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[s0]

Also, I think people's expectations for it are ridiculously high. There's no way anyone could realistically expect this to simply be "DF with a better interface". If the developer takes out all the detail and micromanagement (and his blog states that's exactly what he'll do), the game stops being like DF and becomes a regular city builder.

If people are so desperate for an "accessible" version of DF, there's lots of great games like Settlers, Tropico, Stronghold, or the Anno series that are effectively just that.

[Melly]

I personally find the ASCII graphics very attractive. I which more people would attempt them with an artistic focus.

[Seth]

C.A. Sinclair--I definitely agree, I think there will be a lot of disappointed fans when it gets released.  And there are a lot of people complaining about how Tarn focuses on the minutia in the game, things like individual digits and skin layers and individual personalities, but I always thought those were a big part of why Dwarf Fortress became so popular.  I'm not sure why those people were interested in DF enough to get disappointed with the direction Tarn is taking it.

Melly--I agree, but I'm not sure how "artistic" I would like it to get.  Part of the attraction for me is how ugly ASCII and whatever colors usually go with them are.  But some games, like Crawl, definitely use ASCII in a way that I don't find very interesting at all... I think DF is one of the more interesting examples out there.

[PGGB]

The standard characters and colors don't look very good to me but with some tweaks you can change that to this which is hugely appealing in my opinion.

[Zaratustra]

Well I would really like to show DF to my friends and right now there is just no way to do it without looking like Neckbeardus Maximus, lord of all things textmode.

[Seth]

Would having little pictures of dwarves of goblins running around really make it look less nerdy?

[Zaratustra]

HOW WILL I EVER FIND OUT

[The Monster King]

i agree with Zaratustra the fact that Dwarf Fortress literally looks like nothing to someone who hasn't played it for at least a few hours turns a lot of people off

edit: there's one thing we have to keep in mind, though

dwarf fortress currently is not the finished product

even though it acts a lot like one sometimes

[PleasingFungus]

edit: there's one thing we have to keep in mind, though

dwarf fortress currently is not the finished product

even though it acts a lot like one sometimes

Dwarf Fortress has been in open alpha for longer than most games are in development. Tens of thousands of people have played it.

At what point does the label 'alpha' become meaningless?

[ChevyRay]

As long as it's in alpha stage of development? That has nothing to do with how many people have played it. Probably thousands of people have played Konjak's several unfinished games, that doesn't make them complete.

[The Monster King]

he's not asking you to play it either even though i guess he's enjoying the sizable donations which allow him to constantly work on the game (seriously it's not like the guy ever does anything else he is an admirable ultra-hard worker), but

he's not saying "this is definitive it will never change"

he just has different priorities

if you don't want to play it without a cool graphics/UI just wait 1, 3, 5 years?

i mean i stopped playing DF for a while but i know i'll go back into it one day

[fraxcell]

Personally I would rather he keep working on the awesome stuff he's doing right now, like improving Adventure mode and making it so you can create armies and send them different places than have a better interface.

[Curseman]

http://www.goblincamp.com/2010/07/version-0-1-release/

[fraxcell]

Oh cool! The mouse based interface is definitely an improvement, although I don't think it's perfect quite yet. I didn't like the way that by default a stockpile can hold anything, and if you want a wood stockpile you have to check off everything that isn't wood. Using the middle mouse button to go back a menu, but then having to right click to totally exit out of the menu was also rather annoying.

And why are my bloodthirsty goblins and orcs eating pastries and fine wine?

[deathtotheweird]

There are a few annoyances with the interface, but even with those annoyances I really do like it.

Such a good start, and such a tease. I really can't wait to see this go further.

[Curseman]

The stock manager in GC is 100,000 times better than queuing up tasks at individual workshops like you do in DF.

[Phasma Felis]

I hope to God that Toady decides to hire this guy or something.

My worry isn't that DF's interface is clunky and hard-to-use now. It's that I'm skeptical it'll ever be all that good. Oh, sure, it'll get better at some point, but basically, I don't think Toady is the kind of guy who really cares much about UI. It's the basic attitude you see in a lot of the old-school command-line Linux geeks--"As long as I (who have been using it for ten years) know how everything works, it's fine. If you can't figure it out, you're not trying hard enough--put another two or three years in and quit whining."

And that means I'll never get to play it, because I design user interfaces for a living among other things, and shitty UI gives me hives.

(I'm talking about user interface specifically, not just graphics. Graphics are nice, but I'd be happy with decently-implemented tiles.)

[Curseman]

Toady would benefit a lot from accepting more help from outside sources.  He doesn't need to go as far as Goblin Camp where everything is open source and users can change whatever they want, but he's not doing himself any favors by keeping things as closed off and secretive as he is.  I understand that it's his livelihood and he doesn't want someone to steal his code and take over his project, but reverse engineering the game using his interface code probably wouldn't be much easier than starting from scratch.

Personally I don't think he has it in him to make a good interface even if it was his main focus.  The only game I can think of that has a worse interface than DF is Liberal Crime Squad, which also happens to have been made by Toady.

I'm having a hard time getting my goblins and orcs to make enough food to live off of.  Anyone know how to get them mass producing pies super efficiently?

[team_q]

The stock manager in GC is 100,000 times better than queuing up tasks at individual workshops like you do in DF.

Maybe like YOU do in Dwarf Fortress, not like I do with the built in manager screen in that game.

[Curseman]

Maybe like YOU do in Dwarf Fortress, not like I do with the built in manager screen in that game.

It's much better than that too, since you can set more than 30 objects at a time, and they replenish the stocks on their own instead of needing to be constantly reminded that you need more, and it's mouse driven, and it's available from the moment you begin instead of having to wait for whatever noble to show up, and it's accessed through a single intuitive hotkey instead of being placed in a random, arbitrary menu, and etc etc.

It's better.  DF still has a lot of things it does better than GC, and that'll probably still be true even once GC reaches version 1.0, but arguing that DF's interface isn't hundreds of times worse is an unwinnable uphill battle.