
Polygon sat down with one of the creators of Dwarf Fortress - danso
http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/23/5926447/dwarf-fortress-will-crush-your-cpu-because-creating-history-is-hard
======
TillE
The truly exciting thing about Dwarf Fortress is that it proves that deep,
detailed simulation is well within our reach.

It suggests whole new _genres_ of games that have yet to be created; imagine a
typical fantasy RPG (or perhaps one that plays more like Mount&Blade) where
the entire world is simulated as you play, so every choice you make has
logical consequences. The possibilities are endless, and while Dwarf Fortress
is a great game on its own, it's really just scratching the surface of what
can be done with world simulation.

~~~
gagege
No, please, if Mount and Blade had the simulated world of Dwarf Fortress, I
would never leave my house.

~~~
contingencies
In a word, yep. You wouldn't be the only one.

------
erichurkman
I encourage everyone to check out the game. It's quite crazy, and beginners
inevitably lose due to the game's depth and crazy events ("Losing is fun!").
If the ASCII tile sets make your eyes bleed, there are other tile sets of
graphics to try out. [0]

There's also a very vibrant modding community, including a lot of memory
hacking through the dfhack project [1] – even fixing a lot of longstanding
bugs in the game, like dwarves taking a pair of gloves and putting both gloves
on one hand. There's a full engine to write tweaks in Ruby or Lua, too.

[0] [http://www.dwarfcorp.com/site/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/df....](http://www.dwarfcorp.com/site/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/df.png) native versus
[http://i.imgur.com/FQaND.png](http://i.imgur.com/FQaND.png) (Phoebus tiles)

[1] [https://github.com/DFHack/dfhack](https://github.com/DFHack/dfhack)

~~~
mcdougle
The third party graphics are helpful (but still make your eyes bleed) but the
main issue is the controls -- I just couldn't get past how difficult it was to
do anything.

It's been a while since I've played, but if I remember, you couldn't use the
mouse -- I bet adding that functionality would make it so much easier to get
into the game.

~~~
FreezerburnV
It's interesting, I used to think the same way. (well, I still do to some
extent) But after getting acclimated to using VIM bindings for coding,
learning keyboard shortcuts for common things, etc., when trying out the new
version the controls were surprisingly comfortable. Now granted, they still
aren't really good controls by any stretch of the imagination. But I found it
to be an interesting experience that as I've gotten better at coding/using the
keyboard for coding, purely using the keyboard to control such a complex game
as DF has become a bit less of a barrier. I wonder if anyone else has had a
similar experience?

~~~
shard972
Dwarf fortress made me pickup emacs. After getting into dwarf fortress for a
while, I found the idea of only using a keyboard liberating so I ended up
seeking out a text editor that could give me that.

------
erikb
What I hate about the developers is that they live in their tiny little closed
source Windows cave. They develop so many cool things but you can probably
never use most of it outside of DF. Like how many cool games would we have if
the world generator would be an open source C library? How many languages
would have been added by other people who actually study language related
science if they knew how to. How many people would have developed 3D graphics
engines and usable mouse+keyboard menus if there would have been a publicly
defined interface to interact with DF.

There are actually many cool tools but as far as I know a lot of the time of
these developers is drained by having to find out about the API themselves
(which might change) and most of them are naturally only working on Windows as
well.

Think of Minecraft style community + DF on all available operating systems.
How cool would that be.

~~~
mobiuscog
So go write one ;)

Whilst I agree that cross-platform is a nice goal, I'd much rather developers
wrote what they want to, and are more comfortable with first and foremost
without having to think about multiple platforms or 'trendy' languages, etc.

I want developers to write the things _they_ want, and I'll be happy if they
share them, rather than writing things they think everyone else wants and not
having the same passion.

Some people will want to write multi-platform something and have the passion
for that, which is great, but I wouldn't ever want to enforce that on any one.

If you ever want to see a developer cave, just look at Linux (and the oft-used
'Windows people can build it themselves if they can work it out')

Disclaimer: I use all OSes and like them all in different ways. However, when
I write software for myself, there's little chance I'm caring about who else
will run it. It's coding for pleasure, not money.

