If anyone deserve to get rich it's the people that gave away their project for free for 15 years turning down multiple monetisation opportunities on the way. Very happy for them. Next up VLC!
Apparently Toady has had several 6 figure opportunities just to license the name that he's turned down.
The game is made for the love of making it and what little money they made was always just about allowing them to keep doing what they love. The resulting good will from their 20 years of labor and refusing to sell out paid off in the end when they needed it. Honestly, I'd have bet that if they released the "premium" version for free on bay12 but $30 on Steam they'd still make the majority of what they have.
It reminds me of Justin Hall's story about holding out and refusing to sell "bud.com" to Budweiser.
Instead he just hung onto it, and eventually used it for his own bud delivery company, once recreational cannabis was finally legalized.
He was much happier that great three-letter domain name be used for something he loves, strong kind bud, instead of something he hates, weak piss beer.
>In 1999 I was contacted by a lawyer Steven M. Weinberg, representing Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud beer.
>We chatted by phone: “So, you’re a college student!”
>Actually I graduated the year before.
>He continued: “Well, how does $50,000 sound for bud.com?”
>I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated. I remember reading that the marketing budget for Budweiser beer that quarter was $16.1 million. BUD was the company’s stock symbol.
>I wasn’t going to sell lightly, and they weren’t going to bid against themselves, so we didn’t get anywhere.
The story about his fight to register the four-letter domain name fuck.com is also hilarious:
I'm torn on this story. On one hand I'm really glad he got to keep using it personally out of the gate and eventually was able to later use it again for the intent it sounds like he gave when registering, couldn't ask for anything more for a short domain.
On the other his reasoning for not selling was really unrelated to any of that. His response was standard squatter logic - I registered it first and you have a lot of money + will actually use it heavily so I'm not selling unless it's for tens of thousands of times what I got it for. It wasn't like he responded "I think I will get more than 50k of use out of it" or "It's more than 50k of inconvenience for me to change my email" it was straight up "I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated". Kind of ruins the inspiration when the thing he actually held out for was rent seeking.
On the third hand Budweiser is indeed really shit beer...
I'm not torn. They were actively using the site. They weren't sitting on it simply to sell it. But of course, everything has a price... it was just significantly higher than $50k.
I have a story similar to this. My friends and I had a joke about some famous person in high school (in the 90s). We registered a domain with his name and used the domain extensively.
10 years later the guy tried to sue us for control of the domain. We were actively using it though and it was just an inside joke. Random internet people with no clue about the situation would have thought we were just squatters.
"famous person tried to sue me for a joke domain I was using but wouldn't sell because we liked using it" is a very different story than "guy says the reason he didn't sell is he knew they had a bigger marketing budget". Your story actually sounds awesome. His could have been if it were "I loved what I was doing with it more than 50k" instead of what he says it was. In the end it worked out to a similar outcome, kinda? That's where the torn piece comes in, it worked out but not for the inspiring reason it sounds like at first.
I'm not sure why you care about annheiser-busch so much.
He knew that bud.com was worth more than $50k to Budweiser.
Bud.com would still be on every can and case of beer they produced.
Says they didn't like the beer, anyhow. If Budweiser came with a 15 million buyout offer I might see your point, but $50k is barely enough to buy a reliable car after taxes, registration, and insurance.
It's not about whether I care about Budweiser, who was trying to buy is irrelevant and like I said I don't even like their beer either. I'm just against the idea that registering a domain is something that entitles you to try to use it to make 15 million on transferring it because you were first and hoped someone with big pockets could buy it from you. It's one thing when your reason for not selling is your legitimate intent/action to actually use the domain but it's another when you blatantly say your reasoning is they have more money they could give you for it. It's not some crazy idea, modern policy at ICANN (who actually owns the domain anyways) agrees this is not how they want domains to be used either and most people in that position nowadays at least feign an attempt to say their reason for not selling was existing personal use even if internally they know it's about trying to get more money for the transfer as they know they'd be at risk of having their registration revoked otherwise.
Public resources like domains are tricky. We want them to be used not treated as a get-rich-quick opportunity where people who registered a bunch of generic things try to get millions for sitting on domains. I'm glad in the end this one actually got used but when the story from the source itself gives a completely different reason it's hard to be excited about it regardless how much you care about Budweiser in particular.
In comparison for example (though not specifically domains) "Dwarf Fortress" didn't sell rights to the name because they were actually using it, intended to continue using it, and didn't want to dilute the value they had actually put into the name that made others want to buy it. In the end they made millions of dollars with success of the game's newer launch off that brand identity they had built. That's an inspiring story of not selling a name.
Things have a price when the buyer and seller agree on a price. If only the seller thinks it's worth more than 50k, it's not really worth more than 50k.
