25 replies to this topic

[rob86]

I stumbled upon a unique and apparently quite popular freeware multi-platform game called Dwarf Fortress. It seems to be an interesting RTS/City building type of game, though I haven't tried it very long. It looks like a lot of work has been put into it, it's been in development for years. There is one catch, it's user interface and graphics are quite atrocious. Look at screenshots. Out of the box, it's completely in ASCII graphics (though with great difficulty, you can install some tilesets with real images though this is a fairly confusing affair). I've played ASCII games before, more than a decade ago mind you, but never one that was so complex. There are so many weird ASCII characters moving around, it's a task just to figure out what it all means. For example, a pet dog is a letter "d". Like I said, this can be changed with optional graphics tilesets, but I'm not sure if that's the best route or not. A lot of people claim plain ASCII is better? There are a few things to do to make it more bearable, such as changing the tile colour schemes and using higher resolution windows.

Is the game worth playing despite it's absolutely dreadful graphics? It might be, but it sure takes a lot of effort to learn. It's not for the casual arcade gamer. It's hard enough just installing graphics and tile sets to work together (they're all different resolutions and tile dimensions) I haven't given up on it because it really looks like a rewarding game to play once you get past the learning curve and get used to the horrible appearance and memorize some keystrokes. The general consensus I read on the web is that you forget the ugly graphics, because the game is fun and addictive. It's easy to get a first impression of "What is this garbage?" by seeing screenshots, but the game is really in depth. I haven't even scratched the surface of the basics and I've played it for 4 hours (not continously).

It's frequently quoted official motto is "Losing is fun".

[inverse_bloom]

You know that could very well turn out to be a fun game, but could be a little hurtful on the eye's. Otherwise i'd definitely give it a try. I like these sorts of special games, usually if you start with your expectations very low it turns out really good.

Takes me back to memories like playing Rise of the Triads and Blood 1. Which were well dated by 98-99 by the time i played them, but had an engrossing feel about them. Another free game people may be interesting in is yoFrankie! I have never tried it as i dont think i'd have the hardware specs to play it adequately. Might work on some peoples though. Here is a screen shot -

http://www.yofrankie.org/wp-content/upload...yofrankie10.jpg

Here is the main site (download for the game is about 120 meg, not including "Blender 3D" install) -

http://www.yofrankie.org/

It was built over Blender 3D's engine. Only im i little sceptical how many levels you get with it and it is more targeted towards kids.

Edited by inverse_bloom, 08 December 2009 - 10:13 AM.

[rayzoredge]

I think that this game comes short of what we're used to nowadays.

Reminds me of the days of MUDs. Used to delve into those every now and then at the library... this game would be an upgrade to the genre, since MUDs were text-based.

[rob86]

I played Dwarf Fortress a little bit last night without a tutorial (not that I don't need one, it just gets boring reading 10 pages of tutorials). I was starting to forget about the bad graphics and it became a little bit addictive. I didn't do much, my dwarves seemed to take forever to tunnel out their home in the mountain, maybe I was doing something wrong. Anyway, I built them a dining room, a barracks to sleep in, and gave them some booze (that's their water!).

..I also cooked up some delicious kitten stew and hot dogs. Yes, they eat their pets. Times are tough. I'm breeding cats and dogs for food and companionship. They're telling me they'd rather have meat than strawberries to go with their strong dwarven ale and the the turtle sandwiches are getting old.

In the end, when I when to bed, I was actually wanting to continue building my pitifully unimpressive fortress. I'm starting to see how ASCII mode might actually be preferable to having graphical sprites, because it's kind of hard to tell different units from another even with the graphics. What I found humorous is that on the game wiki, instead of the standard image or screens hot you see in the upper right, they have a picture of the letter that represents them in game. So you'll check out "wiki/dog" and it'll be like [d] < this is a dog! or [w] <- this is a werewolf. You really have to use your imagination..

[anwiii]

ok. you got me addicted to this dumb game. i got as far as creating a world and preparing my characters. i fooled around with building things but i cannot get used to these commands. i have figured out how to make a bed from wood and even move that bed. but gosh darnit! my bottom floor of the fortress started getting flooded with water when it started raining. i deleted 4 folders of my worlds i created because i always feel inclined to start over when i feel i'm making mistakes.

i have played this game for about 6 hours yetserday trying to figure things out and i still can't figure crap out with the keys even when you have a legend to help you

so thanks alot pal! i have better things to do with my time then getting addicted to some stupid game with ascii graphics.

i have a question though. i know you can pause the game but does the game pause when you quit the game or will it be updated according to the time you lost quiting the game?

