Bay 12 Games Forum

I am not arguing at all about tile size.  My suggestion only holds if tiles ever get a fixed size, which I hope very much happens some day.  If they never do, then they never do.  In that case, DF won't be the game I would like for it to eventually be, and farming can remain as it is.  You're right: it ain't broken.  It's just unrealistic and that's ok to some people, and to me it's pretty much a meaningless, contrived game mechanic that I begrudgingly tolerate.  Fortunately, there are many other things about DF that I love.

I think you misunderstand. I agree that farming needs to be overhauled. I do not, however, think that that needs fixed-size tiles and I was simply pointing out that fixed-size tiles will cause more trouble than they are worth. For a slight amount of added realism, Toady would need to handle so many more things. Also, maps would likely need to be larger as not as much would fit in the gridsizes we have now. Larger maps means more rendering time, which means more calculations for pathing as well... This means a huge FPS reduction. It'd be nice to say, "I made a 200 meter tall statue of Urist McDumbass, my mayor that went berserk and got tossed into my HFS Express Tunnel" but it doesn't really -improve- the game in any conceivable way, except for satisfying people who want everything to conform to very rigid and exacting units.

Me being against fixed-size tiles has nothing to do with my feelings on farming. It is a nice thing to think about, but when you consider it from the standpoint that we already have FPS, CPU, and memory problems that we are just now getting over then you realize that more tiles to show the same amount of stuff is just not necessary. It's sort of along the lines of giving DF polygonal graphics. It would be cool to see, but the amount of power and processing required is simply unrealistic. The tile system in DF is modeled off of Nethack and Rogue and it isn't broken. In fact, "tile" is pretty much an accepted unit around here and around Nethack and Rogue communities. "One tile" means something very concrete, even if it isn't exactly clear what. It's like bad handwriting. It says something, we just aren't sure what.

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What I am saying is that we can remove the unnecessary complexity and simply tweak how farming works, which is supposed to be what this is about. If a Dwarf eats 10 Urists of food each eating cycle and your farm produces 50 Urists of food in roughly one Dwarven eating cycle, then that farm can feed 5 Dwarves. Let's figure that each tile produces roughly two Urists per cycle. That's a 5x5 farm to feed 5 Dwarves per cycle. One dwarf could manage a 5x5 farm. That's a 20% producers-to-consumers ratio. Voila, now farms are successfully balanced to where you WILL need to upsize your farms with your population. If a 5x5 farm feeds dwarves with 1 of those dwarves producing, then you have a 1/5 ratio per 25 t^2 (that's tiles squared. Yes, I use them as a unit.) That's 2/10 for a 5x10 farm (read: 2 producers / 10 total). That's 4/20 for a 10x10 farm. You would need 5 full 10x10 farms to feed 100 dwarves. 10 full 10x10 farms to feed 200 dwarves. That's a MUCH more manageable number, while still maintaining the "realism" ratio of food production. Of course, this also means that Quarry Bushes would require nerfing. Honestly, that's fine with me as I only need one season of them in a 6x5 farm to feed my dwarves for almost a year. That's absurd. We can keep the FPS problem managed, though, by having each "tile" of farm able to produce a set maximum of food overall in Urists (or a Dwarven measure of weight) that is settable in the inits. Or we could be more invasive and make it so each "tile" of a planted <plant> is able to produce a set maximum of food overall. Food should also have some waste that cooks can reduce with skill. Quarry bushes have waste in their useless plant matter and roots, like other plants, while plump helmets should have little waste if any. The maximum is how much a legendary <relevant skill> can create from the plant or foodstuff in question. Everything else is lowered by efficiency percentages, which could be set via raws or inits. Legendary is 100% efficiency, obviously.

If you skimmed here, please go up to the bolded message and read what I posted in its entirety. I feel as if it is an excellent compromise and has been compiled from several ideas I have read around the threads. It is not, by any means, an entirely original idea yet I feel as if it has overwhelming merit in addressing this problem using the new features introduced in 0.31.##.