Who said anything about he should have had to give it away? All I said was the story was an uninspiring one about domain squatting for money not an inspiring one about someone who refused to sell because of their love/use for the domain. What they had to do at the time this was occuring was very unrestricted but these days it'd be governed by the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy where you really don't want to give something like that as your reason for not wanting to sell to a good offer. After all domains are not owned by you just because you are currently registered them, they are owned by ICANN.
That's not squatters logic any more than you're a squatter in your own home if you refuse to sell even if a generous offer comes along because you value your home a lot more than even an above market offer, but you'd still likely sell at 100 times valuation. Again, that doesn't make you a squatter, just someone holding on to something and saying "If you really want this, you're going to have to offer me something grand, and I know you can afford it, otherwise I'll hold on to it".
I mean there are a lot of differences here, primarily that you by definition don't own domains you lease them to use, but yes that'd also be its own flavor of extremely uninspiring story. Holding out to get the value something is actually worth to you before you give it up is great and interesting but that's not the reason they gave.
It doesn't seem like a very similar story at all. One is a story of hard work for many years on something one loves; the other is cybersquatting eventually (kind of) turning into a business?
In America, healthcare (insurance and out-of-pocket) can be a major contributor to cost of living for anyone with anything more than the occasional cold. It's especially bad for self-employed people like the Adams.
What? A company pays it's workers a salary and that's a loss for the business no matter if the people it's paid to are using it for food and rent.
If they didn't have any revenue coming in at all, then they should have a quite high deficit in the company that they can subtract against the income now to reduce taxes.
To be able to maintain carry forward losses, you have to have capital.
The boys didn’t have capital. They paid themselves what came in.
If they had been maintaining losses, they wouldn’t have a house because they would have had to sell it.
Not necessarily. But they probably didn't have a good lawyer and accountant. It's certainly possible to have a corporation run a loss while its employees keep their houses. I mean that's pretty much the entire point of corporations.
Why would a worker who owns a house and every year is owed more and more in unpaid back salary from a company they are working at for free, ever need to sell their house to cover the debt that the company has to themselves?
Steam revenue share over $10,000,000 is decreased to 25%.
Also it very unlikely publisher get 30% for title like DF. More likely there is some recuperation if publisher invested into new version and then then 10-15%.
20% is going to the publisher. They paid for the Steam version, including hiring the graphics and sound people. They're also handling customer support for the paid version.
Of course for legendary game like Dwarf Fortress it doesn't make sense and it much lower, but for normal indie game 30% is not a limit so most of developers get less than 50% of sales after Steam and publisher cut.
Usually % that goes to a publisher depend on stage of development, risk publisher taking, whatever you give up your IP and your agreement on recuperation. E.g. if you keep your IP, but publisher cover most of development costs after prototype then they will likely take up to 50% after Steam cut.
being on steam is pretty valuable. people are more likely to buy a game on steam than off of a random website. steam will show your game to people who like similar games. there are cloud saving features, mod integration, updates etc.
There is also pretty good Linux support. So if you wanted to tick the Linux box you only have to make sure your game works under proton which generally just means avoiding proprietary anti cheat and Microsoft specific codecs/fonts.
I know a franchise whose games ran with 99% compatibility in proton except the cutscenes which used a proprietary codec. Proton then got a patch and just shows a static image during cut scenes while the rest of the game works perfectly. The developer can fix it by reencoding the cutscenes. No need for explicit Linux support.
$3.7mm/15 years is shy of $250k/yr TC. There's something to be said for being able to work on your life's passion, but not all of us can think up funny amazing dawrf simulators, and even if we did, there's already a really really good one. https://xkcd.com/2347/ applies. Unless people start being a whole lot richer and a lot more generous, newer load bearing pieces as appropriate for our newer world aren't coming about. Instead they're Facebook and Google supported.
Depends on one's motivation. I really doubt at any point the Dwarf Fortress guy expected to become a millionaire with his game anymore than Notch expected to become a billionaire off Minecraft. They pursued the ideas because they were doing something that they themselves wanted, and enjoy(ed) making.
There are other examples like UnReal World [1]. It's a game about surviving in the wilderness in Finland made by a guy living out in the wilderness in Finland. It had its first release 31 years ago, and the dev is still going at it. He's not exactly rolling the dough, but what's better than doing what you enjoy and making enough to get by doing it?
Well sure, making way more than you need! But spending the prime of your life doing something you love with the chance of a nice payday, seems more pleasant than spending the prime of your life doing something you dislike but with a more guaranteed upper mid payday.
