Wolff
3101
Ya sounds like a game where you place buildings in 30 seconds then do nothing for 30 minutes…awesome!
YOu haven’t even played it have you? Here’s the best explanation of the differences I can come up with: If Goblin Camp is like Sim City, Dwarf Fortress is like Dwarf Fortress.
Yup, that’s the idea, and it works (too) well, as not only dodge, but all their combat skills will increase. The only issue is that it makes your combat log kind of useless with the constant “dodge” spam.
Teiman
3104
Is a open source project.
It can always be forked to be more like DF, and less like Sim City.
That sounds a lot like Dwarf Therapist assigning jobs and the manager screen for creating stuff.
I always feel like macro is what Dwarf Fortress is intending, but ultimately impractical for normal purposes.
I’d rather the macro be the intention, and the micro be exception. Like when you have some stupid itch to make a crimson-caped katana squad with badger skull helmets.
I haven’t played DF in ages, but yeah, I agree that I thought the idea was to play the game at a macro level, and then have the game simulate all the micro level and allow you to zoom in and see how many toes your head marksdwarf was missing if you wanted.
Quaro
3108
Well, it’d be good story however it turned out.
Toady needs to decide min/max his development skills. There’s no free respec on a software project – the longer it goes on, the more expensive it is. The way he’s playing now, his build is gonna hit a wall in the end game and the rest of us can see it coming. Then he’ll be stuck grinding for incremental gains.
AFAIK, he’s not using version control. He’s mentioned that he’d be embarrassed to show to code to anyone before, and I can understand that feeling, as I’ve been there. Maybe he could do a small side project instead, and work with some people on that. As a break and as a learning tool, then later he can bring he new skills to DF. Just adding version control and some amount of automated testing would improve his quality of life, every day, by reducing the stress of fixing bugs. Even just version control.
RepoMan
3109
“improved mythologies” is awesome, even though I’m sure you meant “improved methodologies” :-)
And if he’s not using source control… well…
Still, it’s not like Toady’s alone in being a mathematician/scientist who drifted into programming with no opportunity to learn software-engineering-specific skills. That, plus the fact that he’s the only developer, makes it at least barely feasible for him to work with no actual process or tool support.
But the big problem for him is that it seems his player base is suffering significant attrition (as witnessed by this thread), due to his long-running and unfixed quality issues. Unless he switches his focus from features to quality, that trend will very possibly continue, which threatens his long-term plans of making a living indefinitely from DF.
Where do you see the attrition? The official board is still extremely active as far as i can tell. I don’t think that judging from the activity on an external forum is the best method. And according to the donations it’s still going well for him. People come and go, yes, but those people are not necessarily those who are paying him regularly. He has a relatively large base of loyal core users who don’t find anything wrong with his schedule.
I’d say that he is pretty safe until he hit the inevitable “oh shit, I have to rewrite at least 50% of my code to implement feature X or Y” moment.
The sweet spot was 40d19 (2) for me, now my interest is decreasing, despite some good ideas there and there.
Marcin
3111
This is my opinion too. He’ll be fine until the codebase implodes under its own weight of unfixes.
fenrir
3112
All that stuff about quality is probably true. But at least for me personally the real problem with DF is that he doesn’t really want to make a game - he wants to make a world simulator. While the two have some overlap and I’ve enjoyed DF in the past, it’s becoming very apparent to me that eventually they end up in very different places. A lot of the design decisions that sound reasonable for a world simulator make absolutely no sense in a game. I guess I could understand it more if all the depth was under the surface which might make for a richer and more real world, but I’m expected to bandage my dwarf squads one toe at a time as well as make sure the supply of left socks matches the supply of right socks.
(Standard disclaimer about how the game is free and I have no right to be bitching about it, etc. etc.)
Most of everyone’s ideas regarding improving this game revolve around making it more playable now.
I’m willing to bet that he views this, his labor of love, as a life long project. So something like tossing out the entire program and starting from square one probably will happen and he is probably okay with that. How important can squashing a substantial list of bugs in this game be in 2011 if you’re a guy planning to still be working on this game in 2040?
I’d guess from a pro software developer point of view that sounds at best like doing things the hard way, and at worst crazy, but I don’t think this game is about making him a professional software/game developer. I’ve read interviews with people like Garry from Gmod and the Minecraft guy and they NEVER sound like this DF guy when it comes to their approach to their game development. Those other guys always sound like making a living developing games is the goal.
The problem you’re having, at least as you describe it, isn’t with the scope of the mechanics. Rather, your problem is the interface doesn’t provide you adequate control.
If it makes you feel any better, I very much doubt that anyone who has actually played the game, disagrees with you. Even the creators. Pretty much every interface update since… Before Boatmurdered, I think, has included (also totally inadequate, but…) various attempts at providing better, faster, simpler and less anal control.
I don’t see how Tarn could be as naive a coder as y’all seem to believe.
The fact that DF has gotten this large without collapsing under its own gravitational pull indicates that it’s fairly modular, and that he has testbeds for individual aspects of the simulation. The fact that the patch notes are mostly hilarious system interactions instead of ‘fixed memory trample and crash to desktop’ x 50 indicates that he has a reasonable amount of coding experience.
