Bay 12 Games Forum

What's a simple floor pattern that can retrieve the magma?I wish for it to cover an entire area so the area can be flexible with retrieving magma. As you know, magma cannot simply phase through the ground without open space.

I use a grid of 7x7 rooms with single tile thick walls and doors between them for my magma-using industries. Underneath I dig out a similar pattern for my magma reservoir, then fill it using a set of pumps pulling directly from the magma sea. If you want a really large area I recommend using a small pump stack so you can locate the reservoir a few z-levels above the magma sea and hence don't have to design it around the big pockets of magma.

Mainstream games:
Often intentionally engineered to be addictive, even at the expense of gameplay or complexity.
Graphics are of utmost importance - we need it to look pretty for trailers and screenshots.
Learning curve is kept shallow to maximise the number of potential customers.
Every effort is made to maximise profits, usually leading to underpaid developers and shafted players (DLC, DRM, anti-piracy, etc).
Windows only - Linux/Mac aren't a big enough market share to justify development time.

Dwarf Fortress:
Toady and Three-toe only care about making a unique, fun, and interesting game.
Fuck graphics. Good gameplay is everything!
They aren't afraid of giving gamers an intellectual challenge. If you can't understand what the ASCII symbols mean or how to build a pump stack, read the wiki.
They are doing it out of passion rather than desire for profit. The players get the game for free, and the developers still manage to earn a decent amount of profit purely through donations.
Versions are available for a range of different OS's.

I'm not sure if this point has already been made - I'm not going to read through 6 pages of arguments - so sorry if I'm repeating what others have said:

Developing a complex and fully-featured UI at the moment wouldn't be a good idea because the game is in a constant state of flux. Major parts are being added and removed with every release, and spending weeks or months implementing a polished and newbie-friedly UI would be a complete waste of time if the underlying mechanics which it controlled were going to be heavily modified or replaced completely in the next release.

Not to mention the problems with actually displaying all of the data to the user. I can't honestly think of a more usable interface design for most of the menus - the current system just requires a bit of patience and practice. With the current design almost all information is, at most, about 5 key presses away. That's a lot better than most UI designs manage. The one thing the interface does lack is polish, but one glance at the bug tracker and the dev log will show that the rest of the game suffers from that problem as well - mainly because it's still under active development.

The one big addition I would like to see would be a menu giving the same information and control as the main Dwarf Therapist interface, because currently it's far to difficult to search through dwarves for one with specific military skills.

Maybe at some point Toady can implement the destruction of body parts if they're raised up and broken down enough. Or just a random chance that they get destroyed any time they're 'killed' again, so that the items don't have to track any additional info such as how many times they've been raised. Or perhaps they can simply become ineligible for necromancy after a few times.

This is an excellent idea. Maybe it could work in a way similar to how slash attacks can sever parts. Any kind of attack against a body part has a chance of simply pulverising that part, and the chance would be much higher for smaller parts. Hammers and other blunt weapons should be the best at this, while spears and whips should be the worst. It could have the same effect as severing a part, but instead of simply cutting it off the part would be removed from the game and replaced by a load of blood splatter. The big difference would be that you could pulverise a part even if it wasn't connected to anything else. This would mean that if you walked into a room full of undead hands, you could reasonably smash them all into a bloody paste with a hammer rather than just being endlessly swarmed by them.

You should do this again, but with a lever and !!magma!!.

I kept expecting them to pull the lever to flood the entire surface with magma after they shut the gates but it never happened. I suppose it's really hard to make a 3D fluid simulation look realistic though.

Dwarf Fortress: Our main export is suffering!... Suffering and socks.

And for the next version:

Dwarf Fortress: Rollercoaster Tycoon, but with angry drunken midgets swinging axes!

The most useless artifact in my current fort is probably the Prase Toy Hammer, menacing with spikes of prase. It's like the guy was just mocking me by making what would have been an awesome weapon (it's even got a cool name), but he had to make it a toy instead of something useful. Fortunately he died in the great goblin siege of 252 - he's now buried in one of the ~80 coffins in my memorial hall.