The success of DF should be viewed as the result of perseverance in coding and dedication to a community. They are pretty much the OG of their niche and have spawned thousands of copies but the copies have been the ones to fail for the most part mainly due to not sticking with it and/or not building a strong community around their projects. DF survived pretty much in spite of the actual product itself which, while it has improved steadily over time, remained almost actively user-hostile with its UI. You had to really love the game and the community in order to play it regularly. The Steam release is really a crowning triumph that will hopefully ensure the legacy of the game if not a completely renewed life.
It is absolutely possible to succeed as a solo indie game developer, even if the likes of Minecraft or Stardew Valley or Dwarf Fortress are pretty extreme outliers. But it's nice when they do succeed.
How many of those failing 80% were working as hard as the Tarn brothers or Eric Barone? I'd be surprised if 1% of them were.
Luck is a big factor, but working hard is an often underrated component. Equating game development, or anything in life, as a lottery is a terrible mindset to be in and sets one up for failure and mediocrity.
Success lies somewhere between cutting one's own losses early, and unrelenting stubbornness.
I'd say even that is generous. Especially once you consider opportunity cost -- length of development, contractor expenses, hardware, lost potential earnings if employed, etc.
My VR game eventually sold 130k copies over four years, but amortized over 1.5 years of development, $100k contracting expenses, $25k hardware, most copies sold at sale price, and another partner to split earnings with I still would have made significantly more as an employed principal or even senior engineer.
As far as indie game success goes, selling this many copies puts me on the far end of the percentile scale. Oof.
There is of course the non-monetary "compensation" aspect. I created something I am truly proud of, tons of people have either seen or played it and enjoyed the experience, and I crossed a huge item off the ol' bucket list. Even if the game had only sold 10k copies, I still would have called it a win personally.
yeah this is 100% survivor bias; their success only means you can make money with already hugely successful & popular projects, it's not indicative that your project will be successful or that you're doing the right thing
but it’s an example of someone following through and bringing something to fruition, not to imply it means you’ll get the same sales and reception but working 15 years on a project is an insane extreme, if he can do that I can do a year or two just to say I finished it
This would be a lot of fun for most seasoned engineers. Tbh I'd rather enter a 15 year old code base written by a single person (who is still contactable and available) than a 15 year old code base written by hundreds of people, some of whom have died, moved on, or are others unreachable, and the inevitable bad patterns being followed thanks in part to Conway's law. A monolith made by a single dev is likely in my opinion to be much more approachable.
I fail to see how "real" version control would significantly alter this project. He's a solo developer, so the history is likely going to be a linear series of commits.
That's not to say that there are not quality of life gains to be made, but dated backups of the repository would be fine.
Tagging changes with messages is a huge plus. Seeing when each line changed instead is another. Being able to group changes into bundles/commits is another.
Even on solo projects with linear history some sort of version control is valuable.
The devil is in the details. Being able to see a comment history alongside file level changes is very powerful over time. Version control is priceless.
I would still use version control since it's literally a zero cost addition and can help with things like bisecting issues. Sometimes I do mini self code reviews via "git add -p" anyways too. Plus it's easier to copy the files/folders from one spot to another without losing any files to data corruption or forgetting to copy a file.
Well, they certainly didn't need distributed version control, but I'm sure there was some sort of version control used, even if it was daily backups, or just copies upon copies of files.
DF is a procedurally-generated colony sim (build a colony in the wilderness and survive/thrive/die in an entertaining way).
But that's not _why_ it is vast. The vastness comes from three main things, I think:
1. the number of distinct procgen systems. Creatures have procgen phenotypes and personalities. The landscape, biomes, and simulated geology/hydrology. Biomes. The civilizations and simulated history. The names of things. Religion, Instruments, cultural songs and dances, masterwork items and treasures, legendary forgotten beasts, and a bunch of stuff that doesn't come immediately to mind.
2. the inter-relatedness of the procgen systems. In many procgen games, the different systems do not affect each other. Systems that affect each other multiply the possibilities. And if they all affect each other, it's exponential. They all multiply each other. It's hard to describe how hard this would be to build in a way that wasn't just a mess of nonsense, but they did it by focusing entirely on the underlying systems and the UI was impenetrable ASCII with baffling UX. That has changed with the steam edition.
3. This game was written by two guys over the course of more than a dozen years funded by donation. It is an exceedingly rare and towering artistic achievement. This game should not exist, and will almost certainly never be surpassed (at least not in the same artisanal way).
One of the goals that was mentioned as a north star was that they wanted this game engine to be able to generate any fantasy story that has ever been told. But that none of those stories would be explicitly coded in, the world was just capable of making it happen.
While you go into detail on the generation of the world, I think the simulation is another major factor that goes into it.