also, it took me a half hour to try and figure out how to prepare my characters because my plus/minus keyes didn't work on my laptaop. so i assumed they were for a numeric pad. i had to edit two keys

eventually, i think i am gowing to draw out plans for a structure before i build one. i think that would be easier. everything is in 2d but i was researching a little and caught a glimps of a 3d visual for the game, i guess there are addons to this game as well

i have only tried the fortess part of the game so far. have you tried the adveturer or legend?(i believe it was called legend)

i c an see how some people wouldn't like this type of game because they are too used to others that do pretty much the same thing but with excellent graphics. i'm old school though. i still get a kick out of playing the older versions of ultima which you can only do through dos or a dos emulator

rob86, on Dec 8 2009, 11:37 AM, said:

I played Dwarf Fortress a little bit last night without a tutorial (not that I don't need one, it just gets boring reading 10 pages of tutorials). I was starting to forget about the bad graphics and it became a little bit addictive. I didn't do much, my dwarves seemed to take forever to tunnel out their home in the mountain, maybe I was doing something wrong. Anyway, I built them a dining room, a barracks to sleep in, and gave them some booze (that's their water!).

..I also cooked up some delicious kitten stew and hot dogs. Yes, they eat their pets. Times are tough. I'm breeding cats and dogs for food and companionship. They're telling me they'd rather have meat than strawberries to go with their strong dwarven ale and the the turtle sandwiches are getting old.

In the end, when I when to bed, I was actually wanting to continue building my pitifully unimpressive fortress. I'm starting to see how ASCII mode might actually be preferable to having graphical sprites, because it's kind of hard to tell different units from another even with the graphics. What I found humorous is that on the game wiki, instead of the standard image or screens hot you see in the upper right, they have a picture of the letter that represents them in game. So you'll check out "wiki/dog" and it'll be like [d] < this is a dog! or [w] <- this is a werewolf. You really have to use your imagination..

[rob86]

As far as I know the game pauses when you quit it and you continue where you left off when you load it.

The keys seem to be one of the annoying parts of the game, I think you can rebind them but I haven't tried that. For example, my little + key won't work, but my - will. I have to use the num pad to navigate the menus which seems awkward, and to make it even awkward, some of the menus use the arrow keys. I read in a tutorial that you can supposedly use alt + arrow keys on the menus, but that didn't work for me. Perhaps you have to set them up this way yourself.

I think there are 3rd party visualizers that show you what your fortress looks like in 3D. If you look in the game, there's a hotkey for Visualize, which doesn't do anything - I imagine this must load some open of addon. There are also other utilities which I haven't tried, like Dwarf Foreman, Dwarf Therapist.

There are a whole bunch of tutorials out there, but I found this one was pretty informative. There are quite a few pages to it.

http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/...ess-part-1-wtf/

If you haven't seen it yet, the http://dwarffortress...x.php/Main_Page wiki is a must see webpage to understand what's going on.

I haven't tried adventure or legend mode.

[rob86]

Okay, I have to admit, Dwarf Fortress is a great game. It might look a bit crude, but I haven't liked a game this much for a long time. I'm overwhelmed by the depth of it, I've been playing it for hours over the last few days and I've barely scratched the surface of what you can do. I can't wait to get back to building my fortress, and to be honest, I'm cursing myself for discovering this game. It's eating up all my free time!

It's true what they say about forgetting the bad graphics. I'm so immersed in the game that it all seems to come together in my mind. The User Interface, while admittedly still pretty non-intuitive, begins to make more sense with experience. For a game this good, I'll deal with the minor flaws.

If anyone likes this type of city building game, they should definitely give this an honest try, with a tutorial and the wiki handy. I would dare say it's nearly impossible to learn without some kind of help. The game has it's flaws, mostly in the user-interface and menus being confusing. It's not always obvious where to find things. The graphics really aren't so deplorable once you get used to them, they aren't necessarily a fault. They are surprisingly refreshing after years of games made during the the high definition 3D gaming movement. I always complained about strategy games becoming too 3D and graphic intensive, with bigger and bigger units that fill the screen, making strategic gameplay nothing more than scrolling and rotating around trying to get a good view of the action. Dwarf Fortress might just be the answer to my wishing.

It's hard to believe one person made this game. If you ignore the dated graphics, and you'll be able to, this game rivals even big brand name city building-type games in quality and I've played quite a few. This is no obscure game that nobody plays, there is a very active forum with ~200 users active when I visited. I asked a couple Newbie questions, and within seconds there were replies. Dedicated fans, for sure!

