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[Lee72]

For example, A Game of Dwarves, Gnomoria, and another one I cannot remember the name of in development that actually sounds closer to DF). If someone actually has the ability to put the pieces together and merge modern day graphics with the similar kind of complexity or Dwarf Fortress and a fluid GUI, they will have a hit and Bay 12 Games will be missing out.
 
I think it's time DF went 3D and were put out to the mainstream. People are hungry for a game like that, just look how successful Minecraft has become. 
The devs are missing out on a great almost "untapped", pun intended, opportunity here to really become a household name. As long as this game stays ASCII 2D with or without tile sets, it will never hit the mainstream and millions of people will never know its greatness. It's time to get with the future devs, you really are missing out on an a great opportunity here.

You are on the wrong forum with your, millions of people & missing opportunity blah, blah, blah talk!
We love this game as it is, the way Toady wants it to be.
The other games you mentioned are like bubble gum, you chew over them a while then spit them out!

[ZimminyCricket]

And then there are crazy buggers like me...

Coding an AI to try and surmount the insurmountable odds of failure.

[HiEv]

The UI needs upgraded: Agree.  This is doable, and some user tools like Dwarf Therapist and various DFHack tools have lead the way.

The game should go 3D: Strongly disagree.  This is a project that would take a team of 3D graphics artists years to do, the game would need a 3D engine of some sort, and the weirdness of giant dragons taking up the same space as a tiny kitten would need to be sorted out (among other things).  This would be a multi-year project with a huge budget that simply doesn't exist.  Furthermore, it would stunt the modding community, take away much of the imaginative interpretation of what goes on in the game, slow down the adding of new features, since many would have to have graphics created for them first.  Basically, we're a long way off from the point where this would be reasonable.  Maybe in v2.0 or v3.0.

In the meantime, there are tilesets that help make the visualization a bit better.

[Lazerlatté]

DF will never go 3D because that would mean you actually could see what's going on. Which means you could see all the nudity and bloody, gory, gruesome violence.

[katana]

DF will never go 3D because that would mean you actually could see what's going on. Which means you could see all the nudity and bloody, gory, gruesome violence.

Not to mention the purely impossible stuff- some of the creatures we get, stabbing somebody in the tongue from behind and only severing it, quantum stockpiles...

[AutomataKittay]

DF will never go 3D because that would mean you actually could see what's going on. Which means you could see all the nudity and bloody, gory, gruesome violence.

Not to mention the purely impossible stuff- some of the creatures we get, stabbing somebody in the tongue from behind and only severing it, quantum stockpiles...

Using the forearm to hold the tooth and bolts somehow managing to hurt both liver and heart.

[malvado]

Actually Toady is managing 3D rather well in my point of view, Just have a look at how trees are now several tiles high, different types of sites are generated in full 3d such as walls being several tiles high, sewers, dungeons etc spanning several levels up / down , towns being fully 3d (still there's room for improvement such as housing with better roof's and more floors).

I'd say making a creature more 3D by increasing it's size in X, Y, Z is doable, as for how the creature would look is another matter , but it could be doable as well by using some standarized body parts that can be extended and moded to fit the type of creature in question.

I

[Grisher]

Does Toady rely only on DF donations to survive? Pay his bills etc etc

What is taken in each month for donations isnt even what I take in each month before taxes. My jobs about avg around here for someone without a college degree.Its getting difficult for me to survive with the costs of everything rising as rapidly as they do anymore.

Toady never answers the ui/graphics questions in a definite answer.A definite answer would most likely chase off some of the people waiting for a ui/graphics overhaul and with them donations.
The Sept report shows he is surprised nobody is excited.I can only guess his deduction that we arent excited is shown in the low amount of donations.

If Toady ever plans to get more in donations then he is currently getting, more depth isnt going to do it.It will take at the least a ui overhaul and most likely stone sense style graphics.

I myself love the game,its a fantastic game with so much depth and detail its amazing.

[katana]

I'd say making a creature more 3D by increasing it's size in X, Y, Z is doable, as for how the creature would look is another matter , but it could be doable as well by using some standarized body parts that can be extended and moded to fit the type of creature in question.

There's a big difference between multi-tile static (or mostly static) objects, and multi-tile objects that move around constantly. There would also be game balancing issues which we don't have right now because of abstractness.

