Bay 12 Games Forum

No, a ton of people complained about the old UI, so he made a new one, and now people that some how managed to adapt to the old UI, but can't adapt to the new one, complain about it.

I'm an old player.  The old UI was kinda terrible, in terms of design (e.g. inconsistency among different menus).  But every operation was possible with the keyboard, which has two major advantages; one, it's better for accessibility and preventing injury; two, it's macro-able.

The new UI is, to me, indisputably a step forward in terms of intuitiveness and consistency.  Overall I like the new UI better than the old one.  However, they made two design decisions that I dislike; one is that some operations are mouse-exclusive, and the second is that old keybindings have changed.  In large part it seems that the latter choice is to accomodate WASD arrow movement, which sounds like little benefit to me—it's not like this is an FPS, the arrow keys would be fine, the number of new players who would be both interested in DF and insistent on WASD feels to me to be vanishingly small.  I wish this was customisable, with an option for the old-style keybindings.

Full keyboard support for the new UI is in the roadmap, but you know how it is with DF; there's always so much to do and so few developers (even though the new version has double the number of developers).  The most recent release has fixed a number of longstanding grave bugs and even more longstanding performance issues.  I do believe at some point we'll have fully mouseless interaction back in the menu(s).  I don't think the old keybindings are coming back, but dfhack has a command to overlay on-screen hints for the new keybindings; I hope that this makes into the new UI in vanilla, too.

Thanks for the replies, sir.  I’m sorry for your loss and I hope that you get over your illness.

I personally haven’t played DF for months now.  The main reasons are that I only have a machine running Linux and I’ve never used Steam before so I’m concerned that, if I were to get the Steam version, I’d have to download and install the Windows version on a machine running MS Windows and get that running before I could either switch to running it under Linux using Wine or switch over to the beta branch and use the native Linux version.  Also, I can’t run the older pre-Steam versions because the Linux distribution that I’m on now  doesn’t provide libraries for versions of SDL prior to SDL2 (and the maintainers have said that Hell will freeze over before that ever happens…).  I’ve tried installing Wine and running the Classic versions, but all that happens is that DF crashes on startup.  I’m really looking forward to there being native Linux support on the main branch.  Hopefully then I can start playing DF again!

Like mikekchar said, you can install Steam directly on Linux, switch to the beta channel, then rescue the DF folder from Steam's clutches.  For personal/ideological reasons I don't want to have a Steam account, so I'm waiting for the Linux version to be released on itch.io.

Meanwhile I was playing the Windows version from itch, with wine 8.x.  It generally works fine, but sadly every so often it crashes—rarely enough that I get to run a fort for 3 or 4 years and then suddenly I lose a season's worth of work.  That happened with both wine 8.0 (current stable) and 8.15 (stage), so I gave it a rest for now.

I happen to have a fortress with a walled-in werearmadillo right now!

I confirmed it, he turns at the exact tick that the full moon day starts (here 13th Limestone) (I like to imagine it's a Friday)

Since this isn't a DF bug I can't report it to the bug tracker, but I just wanted to put it online somewhere: I'm experiencing crashes with running the new version on wine/amd64.  This happens both with wine 8 stable and development, and rarely enough that I get a good fortress going on for a few years before the application suddenly quits and takes a season's worth of progress with it.

If there's any other people playing from itch who refuse to use Steam/Proton, I would advise caution.  I will hold my elkbirds and wait until the Linux version is back before commiting to play.

ok let's make a nondenominational temple for my dwarves, I'll put a statue in gold so that they get happy.  should I pick a theme, haha no I'll let them choose what's the statue of, maybe they'll make a statue of, dunno, a piece of cheese or a bee or something and then it'll be funny that they worship that.  it's unlikely that they pick something actually related to religio—

"This is a well-crafted gold statue of Itęg.  The item is a well-designed image of Itęg the deity of lust and depravity, depicted as a female dwarf in gold by Olan Alĺthshethęth.  Itęg is laughing."

(and Itęg is "tentacle"—I'm guessing this part isn't random? the algorithm looks for words related to the deity's spheres of influence when naming them, right? otherwise I am myself converting to Itęg at this point)