3081

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).

3082

I would love to see a pixelart version of DF, it would mean a 3rd party completely copying the game and it would be kinda mean, but I am tired of the interface frustrations.

People ask me when I am going to make another DF play-along tutorial and I simply refuse until the military (and some other) screens are better. I can’t be bothered trying to fight my way through them.

3083

I’m totally in the same boat, except it’s been a while since I last tried it.
I don’t care about the UI all that much … or, let me rephrase that, I DO care about the UI, but I can live with the crappy one if at least it’d work as intended. What kills the game for me is the tons and tons of bugs, and Toady’s complete lack of ambition to fix them. Instead he adds tons of additional stuff on-top that comes with fascinating new bugs etc.

rezaf

3084

Well, reading that article makes me feel he isn’t someone who’s keen on polishing the experience as opposed to indulging in himself. He’s a lazy smart guy who just wants to do what he wants to do, so everyone is either on that ride or off it. I don’t see much in the point of complaining.

3085

Some student with a lot of time in his hands can join a effort like Goblin Camp (a open source DF clone) and try to improve it to a point is decent enough.


$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/genericcontainer/goblin-camp
3086

This game is kicking my ass.

3087

I like this new poster. Can we keep him/her? Please?

3088

Is there a way to tell your dwarves to get the hell inside during an invasion?

3089

There is. You can make the outdoors entirely verboten or you can limit it to military dwarfs only. Been long enough that I don’t remember the commands for it, but I know it’s there. I used that a lot since it’s more fun to rely on a military than traps.

3090

Thanks (I guess?). Him, by the way.

Back on topic, I know that asking for a new GUI or bugfixes even in exchange of money won’t have any kind of impact. Others tried before, with the lack of result we know.

Is there a way to tell your dwarves to get the hell inside during an invasion?

Before the military “update”, it was a simple keystroke in a menu. Now you have to define a burrow (preferably with food and drinks), and assign your civilians there through the military menu. Because, hey, why make things simple when you can make them overly complicated? I can’t remember the specifics right now, but it’s in the wiki.

I just let the stragglers die in front of the gate instead if my military isn’t ready at the time of the first invasion. It’s not like there’s a shortage of dwarves.

3091

The burrow system is the newest solution for that. Designate your meeting hall or somewhere else safe and with food and drink as one, then create an alert that causes civilians to flock there.

With one alert you can have your military rush to your front gate to defend it and have everyone else run to safety.

3092

It’s complicated but it kinda makes sense. However, I think you have to juggle 3 interfaces to do it - because all at once it sets your military on alert, cancels their current orders and sends them to their battlestation posts (provided you assigned them), and can do this for ALL squads you’ve created, AND sends your noncombatants inside to a previously designated zone or subset of zones. So in theory all you need to do is hit your Red Alert button and this all just happens.

However as you can imagine, the UI to do this in is painful, because lassoing and right-clicking “assign to squad a, b, c or noncombatant” would be clearly too simple.

Every time I think of giving DF another shot, I remember how much not fun it was to do things like this, and how much simpler it could be, and my willpower just drains away.

3093

Man, the amount of times I have accidentally deleted a higly-complex burrow …

That interface …

3094

in theory is the important part in marcin’s post. Because your military has also to be in “on duty” mode to do anything (and for that you have to give them a schedule and hope they are not sleeping), also your marksdwarves will probably stare at the nearest wall once they arrive at their destination.

Marksdwarves are useless.

And as I am in a good mood, here’s how to make the ultimate badass military in one or two in-game years. All you need is iron, wood and stones.

  1. Make/buy 4 full iron sets of armor + axes.
  2. Make a 5x5 room filled with upright spikes made with wooden training spears (2-3 spears per trap) and one weapon stand in the middle.
  3. Link all the spikes to a lever
  4. Get 4 useless dwarves, enlist them and order them to use the said room as a training barrack.
  5. put the lever on repeat, enjoy the ridiculously fast/broken stat increase

You can put more spears per trap, it’s faster but more dangerous. Also prevent your military from owning pets and keep your cats in cages, you don’t want animals to die there (as someone will go clean it up and die in the process). Oh, and male military only, you really don’t want babies / children in the room.

3095

Heh, does the continuous dodging make them level crazy fast?

3096

After reading that NYT article I was, for some odd reason, having daydreams of volunteering myself to build a better UI for DF. I live two hours away from Silverdale, so meeting in person would actually be conceivable, and I think I have the coding chops to do something useful there.

But seeing some of the more recent posts in this thread – in which even Calistas, one of the guys who’s done the most to promote DF via tutorials, has given up on the more recent builds – clarifies that it’s kinda pointless.

If Toady is consistently adding more buggy features without fixing old bugs ever, then any attempt to work with him would be doomed; it’d be like trying to remodel a sandcastle while someone keeps pouring more and more sand on top. The key to long-term large-scale software development is to work clean – you have to have something solid, or over time entropy will kick your ass. Sounds like Toady doesn’t even have a test suite per se, nor any kind of effective bug tracking system (“effective” in the sense of “leading to fewer bugs over time”). And yeah, it also sounds like he really doesn’t want anyone entering into his cozy and familiar interpersonal dynamic with his brother.

Not a whole lot of room for fruitful collaboration there…

3097

As someone above mentioned, if you want to collaborate on something that has the potential of DF, check out Goblin Camp. I haven’t actually played it to know how far along it is, but it is clearly the “open source” DF clone.

3098

Goblin camp doesn’t intend to be DF, it explicitly wants to remove a lot of the fiddliness. You might as well go play Dungeons of Dredmore or some other terrible modern assault on the word “roguelike”.

3099

Those are some fightin words with no explanation!

But seriously I’ve looked at Goblin Camp and even according to the design goals/docs it appears much closer to Dungeon Keeper than DF.

3100

Hehe. I picked up DoD last night and after dying on level 1 three out of four times it actually appears even harder than nethack :-)

Read Goblin Camp’s “Future plans” page:

That’s like, the opposite of DF.