Edit: I should also mention how utterly AWESOME Dwarf Fortress is.

~~~
erikb
The "just write this one program" philosophy always just yields one program at
most. The "add software to the community" approach might add only 1/10th of a
program, but with thousand people doing it you get 100 programs out of it.
Which approach looks more reasonable?

Or to give another example how many people can enjoy Game of Thrones because
it's written in English? (I'm German and I love it!) If it would have been
written in a minority language that is only spoken in one village somewhere in
central Asia it might have been more comfortable for the developer, but only
few people can ever take joy in it.

They don't need to make the program work on all systems or use a fancy new
language. They just need to enable the community and make use of development
patterns that are flexible. Java certainly is not a fancy new language, and
despite it's claim it only really works on Windows well enough out of the box.
Yet Minecraft has an open community where even the developers profit from what
others add to the game. When the coders of DF die in an airplane crash
tomorrow DF is pretty much dead as well and that's the big problem I think. If
I invest my whole life to create an awesome piece of work, then it should
surpass me in number of years.

~~~
infiniteri
Going along with your analogy, it's very possible that if this central Asian
George R. R. Martin was deterred from writing Game of Thrones in his native
language because it isn't "reasonable" for others to expect to read his works,
then maybe it would never have come into existence in the first place. Look, I
understand your point but sometimes when you want something done you don't
mess around and care about what other people want. You just do it in whatever
way is easiest for you. Saying you "hate" these people who actually have
CREATED these things that have added value to people's existence seems really
rather immature. It's not like lives are going to be saved because DF was open
sourced.

------
coder23
I think it a loss that a game with such original complexity has the most
primitive graphics. Nobody wants 3D acceleration, but an upgrade to a simple
2D with sprites and effects with a better interface, would open it to a wider
crowd.

~~~
Holbein
The funny thing is, Dwarf Fortress _is_ simulated in 3D. With the 3D viewer,
you can even look at your terrain in 3D:

[http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r21/khyron2k/Dwarves/Dwar...](http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r21/khyron2k/Dwarves/Dwarf_Dam.jpg)

If DF would look like that during gameplay, I'd immediately start playing.

~~~
voronoff
You can play in Stonesense, though it's still early days yet and only works on
the last patch.

[http://www.wired.com/2014/07/dwarf-
fortress-3d/](http://www.wired.com/2014/07/dwarf-fortress-3d/)

~~~
Holbein
Thanks for the link. While it does indeed looks nice, it's not what I had in
mind. This is basically isometric 2D. You're looking at a plane. Things that
rise up, like pillars, are not shown. You could not see that dam the way it
really looks like in my linked picture.

~~~
voronoff
We're getting there. mifki's working on getting multilevel rendering for basic
tilesets
([http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=138754.105](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=138754.105))
and then that will be exploring 3d. Stonesense itself is headed in that
direction, see the most recent forum page:
[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=106497.1035](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=106497.1035)

------
dpeck
Dwarf fortress will crush your CPU because it isn't, and likely never will be,
multithreaded.

~~~
pekk
Doesn't that mean that DF will only "crush" one core rather than all of them?

Is it really a big concern how well DF will scale? It's a game, it is made to
be played. It isn't really meaningful to criticize games for whether they are
multithreaded or not.

~~~
dpeck
Yes, it will crush a core.

It actually is a concern as DF in game (dwarf mode anyway) does a huge amount
of pathfinding for the little buggers and other creatures. Not to mention item
tracking and other bits.

This means that once your fortress gets somewhere around 200 dwarfs you start
getting into FPS death because it doesn't scale. So it actually as is a
problem, and development of the game is going against the grain of modern
computing.

I'm not downing on it at all, DF is Tarns forever project, and a damn good
one. He, by design, doesn't owe anyone anything. But the reality of it is that
it only gets less and less playable over time and will not be able to reach
the mass civilization simulation that many of its players want as more
features are added and core speeds remain relatively unchanged.

~~~
Scuds
> He, by design, doesn't owe anyone anything.

A commercial game would have a tutorial mode and other bells and whistles to
make it more approachable. Thing is, I have one hour a day before sleep to
screw around, so is it Bob's Burgers or Dwarf Fortress?

