Dwarf Fortress, the Great Ancestor | Hacker News Reader

Dwarf Fortress, the Great Ancestor

zarkonnen.com

77 pointsZarkonnen23 comments

The handful of games inspired by Dwarf Fortress are cool, but I really hope somebody is working on a proper successor. A game that's even more ambitious with its simulation, with the software appropriately designed so it can be multithreaded and optimized.

Dwarf Fortress is amazing. It's quite possibly my favorite game of all time. But at the same time, it's really only scratching the surface of what's possible with this kind of simulation. There's a whole genre of incredibly deep RPGs just waiting to be created.

That may be hard, since DF is under constant development.

Being more ambitious in the sim department will be excruciatingly hard, since DF already has an almost silly level of simulation:

http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/5926447/dwarf-fortress-will...

That said, yeah, it's a cool genre which could use some real love.

I think it would be interesting to see something DF-inspired at an MMO scale. I'd like to imagine what a larger team could do, with access to lots of parallel CPU power. DF does a lot of work abstracting things that are off-site, since a typical PC can't simulate the entire world in realtime. But if you had enough servers sharing the work, I expect you could do much more. Throw in a bunch of players all giving some direction to their own little autonomous civilisations, and I think it would be fascinating to watch.

DF also already has an almost silly level of ambition: http://bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

Awesome article, thanks

It's really encouraging to hear I am not the only one who thinks so. It's kind of my dream to build a game with that sort of depth someday.

For now, I'm trying to solve subsets of the problem in a more limited scope by creating a crafting/building game that understands real-world material proprieties.

The upshot of this approach is that the player can experiment with crafting say, a bow, out of any of the materials they have on hand. Some may work better than others, based on the properties of the material. I'm hoping this approach enables more player creativity because it's much more flexible.

I suspect though, that it will prove to be tremendously difficult to balance the game as there will always be edge cases where very overpowered items can exist, but maybe that's half the fun.

/r/outside was like this, then some asshole discovered that ramming together two heavy elements really hard was massively OP and ruined the game for everyone.

DF is one of the top games at creating emergent scenarios, and yet not very good at it. Many parts are tedious, broken or not very fledged.

I really wish more games opened their AI, including conversation. Using them for little Turing experiments is a lot more fun than item mods.

Just a heads up that the majority of the page took around 15 seconds to load, and that was after a few refreshes.

http://i.imgur.com/wzJAp3Y.png

Huh, that's rather unfortunate. Thank you for pointing that out, I'll see that I can fix things!

The author writes about balancing difficulty of DF. I've seen many people saying that DF is too easy once you figure it out. It's true that it isn't a difficult game, but I think it's missing the point. The point of DF is simulation, not being a difficult game. There's a lot of beauty in it. If you want to be challenged there are better games for that. If you want to explore virtual worlds or excercise creativity you've got a deal.

This NYT story about the guys that wrote Dwarf Fortress is amazing. One of them was a Phd candidate, but now they survive on the money from DF fans - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of...

The guys who make it are really cool and accessible. There have been lots of crazy fan projects doing research they hope for them to incorporate in the game somehow (e.g. material properties research, tree research, http://imgur.com/EPtgt ...)

For another vast 2D game experience check Distant Worlds, 4x space strategy with tens of thousands of planets and asteroids http://www.spacesector.com/blog/2011/10/distant-worlds-retur...

>. But at this point, DF has a relationship to modern games much like a literary classic does to other books: it will help you understand where a lot of stuff is coming from.

According to wikipedia DF came out in 2006? Where does the classic book analogy come from.

Yeah. DF owes a lot to nethack (interface, interaction of lots of elements, code quality), which has much more claim to be a classic (it's been popular for decades, and is still fun). DF captured a certain kind of imagination but it belongs to a long tradition of detailed modelling of civilizations in games.

They are stating that just as concepts and themes from classic books resurface in more modern books, gameplay concepts and themes from DF can be found in modern videogames.

That isn't to say DF does not contain themes from previous videogames, or that it is the progenitor for modern games; just an influence.

The article is quite explicitly calling it a classic it doesn't actually mention any predecessors that it inherits from (I haven't played DwarfFortress, but reading about it suggests to me, games such as Ultima, Moria, Angband).

We consider many of Shakespeare's works to be classics, but he pulled a lot of his themes and ideologies from the Bible, the Illiad and the Odyssey.

One does not need to be first to be a classic.

Actually Shakespeare also pulled many of his themes from other writers very much closer to him in history (and he was criticized for it in his time actually), but as it remains those writers i.e. Christopher Marlowe are not well known and Shakespeare is (but it is essential to this that merely reusing-retelling-retheming of classical aspects is not enough for this, many others besides Shakespeare did this in those days, as many films, and tv-series do it now).

To give an idea of how revolutionary DF is, I'd say it's just as close to The Sims and Minecraft as it is to Angband.

It is revolutionary because its scale and breadth, the way it integrates so many moving parts and procedural generation.

But "inspirational" it's not: procedural generation has been used in games since the dawn of times (the 80s!), and same goes for huge sandbox games (Elite), economic/military simulations (civilization, sim city, star control), etc... if anything, DF it was insipired by some of these games, and merged their gameplay into something unique.

In a way, it´s depressing (although understandable) how AAA titles in the last 20 years have focused on graphical improvements and standardized gameplay, instead of exploring new territory.

The recent resurgence (and commercial success) of indies it's the best thing to have happened to gaming in some time.

dwarf fortress is the war & peace of games.

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