[anwiii]

no kidding it's a great game. the irony of it all is that. what you say is all true. i just wish other people would take the time to download it. i would love to see more feedback in this thread to talk about stuff....you know...newbies bantering and cursing the game back and forth. i don't think there will be a day where i master this game. it is VERY complex. yesterday, i actually watched 5 of those utube viideos by duck somethin' or other. he did a pretty good job in putting up a vid tut.

there i am on the computer a lot so i like running this thing in the background. this was the first day i haven't started over yet....BUT! i see it in my near future i had bought dogs at the beginning and now they are having puppies. the game has so so much to do, i haven't even found the time to train them yet. figured out why my farmland wasn't able to harvest too. that was pissing me off when i would locate somewhere and couldn't even use the area to grow food.

i haven't researched this yet, but while playing, i'm wondering when the game was created. the only reason why i like the game so much is it's complexity and the logic behind everything you do and the consequences of everthing you do. i think the game starts you out with a horse and a mule, but still, i haven't found a purpose to either yet. also, i have found that starting out with two highly skilled minors is your best bet since there is a lot of digging involved.

i find myself having to keep visiting the wiki site for help in understanding what things are and what they do

rob86, on Dec 9 2009, 01:32 PM, said:

Okay, I have to admit, Dwarf Fortress is a great game. It might look a bit crude, but I haven't liked a game this much for a long time. I'm overwhelmed by the depth of it, I've been playing it for hours over the last few days and I've barely scratched the surface of what you can do. I can't wait to get back to building my fortress, and to be honest, I'm cursing myself for discovering this game. It's eating up all my free time!

It's true what they say about forgetting the bad graphics. I'm so immersed in the game that it all seems to come together in my mind. The User Interface, while admittedly still pretty non-intuitive, begins to make more sense with experience. For a game this good, I'll deal with the minor flaws.

If anyone likes this type of city building game, they should definitely give this an honest try, with a tutorial and the wiki handy. I would dare say it's nearly impossible to learn without some kind of help. The game has it's flaws, mostly in the user-interface and menus being confusing. It's not always obvious where to find things. The graphics really aren't so deplorable once you get used to them, they aren't necessarily a fault. They are surprisingly refreshing after years of games made during the the high definition 3D gaming movement. I always complained about strategy games becoming too 3D and graphic intensive, with bigger and bigger units that fill the screen, making strategic gameplay nothing more than scrolling and rotating around trying to get a good view of the action. Dwarf Fortress might just be the answer to my wishing.

It's hard to believe one person made this game. If you ignore the dated graphics, and you'll be able to, this game rivals even big brand name city building-type games in quality and I've played quite a few. This is no obscure game that nobody plays, there is a very active forum with ~200 users active when I visited. I asked a couple Newbie questions, and within seconds there were replies. Dedicated fans, for sure!

[rob86]

The animals are for eating! I think you can eat any animal. I'm not sure if they have other uses. You can use their bones and stuff to make crafts. I just breed cats for food. The dogs can be used for hunting and attacking thieves, the cats kill vermin in the fortress. All the animals can become pets and make a dwarf happy. Sometimes I don't understand my dwarves, there's a lot wrong with this situation that happened:

A goat and a raccoon died on top of the dining tables (why are they in the dining room anyway), and even though I set the dwarves to dump the corpses in the garbage, everyone avoided it, even going so far as eating beside the corpses, until purple "miasma" was filling the room, and still nobody cleaned it. I eventually cooked something with the corpse in the kitchen.

Don't forget your miners need picks.. I only brought one along and had two miners, I don't know what the second miner was using, his finger nails I guess. He became a legendary miner. I'm trying to do some real mining and smelting now, which is kind of hard when I don't know anything about geology. You have to dig around and find some ore, then make some charcoal, then smelt the ore into a bar, then forge the bars into something. As for where to find ore, I have no idea. It comes in either clumps or veins, at certain z- levels.

I've done a few new things recently, traded some crafts for some stuff, pissed off the elves (don't trade them anything wooden), created a soldier, built an office for my noble and sheriff. I'm still on my first fortress, and I have a feeling the goblins are going to be invading soon to tear it down. I doubt my one soldier and couple war dogs will be able to fight them off, and I haven't figured out how to make traps. I'm not sure what happens when you create a military, maybe you can attack other civilizations. There is so much to do. Here's a tip, make a lot of crafts and bins (they hold the crafts) then you can trade them and get some new items. I got some new picks and weapons that way, and a wide variety of disgusting sounding food (Spider meat?) of course you need a trade depot and a broker noble dwarf. I think my dwarves appreciated it, they were just eating vegetables for the past few years.

Check out the 'Dwarf Therapist' utility .. it lets you organize your dwarves jobs. Pretty useful. If you're on windows, you probably have more options for utilities than I do. I was lucky to find one that works on linux.

I too wish other people would try it. I'd like to hear what other people think about the game itself and not the screen shots. By the way, it was started in 2002 and first released in 2006.

[inverse_bloom]

Im not sure... how are your eyes after an hours play? It sounds like the kind of complex open ended game ive been waiting for, for a very long time. Those ideas you mentioned would be great incorporated into a 3d game. The only game that i have played which comes close is "Gothic 2" or "Morrowind". Those two games are definitely in my top ten.

Morrowind is such a worth while play for those who haven't played it, i should imagine it now retails for about 5 or so bucks in the U.S. Oblivion was just a dissapointment for me, no color, generally a flat experience in comparison to Morrowind.

Edited by inverse_bloom, 10 December 2009 - 08:40 AM.