Bay 12 Games Forum

One can always talk about what would make good default settings. But forcing everyone to play at a difficulty which you like is not a sensible thing. Nothing bad about cheating.

I would very much like a standard quit-without-save option, so I can try stuff and experiment with the game (for example, with magma physics). If you don't want to save/load, then don't do so. No reason to forbid it to me.

Of course you can mod your dwarves to be invincible, but it's rarely going to be very interesting in the end. But would you as a beginner want to play Federer in a Tennis-match? Or would you rather prefer to start with someone a bit closer to your own level?

And you seem to be missing a major point.

Highlighting the different minerals from embark is cheating.

Are you telling me that my way of playing a game is wrong?

There is no such thing as cheating in a game where you cannot win against another player.

You can't seriously improve the UI until most of the other features are finished.

Wrong. Putting the entries in alphabetical order would improve them. They would still not be great, but at least you could read them instead of having to memorize them by heart. I have not played DF for half a year and picked it up yesterday. It's such a pain when you want to build some building and cannot find it in the unordered menu.

The game already has a sorting mechanism for entries in menus (seen in the job manager), therefore this would be very simple to accomplish.

And this is only an example of what could be done with very little effort but high reward. Of course complicated interfaces cannot be finished before the mechanics work, but that is not what I am rooting for (yet). It's like those games which limit your hotkeys to a small number such as 8. Easy to fix, worthwhile result.

It is a difference in marketing. Dwarf Fortress is based upon being ambitious and almost entirely uncompromosing in its vision. That is why people like it and that is the whole point to the game.
If Toady concentrated only on what was needed to make this game fun. It would be done by now except you wouldn't be here (and likely I wouldn't be either). Except that wouldn't be Dwarf Fortress.
Now years down the road when the game finally gets closer to release a lot of these features you want (such as improved UI) will be added to the game. You just need to be patient until then.

I find it risky to delay important features five years into the future and instead add eyelids to all creatures. Toady might lose interest, get sick or have no time. And then we'll never see those features. I know too much about game or software development to be patient for such a long time (Duke Nukem called and said he agrees with me).

No. If games have taught me anything is that developers loathe AI.

Sadly true. Even though it's such a fascinating topic and a lot of fun to work at. DF is no exception here. But that's beside the point: If you can spend your time on a project, figure out where it matters most. Do you really have to render the jiggling of boobs in excruciating detail before you even get basic gameplay done? (Graphics are a major offender for big-name titles, they swallow up all resources and in the end, we get boring games). Toady does the same, only "eye candy" equals "simulated details" to him.

See now the humans are planned to be fully playable in the future. So yeah SURE the Dwarves could look amazing now, but that would harm future development.

Nothing prevents you from adding the human stuff then. I have trouble coming up with a reason why a more streamlined menu structure (such as alphabetically sorted menus) could ever harm future development. Worst case the time spent on it is wasted because it has to be changed from scratch. That is why one starts where very little time matters a lot, as only very little time can then be rendered pointless. if you spend three hours on menus, at worst you lose three hours of work in two years when you have to overhaul it. In the mean-time (two years!) you had a far more usable version and everyone could enjoy it much more. That's acceptable. Iterative development is very reasonable.

Couple Hundred? You need to increase your numbers quite a bit. Dwarf Fortress didn't start development this year and even then he has likely wracked up numbers in the thousands of hours for just this year so far.

I know. Things I would want to see could get done in less than 40 hours for sure. I don't root for an AI that's more intelligent than Einstein, I want sorted menus, low/high priority labour assignments, basic mouse support, streamlined hotkeys and something along the lines of Dwarf Manager.

I always get into DF and then lose interest because the thing is so damn unfriendly to use. It's just not much fun to go on a drive when you have to push your car 80% of the time instead of driving it.

Well, sorry for accidentally something twice. Great minds think alike.

To me it looks like the suggestion forum drowns the important, useful and simple ideas in a host of irrelevant, situational and incredibly complex suggestions. See the first page for reference.

Yeah, boy. Toady One spent the last year- literally the entire last 12 months ending this last July- working on making the body parts MORE complex.  Down to EYELASHES.

Which is a colossal waste of time from any perspective that is not "I had fun writing the code" (which was the primary reason for starting this project anyway). The difference between two games with and without these changes will be negligible in most cases, a Dead complex Dwarf is the same as a Dead simple Dwarf. At the same time, those 12 months could have been spent on pathfinding, job priorities and user interface, which would have benefited everyone playing it. Alas, toady is not writing DF for the players, he's writing it for himself.

Even though I think a mouse-driven UI would be nice, I am still a big fan of hotkeys. The major issue are inconstencies. I tripped over the floodgates today (linking, building, creating, everthing on another key, with unsorted menus makes for a big headache), or this one: Removing stuff from the job queue uses the R(emove) key, whereas everywhere else it's the C(lear) button. Oh, except Gems, where C(ut) is taken, therefore R(emove )is used too. Talk about messy. F9/Esc/Space is a common one and gets brought up repeatedly.

The game does not feel very alpha to me. With 20 hours spent on interface, and three man-years on graphics (because graphics are more important than anything else apparently) you could release that in a box. Bugs are few, gameplay is solid.

I do have a pretty idea for a nice interface (which would reduce micro A LOT), but it would be a lot of work, that's why I didn't bother writing a suggestion on it. I might.

But that also means that they won't pick up stuff that enemies drop inside my trap-infested base, which is not very practical either.

And another problem: I experience brutal slowdowns (which is new), without any fluids doing much. Is this path-finding? I have recently made my fortress bigger to be able to house more dorfs. If yes: Is there a work-around to make path-finding faster? Such as building more/less ways from A to B?