Think about wagons. If a wagon takes up 9x the area of a dwarf, and a dragon is a few dozen times as large, how many tiles would a dragon be? There are many creatures that take up massive amounts of space compared to a dwarf, but take the same tile size. If we increased this, they wouldn't be able to invade dwarves, and would just be trapped outside.
While from a story telling perspective, it's fun to just escape by running through a pass smaller than the creature chasing you, it's very abusable gameplay-wise. If we had 1-tile wide entrances, most dangerous/large enemies wouldn't be able to attack us, and we could just hide inside and take pot shots. Then what about rats and creatures as small to a dwarf as a dwarf is to a titan? Would tiles need to be made smaller, or would they magically be considered as big as a dwarf while a dragon is larger?

[Trif]

Toady never answers the ui/graphics questions in a definite answer.A definite answer would most likely chase off some of the people waiting for a ui/graphics overhaul and with them donations.

These questions have been around for 6 years. Toady just doesn't repeat his answers every 2 months.

Rainseeker:   [...] Our next one's coming from Jim DeMont: 'What are your plans to make the game more accessible to new players?'
Toady:   We have plans, who knows when, as usual, but the plans we have for that are ... There are a couple of things that keep people out of the game, mainly. One of the big impediments of course is the ASCII display; as we've seen from some of the utilities that have been popping up, more people would be playing the game if they had a reasonable look, tiles and all that isometric type stuff, all that kind of thing. And we're planning to support that stuff over time, there's issues there of course that we've gone over in the past about how fast development will be, how many other people need to be brought on board and what kind of trouble that can cause. But aside from that there's the issue of the interface as a larger picture, just in terms of having keys that are consistent and make sense, mouse support's a huge thing for people, and we're planning on doing that thing. The main thing there is uncoupling Dwarf Fortress from all the curses crap that has been there for years which is the ASCII stuff that ties it in so you can't have variable width fonts right now which you'd really want to have to have bigger tiles and have a smaller menu that can hide off somewhere by itself. And there's also the notion of now ... Even if you had a streamlined interface and graphical characters and so on, the game would still be very inaccessible because you still start the game and your dwarves would just be milling around and you still wouldn't know what to do. Tutorials seem like a very reasonable thing, I know a few people are against them for whatever reason but I don't see another way. There'd need to be quite a few tutorials and it would be good to explore ways to make those as fun as possible, because sometimes a tutorial can really be a hassle. So it'll take some work to get those polished but you've just got to make sure people know how to dig, they know how to make buildings, and do the other jobs that the dwarves need to do, and also get across some of those concepts about how the world works, and how it's okay to fail, and you're encouraged to let your game die and that kind of thing.
Rainseeker:   Because it goes on. Your game is connected to the entire world, so if you build a new ...
Toady:   Yeah, it's good to get that thing across and so a tutorial's actually a good platform in that sense to instil some of the overarching concepts of the game, I wouldn't say how it's meant to be played, but just how it can be played. So that's the three pronged thing we've got right now. I could have missed some of the little dev items that are there, and other items that have been floated in the 'What turns you off about Dwarf Fortress?' thread and so on. I know there are a lot of good ideas in there, but the three things that spring to mind immediately are graphics, consistent controls with mouse support and tutorials.

If Toady ever plans to get more in donations then he is currently getting, more depth isnt going to do it.It will take at the least a ui overhaul and most likely stone sense style graphics.

Toady doesn't plan to get more in donations, though. Toady wants to make Dwarf Fortress, and he gets enough money to continue doing it.

[10ebbor10]

Minecraft doesn't really have a business model, does it? It just got lucky.

Valve pointed out Minecraft to the general public in one of their blogs, and that got the game to really boom. It looked as if it was already on the slow track to success if Valve didn't step in, though.

Don't forget the bump of Penny arcade, which was far larger than DF's. (Though both crashed Mojang's servers.)

Does Toady rely only on DF donations to survive? Pay his bills etc etc

What is taken in each month for donations isnt even what I take in each month before taxes. My jobs about avg around here for someone without a college degree.Its getting difficult for me to survive with the costs of everything rising as rapidly as they do anymore.

I'm pretty sure he does.  Such is the life of the hungry game developer.

As for 3D graphics, I highly doubt we'd see even isometric before we get the tile thing out of the way, and even then I doubt we get them before beta(Estimate 6-12 years).

[chewie]

Minecraft doesn't really have a business model, does it? It just got lucky.

