Teiman
3061
We could do with a lot more games that simulate a world.
I think the problem is some part of the public that want predictable rules, “fairness”, etc… so static worlds with rules that always favor the player are created. So you can win or WIN. I like that, but at the same time I mourn the dead of “world creating” games.
In a MMORPG game, with PvE, people from class A don’t want people from class B to have a very powerfull spell. How fucking sad is that?
Is also sad that Toady is still limiting itself, his game and his own economy by not following the UI enhancements. He is not exploring other options, and since we are on the same boat and he is the captain, we don’t see other options.
I half hope other game dev do what Toady don’t want to do.
He can’t explore other options - he can’t program a better UI he says, and he is not willing to let anyone else meddle with his code. I guess he fears he would quickly lose any control over his game and he wouldn’t know what someone else was doing - making any further updates impossibly hard.
I too would love more betterer UI, but I can understand his logic.
I strongly suspect that the code is a septic mess, and even if Toady were willing to let another programmer write the front-end, no one would be able to touch it. Writing code that other people can maintain is a matter of organization and discipline, and the UI’s incoherent approach to design makes it unlikely the underlying code is any better organized. The fact that he frequently breaks his own code, introducing bugs into systems that used to work when making unrelated changes, points to the same thing.
Teiman
3065
If he has bad coding standards, today will be a good time to start imposing himself better standards, and to rewrite parts of code that need rewritting, or any other healing needed to make the code human readable.
We may think “nothing can be done with the code that is already written”. But is not trued, such code can be documented, rewritten, maybe reorganized and made it less “magical”. If the man can change, then the code can change too. But the man need to change first.
Yeah, that’s not going to happen. If he was going to learn, he’d have learned by now.
And he doesn’t need to do anything - he releases new versions and gets donations. He has as much success as he needs.
Quaro
3068
Just to remove any stress of making yearly income. He’d be able to develop the game for years and years even if donations fell off.
You are speaking logic! First mistake ;)
First a Badger Man attacks and mauls one of my farmers (who will die restfully on his own bedroom of blood loss and dehydration but will receive a fine ornamented tomb) and now fucking Moose Men roam into my territory!
A question: isn’t the event log supposed to tell me when someone gets hurt or starts fighting? I just got a “interrupted by enraged badger man” but no report that there was a fight nor that the dwarf needed medical attention or whatnot.
And that meager “success” and funding seems to be all he wants, also.
According to the article, he probably “needs” more furniture, too, but he doesn’t seem to “want” that, either, heheh. His home seems as unwelcoming to visitors as his game!
I think if no one played DF and no one donated to DF, Toady would still see it through as far as his finances would allow it. I always assumed that the players were a side effect, and not the primary objective, of Dwarf Fortress. Everything about it screams “go away” to all but the most persistent of gamers.
Coincidentally, I have Qt3 to thank for unveiling DF to me. I remember the massively long thread you guys started years ago when the game was a single Z-Layer and you just dug through the mountain. I popped it on the machine, and muscled through the unintuitive UI and ugly graphics to play my first ASCII game since the 80’s.
DF makes me both happy and sad at the same time. And don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of highly successful fortresses going on, including one with a 20z level iron axe shaped building made with goblinite and one which invaded the HFS land successfully.
Happy because this is the kind of game I have dreamed about for decades with its uncompromising aim of being the ultimate procedural world simulator. And also because it doesn’t give a damn about fairness or all this causual “the player has to win no matter how idiotic he is” nonsense. Loosing can (and should be) be fun.
On the other hand, as a programmer myself, it hurts badly to see how the thing is written. The GUI is a shame, period. You can claim as much as you want that GUI design isn’t you best suit, that players have to learn, and such, but when you have 3 different sets of keys to scroll inside a menu according to which menu you’re in, and that you don’t have the same shortcuts in each of those menus, you have no excuse. And according to what I see both ingame and in the changelogs / bug-report system, the whole code is a mess. At that point, favoring adding new “features” over fixing existing critical bugs doesn’t help.
The saddest thing is that the fortress mode only is not that hard to code, I would even say that the concept and related AI have been done before on smaller scales. It’s only a mix of need-driven AI and basic order type thingy. But the whole world simulation (that’s not really used ingame) around it causes most the issues. In a one man adventure, you can’t really deal with both global politics and individual teeth on your citizen. Well, you can, but it needs perfect coding and planning. And we all know it’s not the case in here. And as a result, the 10 year long roadmap won’t happen because at one time or another, according to how it’s coded, Toady will hit a brick wall.