There’s ample explanation for the bugginess. It’s one of the most complex game simulations ever conceived*, and it’s specifically designed to produce emergent behaviour. There is no upper limit on the game duration, you could cycle a world between adventure and fortress indefinitely.
DF is QA-proof. 100 Zachs would not be enough.
- Out of curiosity, can anyone name a game with more complex internal logic?
What’s more, I also suspect that DF may have become UI-proof.
Back in the early 2D days, I could easily imagine what a workable UI would look like. But now he’s added the Z-axis? Now that half of the tables in the UI are growing foreign keys? I don’t know what I’d do with that even if I had all the resources in the world. I fear it’d look like a cross between MS Access and Maya.
Teiman
3117
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:System_requirements
CPU: AMD 7750x2 BE @ 2.7GHz
MBO: Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3h
RAM: 4GB DDR2 800
GPU: XFX GTX260
Number of dwarves: 140
Average fps: 6-14
So you get 10 FPS for 140 dwarvens. In a machine that problably have more than 5 TeraFLOPS ( no idea really how much ).
Warning, totally random article follows
http://www.gaslampgames.com/blog/2011/01/26/lean-startups-part-ii-some-games-that-suck-and-why-thats-not-a-bad-thing/
Because you probably haven’t spent years debugging others’ messy code. After a while you don’t even need to see the code itself to know it’s a mess.
The fact that DF has gotten this large without collapsing under its own gravitational pull indicates that it’s fairly modular, and that he has testbeds for individual aspects of the simulation.
The fact that he was unable to (multi) thread his application to at least somewhat take advantage of multi core CPU tells me the opposite. Well, yeah the “display engine” is in another thread, but that’s 5% of the CPU and it’s not coded by himself iirc.
The fact that the patch notes are mostly hilarious system interactions instead of ‘fixed memory trample and crash to desktop’ x 50 indicates that he has a reasonable amount of coding experience.
Wrong priorities. So low level issues, like the fact that the more you go, the more the game gets sluggish, and even that killing all dwarves, objects, and closing pathfinding heavy regions doesn’t really fix the slowdown, are ignored. I’d love to see a 10 page long memory, behavior, crash fix pass instead of your face-palming changelog once in a while.
There’s ample explanation for the bugginess. It’s one of the most complex game simulations ever conceived*, and it’s specifically designed to produce emergent behaviour. There is no upper limit on the game duration, you could cycle a world between adventure and fortress indefinitely.
No one said the game isn’t complicated, the point was because this is such a complicated game he should really get its priorities straight before hitting a brick wall. And, also, UI = crap.
DF is QA-proof. 100 Zachs would not be enough.
Nothing is with proper priorities and timing from day one.
- Out of curiosity, can anyone name a game with more complex internal logic?
Not really if you take the game as a whole.
A note, though, all the reactions between elements to make “adamantine axes encrusted with jewels menacing with spikes of bones” are (or at least should) be database driven. It’s tedious, sure, but complex, not so much granted you’ve got a plan.
The dwarf individual AI is not that complicated either, a merge of various already well documented methods (need driven, order stacks, smart terrain).
What’s more, I also suspect that DF may have become UI-proof.
Please… Especially not when you talk about modularity in your first post. I love this game, but no need to be blind either.
rezaf
3119
Many pages back we assigned the perfect UI to DF: that of the original Rollercoaster Tycoon.
It’s simple enough to reasonable, could be coded by a single indivudual and could cover most, possibly all situations in DF - just open one of them windows.
Anyway, I guess he’d need to do a couple of years of priorization and bugfixing before getting DF to a state where investing lots of time in an UI
would be feasible. And that problem is only going to get worse the more partially-broken crap he adds on top.
rezaf
I’ve always felt that the fundamental disagreement between the Toady apologists (myself included) and the Toady critics (myself included) comes from the fact that DF is so awesome. If it wasn’t so awesome it simply wouldn’t create such an intense level of feeling.
I think we’re all in agreement that in a perfect world DF would both be less buggy and have a more consistent and usable text based UI AND would still have all the crazy features. The question then turns to why some people defend and some people criticize given that we don’t have that.
I think it’s pretty simple:
The critics are generally of the opinion that they want DF approximately the same but they would be willing to give up some of its features in order to get to the ideal picture.
The defenders are generally of the opinion that they would not be willing to give anything up of DF to fix those issues. That even if they personally don’t care if he simulates every bone in the dwarven body and left and right socks separately, they just can’t imagine a case in which we would have a DF with the issues fixed…that the essential qualities of the game are so tightly coupled to the quirkiness that it’s basically impossible to have both of those things simultaneously. Basically, that if Toady were the kind of game dev that was concerned about bugs and modular code he wouldn’t be the kind of game dev that would have written DF.
The critics tend to think that the worst possible outcome of this is to have something that’s as awesome as DF conceptually but that’s as buggy and inconsistent as DF is actually. So they tend to feel like we’re in the worst possible situation. They have a game they want to love but can’t.
The defenders tend to think we’re in the best possible outcome. We have DF, it’s awesome, and you simply have to appreciate it for what it is.
Personally I’m more of a defender but I see where the critics are coming from.