Valve pointed out Minecraft to the general public in one of their blogs, and that got the game to really boom. It looked as if it was already on the slow track to success if Valve didn't step in, though.

I think it was rather the unbelievably terrible but somehow still onholding youtube bandwagon that pushed it into the mainstream. Like many others just as DayZ.

[crazz2323]

I agree with you here, a Stonesense type view is really what I meant by 3D. That can't be too hard being that someone else created Stonsense itself no? Would be really nice, and a UI overhaul. I'll bet the UI and lack of mouse interface scares off some.

Does Toady rely only on DF donations to survive? Pay his bills etc etc

What is taken in each month for donations isnt even what I take in each month before taxes. My jobs about avg around here for someone without a college degree.Its getting difficult for me to survive with the costs of everything rising as rapidly as they do anymore.

Toady never answers the ui/graphics questions in a definite answer.A definite answer would most likely chase off some of the people waiting for a ui/graphics overhaul and with them donations.
The Sept report shows he is surprised nobody is excited.I can only guess his deduction that we arent excited is shown in the low amount of donations.

If Toady ever plans to get more in donations then he is currently getting, more depth isnt going to do it.It will take at the least a ui overhaul and most likely stone sense style graphics.

I myself love the game,its a fantastic game with so much depth and detail its amazing.

[malvado]

There's a big difference between multi-tile static (or mostly static) objects, and multi-tile objects that move around constantly. There would also be game balancing issues which we don't have right now because of abstractness.

Think about wagons. If a wagon takes up 9x the area of a dwarf, and a dragon is a few dozen times as large, how many tiles would a dragon be? There are many creatures that take up massive amounts of space compared to a dwarf, but take the same tile size. If we increased this, they wouldn't be able to invade dwarves, and would just be trapped outside.
While from a story telling perspective, it's fun to just escape by running through a pass smaller than the creature chasing you, it's very abusable gameplay-wise. If we had 1-tile wide entrances, most dangerous/large enemies wouldn't be able to attack us, and we could just hide inside and take pot shots. Then what about rats and creatures as small to a dwarf as a dwarf is to a titan? Would tiles need to be made smaller, or would they magically be considered as big as a dwarf while a dragon is larger?

While I agree about your thoughts about this matter I still think it's pretty much doable, remember Toady has said he wants invaders to be able to dig , climb walls and probably also affect terrain in some way (a giant smashing an entrance to pulp for example trapping dwarves inside) , but yes, I do not disagree that it will definitely be a big brainer issue.

I will think though that some of the megabeasts will instead be smarter and prey on your outside dwarves, dragons would use their firy breath more and so on, perhaps they would even send "minions" to mass invade your fortress (Dragon commanding a goblin force). There's definitely many possibilities.

[katana]

There's a big difference between multi-tile static (or mostly static) objects, and multi-tile objects that move around constantly. There would also be game balancing issues which we don't have right now because of abstractness.

Think about wagons. If a wagon takes up 9x the area of a dwarf, and a dragon is a few dozen times as large, how many tiles would a dragon be? There are many creatures that take up massive amounts of space compared to a dwarf, but take the same tile size. If we increased this, they wouldn't be able to invade dwarves, and would just be trapped outside.
While from a story telling perspective, it's fun to just escape by running through a pass smaller than the creature chasing you, it's very abusable gameplay-wise. If we had 1-tile wide entrances, most dangerous/large enemies wouldn't be able to attack us, and we could just hide inside and take pot shots. Then what about rats and creatures as small to a dwarf as a dwarf is to a titan? Would tiles need to be made smaller, or would they magically be considered as big as a dwarf while a dragon is larger?

While I agree about your thoughts about this matter I still think it's pretty much doable, remember Toady has said he wants invaders to be able to dig , climb walls and probably also affect terrain in some way (a giant smashing an entrance to pulp for example trapping dwarves inside) , but yes, I do not disagree that it will definitely be a big brainer issue.

I will think though that some of the megabeasts will instead be smarter and prey on your outside dwarves, dragons would use their firy breath more and so on, perhaps they would even send "minions" to mass invade your fortress (Dragon commanding a goblin force). There's definitely many possibilities.

It's very much doable, and an AI rework will come eventually, but I really think this is so far away that anything we say now will not matter. By the time we get to these things, our very core mechanics could've completely changed.