Tyjenks
2681
I imagine once Toady put himself on some regular timetable with improvements along the lines of what all the rest of us might like other than what he feels like working on, he would lose his drive to do the crazy things he does and it would become more of a chore for him. Double-edged sword and all that. Best to stick with what we get. Although, what we get is pretty damned hard for me to keep up with. ;)
I disagree. This pretty well explains his plans. His development model, however, of giving the game away with semi-frequent updates and hoping for donations means getting the game playable every few months or years and then breaking all that to keep going. The new military, for example, is part of the overall army arc in which armies will be traveling all over the map to fight each other.
It is slow and frustrating. There is no doubt. I stopped playing until adventure is more robust. But I have no qualms waiting or knowing that each release gets us closer to what will be the best game evar.
That’s my point; I complain because:
a) I care
b) I donated to help him in this endeavour
c) I want a better game, yes, but under his model of development and without being detrimental to the whole of the game
That said, I’ve been playing it for years now and the menus, even if I remember them perfectly now, are still a work in progress that, in my opinion, could/should have precedence over uber-complex damage models.
Take the military for example. Had Toady revamped the military menus a year ago, he’d now be having to redo all of that work because the military has drastically changed. That’s a WASTE OF TIME. That’s also exactly why he hasn’t redone the interface yet.
rezaf
2685
But Toady’s ToDo list will NEVER be completely processed.
He needs to set himself milestones a year or two apart with some stuff he can reasonably hope to achieve in that timeframe and then finalize these versions at least to a certain degree.
In the late versions, I’ve increasingly felt that Toady is beginning to suffer from always implementing tons of new stuff before the stuff that was there before actually works as intended.
The newest major release (with the muscle tissue stuff etc.) has broken a lot of features, and Toady has struggled to fix even the most glaring issues - in fact he is still working on that.
Just leaving stuff in a semi-broken state planning to return to it later when lot of additional, equally semi-broken features have been implemented is asking for disaster. Especially when you’re not exactly a coding genius.
rezaf
JM1
2686
Making a coherent and intuitive interface means that when you rejig, remake, and add parts of your game, it’s not a gigantic clusterfuck when you do the UI for it.
Tyjenks
2687
Are all the versions cataloged somewhere so that we can at some point say, “This is the most non-broken version” and go back to it?
The DF Wiki has entries for all the different versions. If you’re looking for a nice, solid, stable version then go back to the last one released before the 2010 version. There was a 12-14 month chunk of time between the old version and the new one that has all the crazy additions and bugs.
This is about the worst possible argument in defense of the abysmal UI.
Waterboard me often enough and I’ll get used to it. But at the end of the day, it’s still waterboarding.
It’s a remarkably bad UI even given the restrictions of a keyboard-only interface. Not that there’s any excuse for such limited mouse support - it’s not 70’s. In any case, while it’s certainly possible to memorize the UI (as I have), that’s no excuse for the design.
It has better mouse support a few years ago. The Z level update basically got rid of it, though.
Which again points me toward the “waste of time, at this point” camp.
Anyone looking for my tutorial and wanting to play it on the mac then head somewhere in here… http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/ …and find the how-to comment someone posted. Handy!
Razgon
2694
I love this game…or rather, I love the idea of the game, and reading peoples stories about what happened to their dwarves.
I’ve tried to get into it 4 times by now, but I simply cant. Its too frustrating and simply doesnt work for me, which is a shame. There seems to be a great game hidden here, and with a few UI updates, it would sell better than minecraft IMO.
Read Calistas’s tutorials on after action reporter. That will get you in.
Also check CaptainDuck’s tutorials on youtube, they are quite handy.
Ohhh, I just found a perfect desert location for my dream “Valley of the Kings” fortress… must fight urge to make another game…
If you don’t have the patience to learn the UI, then you don’t have the patience to learn the ridiculous number of mechanics and systems that make up the game, either. I almost wish he’d never update it, just so all the lazy whiners stay away. I understand that DF isn’t the easiest game to pick up, but you’re never going to learn it if all you do is second guess the design decisions of a developer/game that you are obviously highly unfamiliar with.
If it were only complexity that were the issue, I’d be with you …
Speaking as someone who LOVES Dwarf Fortress, there is a malignancy to the interface which would still betray corruption even in the complete retroactive nonexistence of the mouse.
What is the problem? I have no issues getting around the menus, building the things I want, ordering my dwarves to do the things I want, etc. Everyone complains about the interface, but people rarely site specific examples.
I’m just so sick of hearing people complain about it. Not just on QT3, but on every other forum I’ve ever seen a DF thread on. People don’t want to put in the work to learn the game, and they expect Toady to do some Minority Report style interface that’s suddenly going to make the game super easy to learn and solve world hunger and who knows what else.
Stop complaining, put in the time to learn the game, and the menu is no longer a problem. I know this is true because I experienced it first hand. I used to get frustrated with DF, too, back before I understood it. A “better” interface isn’t going to magically make the learning curve go away.
The menu navigation would be one of the big ones. There is a great deal of inconsistency between menus in various systems, and sometimes even within one system. Completely independent of any learning curve.
For instance, marking trade items for is one of the simplest tasks in the game, and yet completely brutal for picking out individual things. There’s no filtering, very little sorting, no quick selects …
Look, dude, it’s a great game. It’s brilliant. Fantastic. There’s nothing else like it. But it isn’t perfect. It’s extraordinarily complex, so there’s no doubt that it’s going to have bugs. Bugs become evident in other systems, too, if you play long enough - but the interface is the most strikingly obvious to a new user, so it naturally tends to receive the greater amount of attention. Less so than, say, the perpetual motion problem, or the atomization.
Also, this is probably not an issue over which you should allow yourself to get too upset.
