Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Nanban Jim]

More specifically, what problems did you have before learning the ropes of the game?  We figure we are losing 90% of the players because of the UI and other barriers ...

What do you think is scaring people away? [...] We have to identify the main culprits first.

Checked back after 2 years. I still haven't learned the ropes. It's still the UI.

It's a UI written for those who already know how to use it, and no-one else.

Can it be learned? Obviously. But the question is what's scaring people away before learning the ropes. That's what's scaring people away, the UI.

[kuki]

Checked back after 2 years. I still haven't learned the ropes. It's still the UI.

It's a UI written for those who already know how to use it, and no-one else.

I agree with this.

I was completely unable to figure out DF the first three or four times I opened it, then I read the wiki for a few hours, then I was able to play. For general comparison, I can get comfortable in more or less any professional creative computer program without turning to the manual.

The DF UI does not take advantage of UI conventions, which means really the only ways to learn it are 1) look everything up or 2) try every menu option before you start trying to figure out what does what. People much prefer to learn fun computer programs by looking to familiar conventions for a few controls, then using those controls to do what they can, and figuring the rest out from context, building knowledge as they experiment.

If DF had, at the very very least, addressed the convention of using the mouse, arrow keys or WASD to look/move the cursor by telling me "Dwarf Fortress uses a split set of four controls instead of a standard cursor for viewing - experiment with the K, V, Q and T keys in conjunction with the arrow keys to see what's what!," I would have been able to figure out the rest, albeit slowly.

I did not read all 126 pages of this, forgive me if this territory has been covered.

[Viking]

Great post, Kuki. What you say is true. Hopefully Toady can focus a bit on UI soon. A smoother UI that is easier to come to terms with with do a lot for this otherwise great game.
 That said I'm very eager to see the next update completed

[Brynjólfur]

I'm a newb to the game and for me it's not the UI nor the graphics.  To note I am a veteran of gaming.  Been playing constantly since 1982 and also work in the industry on some high profile titles. 

i love this game!  It's 2 things that I have stumbled with though that I think would change a lot:

1) Better UI descriptions.  Something similar to tooltips.  Something that explains a feature as you are selecting.  Maybe just a button you can press to get more info.  It's not really the UI that's a bother...it's the uncertainty and the need to go to wiki's.  It's fun to go to wiki's yes but it's unnecessary in the grand scheme of things.  It interrupts the flow of the game, especially for newbies.  That great feeling of managing a fortress doesn't come until 15-20 hours in at minimum....assuming you have the best resources at your disposal (I had the excellent book "How to play Dwarf Fortress".)

2) The military.  5 fortresses in and I'm still scratching my head.  This is the single most difficult thing for me to grasp and in the end it comes down to the fact that you have to jump through too many hoops to get the military up and running....and also the military management just isn't fun....unlike like most other micromanagement in the game.

[Flare]

FPS death. Even if I feel like starting a new fortress in the middle of the game when the FPS wasn't as bad, experiencing the slow grind right before I abandon pretty much stops me from making a new fortress for a long while.

[Azated]

FPS death. Even if I feel like starting a new fortress in the middle of the game when the FPS wasn't as bad, experiencing the slow grind right before I abandon pretty much stops me from making a new fortress for a long while.

Agreed. I can manage to keep a pretty consistent 30-50 fps if I very carefully manage my fortress. And by very carefully, I mean looking though every single item list in the stocks menu and dumping/atom smashing anything I don't need at that exact moment.

Unfortunately, there's not much we can do to improve performance short of careful management, upgrading to supercomputer style CPU's, or giving toady about a decade to recode the game for multi-core support.

[IronTomato]

It took me a long time to learn DF, which I say is the main problem. Like Minecraft, the game doesn't have a very in-depth tutorial. (Though the help screen is very helpful) However, once you learn so much about the game, you can just teach yourself the rest. If there was an option to go through a hands-on tutorial thing, and then a window would pop up saying "Press d to make designations, put a mining designation on the highlighted area," Or something like that, that would be a great way to teach newbies how to play.

multi-core support.

UUUUGGHH

[Lazerlatté]

The one thing that turns me off is the fact that in adventurer mode you have to get your hands on at least medium-ish quality armor realllly early in the game. Otherwise you're as dead as a zombie funeral.