~~~
skaevola
> A commercial game would have a tutorial mode and other bells and whistles to
> make it more approachable.

Does Jackson Pollock have a tutorial? Duchamp? The beauty in Dwarf Fortress is
that it doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator. It's the vision of
Tarn and Zach Adams manifested without the filter of commercial interests.

Nobody's opposed to a tutorial (and there are plenty of community created
ones:
[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Tutorials](http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Tutorials)
).

Commercial games are like corporate art. A company would never create a game
like Dwarf Fortress.

Alternately, you can spend your hour before bed watching reality television.

------
steventhedev
"Fun" aside, they should take a page from GRRM, and look at what makes popular
fantasy fiction so popular, and borrow some elements from there (such as
allowing nations to commit atrocities during worldgen). The occasional godly
intervention makes things more interesting as well.

From a developer's perspective, though, there is a lot of "fun" left in their
codebase. They handle massive pathfinding, temperature and fluid mechanics,
and other resource intensive algorithms. From what I remember (I last played
DF2010), there is a lot of room for improvement, and the community has
discovered several "workarounds" that reduce the workload for common structure
types (such as a lava pump)

~~~
intended
I just genned a world where the southern elves were crushed for 70 years by a
goblin Civ. 3 queen regents and princesses were put to the sword.

The 4 iteration, resulted in Ivis Voidwinds (or something), the new elf
princess who promptly went to explore the wilds and tamed giant dingos, lions,
polar bears, bears and a host of other animals.

In 162 she led an army and attacked the goblin civ, pillaging 3 cities in an
unstoppable attack till they signed a peace treaty in 163.

In 163 the goblins broke the treaty, at which point she waged war till 250,
when world gen stopped. She was victorious in battle and converted 5 conquered
sites to Elfdom.

She did this all with only 1 kill to her name, she was a high master
strategist.

~~~
erikb
I never got around to really learn to play it, but here and there I gen a
world just to see that kind of thing happening :D

------
zyxley
To quote myself from the last time I commented on an article about DF:

I will continue to have no interest in Dwarf Fortress until it has an actual
UI instead of whatever insane random combinations of controls the developer
felt like adding on any particular day.

~~~
myrmidon
In that case, you might want to give
[http://gnomoria.com/](http://gnomoria.com/) a try, which is similar to dwarf
fortress, but significantly less complex, easier to control, and looks decent
out-of-the-box.

You might also be interested in
[https://www.factorio.com/](https://www.factorio.com/) which is a game about
building factories (free world, 2d isometric). Aside from being addictive, it
is also performant, looks good, has a decent soundtrack and comes with all of
it's ingame-stats conveniently embedded in Lua-sourcefiles (which you don't
even have to parse-- just run them through the interpreter if you want to
start modding/theorycrafting).

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with those games in any way, just promoting
them because they're _awesome_ (best entertainment/price ratio of anything I
ever paid for).

~~~
patio11
I loved Factorio, but had to give it up because it gave me worse eye strain
than any program ever has.

------
codezero
Are there any good newbie tutorials? I always start it but just get way too
lost right away.

~~~
criley2
Find a multiyear walkthrough that will take you hours to just play the game
according to how a manual tells you.

Why? It's like learning Ruby on Rails with Michael Hartl. You follow his
instructions to learn more than just mechanics, but the Rails Way of doing
things.

Same with Dwarf Fortress. You need to learn the DF way of doing things, the DF
way of solving problems. Easiest way to learn it is to follow deep instruction
for a while.

I cannot find the exact tutorial I followed a while ago (and I'm not sure it's
even valid for the latest versions) but this wiki ought to help start:
[http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_gui...](http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_guide)

Maybe a current DF player can link you to the best multi-year walkthrough :)

~~~
jimmaswell
sounds less fun than just jumping in the game and winging it

------
Kiro
That opening cinematic is terrifying.

~~~
erikb
terrifyingly awesome you mean

------
dang
We changed the linkbait title to one of the article's introductory sentences
that accurately (if blandly) describes the piece.

~~~
Widdershin
I appreciate the transparency.