Not exactly sure why i have written all that stuff, but I am not going to backspace the page, so here we go.
Aeon221
3074
Dwarf Fortress at MoMA? I am so there. Better yet, I’ll convince a date to come.
Might be fun to brig my netbook with Boatmurdered on there and let people see the madness first hand.
Edit: I value an API that let’s people write a functional up for DF at 500$ . I’m willing to set up a paypal for other people to add into that if there is interest. If thee is, I’ll set it up and make a thread about it on their forum. Any other folks interested?
“functional up” being ? if you’re talking about a decent GUI i would give 20€ immediately. If it was doing a whole bug-fixing and code rewriting pass, i would give 50€ immediately too. (and if i were rich i’d give more, but it’s not the case at all sadly)
Mazuo
3076
My memory’s a little fuzzy not having played for a few months but there should be a red C in the top left if there are new combat reports, H for hunting which this could be if he was a hunter and got beat up, and S for sparring. The ‘r’ button will access any available reports. If you knew all this and it’s not there, I’m not sure why.
The other way that’s never failed me for medical reports is to open z->health. You must have someone appointed as chief medical dwarf by pressing ‘n’ for it to be available. It will show all your dwarves and tame animals health conditions, whether they require diagnosis (note animals will request diagnosis but there are no vets in game, so ignore, butcher away if you want) and even hunger and thirst levels. I’ve had miners that I thought were fine but actually trapped clued in to me there because of their dire hunger and thirst levels. Another tip I’d give if you get a working hospital up, which isn’t terribly hard to do, is that non-critical patients refuse to get out of hospital beds to eat and drink so they can die there if you have problems like I have with other dwarves ever coming to feed them or give them water (no buckets available). Simply deconstruct the bed they’re on and they’ll hop off, go running for the kitchen to eat and drink and then if you’ve rebuilt the bed in the meantime hobble back to bed to lay there waiting for treatment again. Your dwarves with no legs and the like are still screwed however, so it’s good to not forget like I always do about making buckets and having a water source and to later have one dwarf whose only active skills are to move patients around and water and feed them. Doctors should have those abilities disabled so they focus on actually doing their wound treatment jobs instead.
Yeah if you mean a functional UI I would immediately donate at least $20 possibly way more.
What would the terms of donating into this paypal fund be? He gets the money anyway with the message we WANT a functional UI and are willing to pay, or what?
That article was very interesting.
Some of what I got out of it is that because they moved around a lot when young, he and his brother learned to depend on each other. So instead of reaching to new friends, new ideas, they help each other. That would certainly impact his view of things like ‘improving’ his game. Essentially, unless he or his brother think something needs improving, nothing needs improving. It also means that while he may enjoy his fanbase, he doesn’t NEED his fanbase. I bet if everyone abandoned his game he and his brother would still be tinkering with it as always, because that’s all they need.
It’s a labor of love for him. This means, in my experience with other labor of love situations, that his reasons for doing anything related to the game are private and may not have any relation to typical concerns like making money.
In my view it’s comparable to knowing someone who plays guitar amazingly well. So well that everyone he knows keeps telling him he should play professionally because he could make a lot of money. But the guy only plays because he likes to play, and that’s all he’ll ever do is play for enjoyment. All the people constantly trying to make business introductions for him or get him paying gigs are just background noise. They’re wasting their breath.
Gamers are some of the worst offenders when it comes to obsessing about the business side of the hobby. Plus some publishers and developers in gaming are incredibly jaded to the art of making games, so I guess it’s no surprise that the Adams get so much vitriol over their “customer management.” Gamers might have a hard time reconciling that they aren’t always a customer.
I was really enjoying my comeback to DF but after roughly 16 hours played over this weekend I think I’m going to shelve it again.
I still love the game, but the huge amount of bugs, some of them ridiculous (e.g you need a Dungeon Master to tame exotic animals but Dungeon Masters are bugged so you can’t tame exotic animals at all unless you edit a file…) and the “new” military interface, which in my opinion even made everything worse and is, surprise!, riddled with bugs, some of them stretching back to v0.23…
So yeah, I love DF but I’m not contributing again nor I’m actually going to keep playing until it gets “cleaned up” and some of the more atrocious bugs are ironed out (note I didn’t mention the UI, by now I’m used to it again but yeah, some parts of it are second nature after some time but others are completely idiotic and just illogical).
