• Dwarf Fortress launches on Steam with a brand new look
    108 replies, posted
These actually would happen in real life. People would go to towns recruiting settlers for areas that were either ravaged by war or disease and it was not uncommon for families to sell off their illegitimate children or else ones that would have no inheritance or that could not be supported as well as orphans. Those children would then be led as migrants to settle a new area. This is actually a very common and fairly well supported theory for the origins of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
There is, while I perfer tiles there is the issue of creativity. In the game cats for example, come in all different sizes and colours but with tiles you just see a ginger tom and that's that. Same with every other living thing that has its own description that helps you paint a unique, varied world in your head is boiled down to copy paste sprites that make it seem generic almost.
I find ASCII easier to understand than tilesets because of experience. Every symbol has its own meaning, and you can use your imagination on how it looks like, instead of relying on a sprite to show you what it looks like. And it is not eye rape if you use proper square ASCII with a natural color scheme. The default ASCII is non-square and has extreme contrast, which sucks. Here's an example of square ASCII with natural colours. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/89/b60a1f85-e213-4747-895a-afffd17921b0/Apexrooms-33-region6-202-33506.png
I like the description from the Steam Page: MATURE CONTENT DESCRIPTION The developers describe the content like this: Dwarf Fortress contains detailed descriptions of violence, and 2D sprites inflicting violence on each other. The dwarves also drink alcohol heavily, and alcohol consumption is required for a fortress to run smoothly. Dwarves can experience mental anguish, and in extreme cases this can lead to them taking their own lives or the lives of others.
Correct.
holy shit this is incredible workshop'll make modding way more convenient You can consider it to be a muuuuuuuch more in-depth version of that. I enjoy both, depends on my mood. I'd also argue that the flow is quite different but that's vague and subjective. Don't be intimidated by it either, it's a brick wall to start, but once you bash your head against it for a couple of hours you'll figure out the UI. The wiki is also an incredible (and hilarious) resource.
people that perfer ASCII have stockholm syndrome, change my mind
ASCII graphics is fine as long as you don't use the default tileset, which is extreme eye rape.
I like the tileset mostly but something is wrong with the slope graphics. It's like one of those optical illusion drawings where it's both recessed AND protruding at the same time.
Dwarfs F2P was what it was called on steam. (sorry I had been up for like a whole day when I typed that yesterday) Should've given a proper name of the game I was talking about.
Should've been an Epic exclusive to really upset the DF purist
This new tileset is coming with additional tileset features. Now, sprites can be modular. A dwarf with red hair will have red hair on their sprite. You can see the different hair styles, and what type of shield the dwarf is holding. Beak dogs with blotched skin will look different from beak dogs with wrinkled skin. These sorts of features were already available in the isometric stonesense utility, but now are being made available for normal tilesets. They're even planning to add modular sprites for procedural creatures like forgotten beasts.
Episode 5: Steam Strikes Back
Halo for pc on steam and now dwarf fortress with workshop mod support on steam?!?!?! am I dreaming???? this is incredible
Kinda depressing, in a way. It would be amazing to have DF run much more smoothly.
Literally what I was thinking. Not a game i'd refund, even if I never touched it.
I take my uh oh back. I was afraid they got nabbed by a predatory publisher. Can't wait to support them by buying it on Steam.
Did they also improve the horrible horrible menu structure of DF ?
I'm going to buy it, even if I never got around of understanding how it actually works.
And that is something that tilesets can do that ASCII can't.
Just the fact that it's gonna be an official tileset that's gonna be updated with patches instead of waiting on the contributors to catch up gives it an edge.
Im gonna get it the moment it becomes available,i've been looking forward for this.
I'd buy it just to pay my respects to toady and his immense passion he had with this project, the fact that the game turned out to be incredibly detailed; and for all the hilarious stories, bugs, and changelogs it produced.
I'd be willing to pay for DF if it was made a little bit more accessible. I mean, I wouldn't want it to be dumbed down or anything, just have some well designed menus and such instead of just a clusterfuck of hotkeys
There are some good utilities that take some of the menu busywork out of the game and put them into a much more organized and easier to use GUI, such as Dwarf Therapist.
Dwarf Therapist is a must imo. It allows you to check your dwarves exact stats, so you can see who's physically capable enough of becoming a soldier for example. It would be nice to see DT-like interface in the Steam version
The vast majority of the DF playerbase shares the same opinion, we fought with it until we learned it but none of us actually want it to be one of the biggest hurdles to learning and playing. Last I heard UI improvements are coming after the next big update.
Banished is a closer equivalent to Dwarf Fortress.
I guess it could always be possible to make a tileset that "pretends" to be an ascii set while having differently colored parts of the characters, but it would probably look too obnoxious. Having built in mouse control while having an interface overhaul and more comfortable automation functions would be massively helpful. It should be a lot more obvious as to which parts of the game perform what operation. It could work like one of the Factorio mods, where all fortress related operations belong to an organized hierarchy of intuitive buttons, so that the only challenge that the player faces is what happens in the fort itself and NOT figuring out which buttons to push or whether a feature even exists or not. Also similarly to a Factorio mod, it should be obvious which buildings make what crap and how it relates to dwarfs. Something else that could help would be a carefully crafted step by step ingame tutorial that gradually educates the player in the nuances of the game. As mentioned with automation before, having a set of comfortable functions such as "make an array of bedrooms" or even "auto generate fort" could help if the player only cared about survival itself and not necessarily meticulous architecture. For dwarf fortress purists, there should always be an option to play the game with the original interface if they enjoyed the obtuseness of it, perhaps have an "extra pain in the ass" option where the GUI tries to be an even bigger clusterfuck to decipher, such as having it be in a cryptic dwarf like langauge or having each action be a metaphor, or even have it be a randomly generated system similarly to how DF generates its other stories so that the interface is a complete chin scratching mystery every new game.
From a gameplay perspective I think it'd be interesting to be able to direct dwarves to achieve general goals like that while still being able to micromanage or fine tune the results if you need to. I'm a big fan of procedural generation and watching AI work so just giving a set of instructions to characters and watching them create solutions would be fun to me.
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