[Andir]

Every time I ever played Adventure, I always died of hunger because I never could figure out what I was supposed to do to get food!  Actually, the last time I tried playing I ended up venturing into a fort and getting stuck not able to move because I was hungry/passed out?  I don't even remember.

[pisskop]

Every time I ever played Adventure, I always died of hunger because I never could figure out what I was supposed to do to get food!  Actually, the last time I tried playing I ended up venturing into a fort and getting stuck not able to move because I was hungry/passed out?  I don't even remember.

Food is obtained (without a mod) by buying it at a townsted or butchering a large enough creature (small birds cannot be butchered).  You may also find it irregularly in certain lairs.

[Damiac]

What initially turned me off about DF? Labor designations.  Sort through your list of dwarves, give each one some labors, ok, fine.
Now a job needs doing, ok... if there's an idler, he gets it, otherwise, maybe just at random.
That'll get jobs done, but it leads to constantly messing around with labors, which is terribly inefficient.
Then I got dwarf therapist. Thank goodness for dwarf therapist.

So now what turns me off? The knowledge that even with therapist, with every migrant wave after the first couple small ones, I'm gonna be spending 5-10 minutes (at least) re-organizing my labor force.

Recommendation: Please, for the love of Armok, give me smaller migrant waves! (like 2-8 migrants a season)   I want to be happy to have more dwarves to work with, not annoyed because I have to spend more time paused doing labor re-assignment surgery.

And I'm the type who typically enjoys micromanaging things to that level.  The typical newbie is probably much more annoyed than I am.  And this is all with a 3rd party tool that is a million times better than the in game method of assigning labors.

Also, the fact that the game pauses every time I do anything.  Can that be an option? Maybe I don't want to pause while I designate the next branch to mine.

Aside from that, lack of challenge after the initial rough start, and of course, FPS death, but I don't think there's a simple answer to that.

[kuki]

Please, for the love of Armok, give me smaller migrant waves! (like 2-8 migrants a season)   I want to be happy to have more dwarves to work with, not annoyed because I have to spend more time paused doing labor re-assignment surgery.

Wait oh my god yes. If migrants could just be made into a valuable resource instead of a challengingly overabundant one, I probably wouldn't mind surgically reassigning them at all. I would love fields for "migrant wave size, small medium or large" and "huge second spring migration, on or off" in the init configs. Migrant waves already scale relative to your exports and things, right? So it could be an additional multiplier to the number of migrants, 0.5 if wave size is set to small, 0.75 if it's set to medium and 1.0 if it's set to large, or whatever other values make actual sense in gameplay terms. (I don't think we actually need *faster* growing fortresses as an option, or do we?)

Failing that, yes, just give me less migrants.

[Scootagoose]

Personally. I have trouble with Boogeymen. Sure, it can be solved with a follower, but damn do I hate running for 30 minutes straight in RL time before finally day cracks into night.

[Deathworks]

Hello!

I agree wholeheartedly with Damiac and Kuki that the large and uncontrollable migrant waves are rather annoying. Wanting to do a slow-growth fortress with trade, the system does not allow me to stick to my initial 7 for a while, and if I allow migrants to come at a later point, I have to ready myself for an explosion in fortress population. That is really keeping me from enjoying the game to its most.

EDIT: Rereading the OP, I think that a lot of newbies would also appreciate to be able to start and work with a small, overviewable population, rather than having dozens of individuals all at once. It is just overwhelming if you want to look at each individual dwarf and at the same time learn the game.

Yours,
Deathworks

[itisnotlogical]

I'm only really turned off by Fortress mode. The thing that turns me off most is the massive complexity. It feels like I'm learning to play five really complicated and difficult games at once, instead of one. I could understand Nethack, XCom or almost any other game just by playing naturally for a while; I have to check the wiki every 10 minutes playing Fortress mode for relatively simple things, like which workshop can make what items from which materials. I hope that eventually DF will evolve to a point where the wiki can truly be a helpful reference rather than a necessary gameplay resource.

I really like Adventure mode. The gameplay is complex enough to stand out, but not so complex that it feels weighed down by it. The controls make logical sense, too. (L)ooking at someone and checking their (d)escription lets you check their health status, for example.