I'm with you that fixed tile sizes are a cool idea and would add some immersion. From a logistic standpoint, though, they'd be horridly impractical with how DF works now. If Toady decides to, later, invest the time in multi-threading (glowing due to infamy of the topic) then I could see realistic tile sizes becoming a reality as you could handle pathfinding and graphics on separate threads. I'm only, really, against it because of the problems it would cause. Seriously. I also think that DF would require a large overhaul to get realistic tile sizes working, probably near as large an overhaul as multi-threading.

I figure that we need a new way to handle food anyway, and it is often handled by weight (or volume) IRL... It logically follows that a (relatively) easy fix to farming involves giving foods weights and setting an amount of food in weight that dwarves eat. This could fix the farming issues forever, or at the very least hold them at an agreeable non-absurd level if and/or when Toady decides to implement realistic tile sizes. Either way, food should be handled by weight so as to make things like Quarry Bushes slightly less absurdly superdwarven.

I think that, early on, your dwarves should have a basic time of it. A couple of farms feeding you until you hit enough dwarves to make tools to make farming happen faster... Then you're set until you get enough farms to train animals to pull larger tools... And so on and so forth. The suggestion I posed does not show a realistic consumption curve with rising classes... It's more of a linear model. Ideally, nobles and heftier dwarves would want (but not require) larger amounts of food. Not having that would give them frowny faces, but a bridge could fix that... But seriously, as your dwarves feel the warm bosomy embrace of civilization, they likely will want more food so they can feel the warm bosomy embrace of their bearded wives. Eating meals consisting of 10 Urists of Prepared Meals consisting of two plump helmets doesn't, exactly, lead to having the body fat for the copious bosom that the up-and-coming Dwarven men like. So as civilization increases, dwarves want more than just their rations. If they can afford it, they might even want twice their "survival" amount. The 10 Urist a feeding cycle for a dwarf to "be full" is actually just a rough estimate of a "not starving" kind of full, so there is room for upscaling to where making more than the bare minimum five 10x10 farms for your 100 dwarves may actually be beneficial, especially with more modern tools.

A particularly ingenious (or sadistic) fortress builder may even elect to trap goblins and train them to pull the farming tools. When Toady codes that, I will have a Goblin Farming Union.

Visually, Dante's Inferno is very stylized. It's got that crisp look you'll find in many blockbuster games like Gears of War, God of War, Darksiders, and even a touch of Elder Scrolls. The enemies are tailored to the areas you fight them in, so if you encounter an enemy in the Lust circle of hell, it will be related to that. There are also generic enemy types that follow you around, like general tormented souls and whatnot. When you get up close to some of the generic models, you can tell that they were a bit under designed as the textures become very obvious.

The areas of the game, in general, are really great to look at. The background and foreground mesh very well and, often, it is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. Interactive objects also don't suffer from different textures, so they are often indistinguishable from the non-interactive scene items. The two levels of Hell I had a chance to see were Lust and Gluttony and both were stunning in their own way. Lust had spirals of wind that, essentially, consisted of the pleasured wails and moans of those damned to that circle while Gluttony had pools of bile and acid that the damned flailed about in, wailing in agony.

Some of the visuals, however, were rather over the top. Lust is a great example of this. There were female enemies in Lust that, I kid you not, had vagina tentacles. They would reach down, spread themselves open, and this great disgusting demon tentacle with a vagina-shaped mouth would splurt forth to attack you. It was insane. Then there is the giant penis tower. I'm still not joking. It rises out of the purplish undulating sea that seems to bracket this level of Hell and is surrounded by a sheath of the Winds of Lust, complete with moaning charred Damned flying around it. Your goal is to climb to the top of this tower via an interior elevator, and the interior looks mighty veiny and flesh-like. While you're going up, however, you get to the icing on this cake. No, the tower doesn't splooge... but a giant naked woman (Cleopatra, actually) climbs the tower. Yes, she is in the nude, completely. Wait, maybe she had a loincloth or something... But it doesn't matter. She climbs the tower after you, or perhaps intending to use it for some other purpose as she is the ruler of this really weird place... My brain hurts to think about it. Needless to say, she is highly detailed, complete with breast physics that make me feel like a saggy grandma. Of course, her nipples are little mouths with undulating tongues that spew out a cloud of yellowish ichor and unbaptized babies with knives for arms. I really wish I was joking, but yeah. Lust pretty much tells you exactly how outrageous this game gets.

