March 6, 2024: Dwarf Fortress 50.12 has been released.
News: February 3, 2024: The February '24 Report is up.
News: February 4, 2021: Dwarf Fortress Talk #28 has been posted.
News: November 21, 2018: A new Threetoe story has been posted.
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QuoteEDIT: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I just turned on stonesense for the first time!
I take it you like Stonesense? I have been thinking about having a look but not quite go there yet...
In that case, my hope goes into a team of talented developers creating a companion program that can run and view Dwarf Fortress in alternative methods.
The biggest problem would be make the controls seemless.
Or even allowing the main program to run in the background and take the commands, while the external viewer is fed the commands somehow so it all seems smooth.
This way the creator's vision is maintained and everyone gets the eye candy they want. The complicated triggers for animations like dismemberment and attacking is of a different matter.
But thanks for telling me about stonesense.
Glad to hear you're enjoying the game, but.. its Never. Gonna. Happen.
But, on another note, I was talking about that right there. It seems they've already began on it. Isometric view is good enough, what about detailed isometric animations? If they have proven that they can create something like stonesense, isn't it just a matter of expanding on the idea? And making something like that the main game view? What really changes?The biggest difference lies in between "creation of a viewer that reads DF and generates a picture by somebody with free time on their hands" and "integration of a 3D viewer by Toady One". He's been firm about it so far, and while I'm not ruling out that somebody might manage to combine an interface reader with a 3D viewer to make a companion program that could potentially run/view DF, Toady has been fairly iron-clad about keeping away from 3D himself in the main program.
Also a note on the help, it's not that we haven't offered it. Tens of people have offered to help Toady before, including several large projects (such as working on a new pathfinding algorithm) and, with the exception of a few binary patches and one notable exception where Baughn was able to write some graphics code for Toady, they have all been turned down. This is simply because Toady wants to be able to make DF the way that he and his brother view it, not the way somebody else wants to. Heck, he even turned down a multi-million dollar deal by some company to buy DF simply because he wants the game to go his way. So while somebody could come up with a 3D companion program, I sincerely doubt that Toady ever will.
A long time from now. In fact Toady is sort of purposely avoiding the ability to render 3D sprites. This is simply because with his experiments in the game before DF (Slaves to Armok, God of Blood) he found that he was spending more time actually designing and getting the sprites of various things to work correctly then was actually implementing new things and making the game better. Combine that with the fact that it is literally just one guy doing all of the programming for this entire game (well he has had a tiny bit of help here and there, but 99% of it is all him) and you can see the point. 3D sprites aren't coming to DF, at least probably not in the next 100 years or so. There are a few visualizers out there, one of which will do 3D static images, and then there is Stonesense which does 3D isometric live images, but 3D sprites aren't even really in the planning.
Also just a note here on the 2012 thing, but it's not foretelling our doom (or at least the mayans weren't!). Take a look at some mayan history and you see that December 2012 would really have just been the biggest party of the mayan civilization ever, sort of how we threw a huge party when we went from 1999 to 2000 (crazy conspiracies notwithstanding).
