you're manipulating, even though they all have to do with direction. I can never remember and always have to use the in-game help.

Whereas, when I play nethack or DCSS or brogue, 99% of the things my fingers do, they do without needing to consult their external memory (my brain).

The interface is so simple (okay, nethack's is not, but I started playing it at an early age, so it's baked in to my fingers now) that it's a joy to operate the game.

Once your brain doesn't have to drive your fingers, the interface becomes an extension of you and you achieve a kind of flow where you're interacting with the (game) world without thinking about it. Anybody who has learned to drive stick shift (especially if you already knew how to drive an automatic) knows this feeling.

We place a strong emphasis on usability and interface in crawl. For example, we actively avoid putting items in the inventory slot corresponding to using them: potions shouldn't land on 'q', food on 'e', etc. Another advantage is that we're dealing with a simpler game. Brogue takes this one step further and I think does a fabulous job. For example, there are no inventory stacks on the floor. Either there's an item or there isn't. Adding stacks would impose a complexity cost without improving gameplay.

Back in 2009-2010 on DCSS we were very fortunate to have one of our developers organized a usability study. The usability study ran over several months and produced a ton of feedback. Since the core team is around 30, we actually had the throughput to act on these recommendations.

DCSS is absolutely fantastic.

I wrote an IRC bot last year for myself and a small community on IRC (5 of us at the time), that specifically monitored only us by paying attention to lines said in ##crawl. It also passed along commands to the appropriate bots (Henzell, Gretell, etc), and responded with their responses. The bot was pretty crappy through, as it was just an irssi script with a buncha hacked perl.

https://github.com/shmup/OCTOTROG/blob/master/crawl.pl

A friend in the community rewrote it as a proper bot, and has extended it much more. This little community of ours (now up to 20 or so people) has had a ton of fun thanks to this, because we get the usefulness of ##crawl without the spam.

http://octotrog.neckro.com

https://github.com/neckro/OCTOTROG.JS

Brogue just blows my mind with how simple it is. The magic system is reified as items. You really only have one stat (strength) IIRC. The food clock is both dead accurate and merciless [0].

I haven't played DCSS in a few years, but when I did, it was literally feast or famine: I would either be walking around with dozens of rations or else dying of hunger all the time. Herbivorous races like Spriggans didn't have very high food consumption but also didn't have many options in case they didn't find vegetarian food.

I read the summary page for the usability study, it seemed to give tons of (in particular) very _actionable_ feedback.

[0] Nethack, as much as I love it, causes brain damage in the same way that BASIC does: it shapes the way your brain works in a disadvantageous way. Consider that all of the nethack variants _add_ features (and are unabashed about it, SLASH stands for Super Lots of Added Stuff Hack).

pender has done an amazing job with Brogue. Without a doubt it's the best roguelike out there today. It doesn't have the same scale as crawl, but I think this is more of a strength than anything else. Slogging through 51 levels in a normal length game or upwards of 100 in extended is just exhausting. I joke that every time crawl gets better, we do it by cribbing something from Brogue.

Two features that come to mind are summoning mechanics and axes. Previously summoned monsters would stick around after a summoner died. This encouraged players to just run away if too many summons dropped. Instead, brogue pops all the summoned creatures as soon as you kill the summoner. This raises interesting tactical possibilities: Do I expend items to kill a summoner? Do I try to separate a summoner from other monsters?

It's on par with using vi, but once you get over the speed bump it actually feels natural and you go through the menus without even thinking about it.

Granted, this isn't easy for everyone.

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