There isn't much to say about the sound, as it really was spot on. The voice acting was a little standard, but the sounds for various beasties and attacks seemed, largely, on target. I didn't have any gripes except for the fact that the Damned, in this game, almost never stop wailing. There are three easily definable tracks to this game: Music, FX, and the Wailing of the Damned.

Unfortunately, the Wailing keeps grating at me, even while locked in combat. I hate babies crying, I hate emergency vehicle sirens, but neither is as bad as this Wailing. The main problem is that it's a subtle noise, so even when you think it's disappeared, you quickly realize it's just hovering right on the edge of your audible range. Unless you're really close to a wall, which are all composed of the Damned, then it's really fucking loud. I hate wall-crawling scenes because of this.

I encountered no major bugs or snags in this game. Of course, there was a patch right after release, which lowers the score... Loading times seemed acceptable as well.

Repetitive hack and slash. God of War fans, you'll be right at home. You have heavy attacks, light attacks, and your "other" attacks, which are ranged cross-based ones in this case. Boss battles get very tedious as there are actually triggers to downing the health of many Big Bads. Games like God of War simply say, "Fuck up the quicktime? You die or get injured, but the boss still has a heath bar, buck-o! Bring that shit to 0!" Dante's Inferno decides, "Nooo! Fuck that! We're going to cut out boss health. Instead, to kill these fuckers, you need to attack them until they're staggered, then perform a usually complicated and almost never intuitive quick time action. Repeat this until we say you win. On second thought, no... We'll just give the boss aggravating area attacks that you can just barely dodge as their attack path is almost twice as wide as your dodging radius and let you suffer!"

Boss battles really made me feel like I was in Hell, which is not a good thing in this game. This isn't figurative Hell, nor an allusion to how immersive this game is(n't). This is literal Hell. Boss battles are aggravating, repetitive, and often make you go, "What the fuck do I need to do?!" or "When the fuck does this end!" It only got better with a boss like Cerberus. I mean, at least you know that bastard only has three heads so as long as you can count that high you know you've got that many to go.

Unfortunately, fighting is all there is to this game. It can get old, quick. There didn't seem to be any puzzles or anything to variate from the formula, which may not always be bad but makes Dante's Inferno seem shallow.

Speaking of shallow, the "upgrade" system they have is stupid, too. You have a pseudo-moral choice in which you can damn the baddies or absolve them. Damning them nets you unholy points while absolving them nets you holy points. How intuitive. Of course, now you get to spend them and, oh... What is this? Well, there are seven levels of each track and they are quite specialized. To put it bluntly, the unholy track nets you melee attacks and the holy one nets you ranged attacks. This means that any moral decision is tossed out of the window. They then hurl the window into the sun when you realize that your choice has no effect on the ending. None. Dante's Inferno is, by no means, a literal interpretation of the epic so you think they could have at least given a "good" and a "bad" ending? No, no way. To piss you off a bit more, you can occasionally find what I like to call the Super Damned. Everyone in Hell is Damned, but the Super Damned are those special ones that are pretty much just famous. You can damn them in one quick stroke, or play 30 seconds of a Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or (for you obscure gamers out there) Guitaroo Man style minigame to absolve them. While that sounds cool, they actually make a power-up where you can auto-absolve these Super Damned... But you have to find it first. So they torture you with a shitty minigame and then say, "If you don't like it, scour all of the levels and find all the Beatrice Stones so you don't have to do it!"

Well, at least the hack-and-slash bits are solid.

Except for camera concerns, the controls were also good. The camera liked to be finnicky with me, but others may like it so it isn't too major of a concern. I didn't like how, in boss battles where the boss is redonculously large, you can often miss the quicktime triggers because they appear on scenery objects. You miss these because the camera likes to be finnicky. Minor problem, though, as once you figure out where the triggers are, you can easily watch for them again as boss battles are goddamn tedious. Whoops, raging on that again...

(Not) long story short, it's akin to replaying a God of War title. You do it if you like it or are a completionist, but not because there is actually some substantial bit of game you missed.