Once you start playing the game, the level of detail used in generating the world is now used applied locally to simulating it. An example I like to use is to explain a bug where people's games were ending poorly (or with lots of FUN in dwarf fortress speak) because dwarfs were having mental breakdowns because their pet cats were dying. Which was because the game simulated the cats well enough that they could get alcohol poisoning and die. But why were the cats drinking that much alcohol? Because when they walked through dining rooms, the game simulated the dwarves getting drunk and spilling alcohol which stayed on the floor for some amount of time. If a cat walked over it, it got on their fur. When the cat cleaned themselves, which was also simulated, they would consume some of the alcohol on their fur. The bug was that each micro-dose of alcohol from licking themselves was accidentally being calculated like a full flagon of ale providing the small cat with far too much alcohol.
The level of the world generation with the level of simulation create a basis for a fantasy immersion that you cannot find elsewhere. The UI limitations, even with the steam version, do prevent most from becoming immersed into the world, but there seems to be a crowd who are brought in by the fidelity of the simulation and who can get past the UI that let's them experience something that cannot be found elsewhere.
Another unexpected interaction (I hesitate to call it a bug) that I very much enjoyed was The Possessed Adventurer.
You see, in Adventure Mode (akin to a traditional Roguelike in your created DF world, rather than the Colony Sim that is Fortress mode) you can create a character out of whole cloth that gets plopped into the world, or take over an extant character created through world generation. Either way, both characters are fully initialized within the systems of the game, having their own personalities, likes, dislikes, quirks, moral codes, emotional trauma thresholds, etc.
Well, one player noticed over a few runs that their character's eyes were coated with tears. Odd, they thought, so they posted on the Bay12 forums about it. After some investigation, Toady confirmed that the full personality system was still running in the background, and the character was effectively possessed by an out-of-context demon, the player. The character's consciousness was stuck watching utterly helpless as their body did all manner of unspeakable acts (assuming the player was acting as a typical murder-hobo) that conflicted with their innate personalities, were horrified at what they saw, and could do nothing but cry about it.
It's absolutely insane, equal parts disturbing and chilling and, as far as I am aware, an outcome totally unique to Dwarf Fortress created by the ridiculous depth and detail of the interwoven systems.
Is this mechanism still in the game? That is, in Adventure Mode the player is supposed to steer the character in a way that is aligned with the character's personality, or else the character will get depressed? I imagine this could be turned off as an option.
And that several internal organs of a dwarf are simulated separately. Some of them are fat, and fat has a relatively low melting point. Some rooms got warm enough (because lava was running through nearby rock) to melt the fat, killing the dwarves.
The bug was, iirc, that the AI didn't route around this effect.
Of course, for a long time making rooms like this and leading enemy armies through them was an important part of fortress defense, because actual militias were so bugged at the time...
Also insanely strong carps that drag dwarves into the water, killing them. After all, swimming is exercise, it trains strength, and carp swim all day long...
IIRC, it used to be that very rarely a dwarf might survive the process of having all their fat melted off. This served to turn them into little Terminators, as they had little left that could catch fire again and their nerves were cauterized by the experience so they couldn't feel pain any more.
Rimworld, another "story generator", is a game that my wife refers to as the "drunken dog" simulator - because at one point, the only source of calories on the world map was some beer, and so my colony's pet dogs were drinking it to stay alive, causing them to deliver cirrhosis and die.
To answer the question for anyone interested of what programming language it is written in, Stack Overflow did a Q&A with Tarn Adams (developer) where they asked this, among other things.
Q: What programming languages and other technologies do you use? Basically, what’s your stack? Has that changed over the 15-20 years you’ve been doing this?
A: DF is some combination of C and C++, not in some kind of standard obeying way, but sort of a mess that’s accreted over time. I’ve been using Microsoft Visual Studio since MSVC 6, though now I’m on some version of Visual Studio Community.
I use OpenGL and SDL to handle the engine matters. We went with those because it was easier to port them to OSX and Linux, though I still wasn’t able to do that myself of course. I’m not sure if I’d use something like Unity or Unreal now if I had the choice since I don’t know how to use either of them. But handling your own engine is also a real pain, especially now that I’m doing something beyond text graphics. I use FMOD for sound.
All of this has been constant over the course of the project, except that SDL got introduced a few years in so we could do the ports. On the mechanical side of the game, I don’t use a lot of outside libraries, but I’ve occasional picked up some random number gen stuff—I put in a Mersenne Twister a long while ago, and most recently I adopted SplitMix64, which was featured in a talk at the last Roguelike Celebration.
Dwarf Fortress is an almost two decade project of interactive storytelling in the form of a video game. They've modeled the world down to an incredible level including personal relationships between people, races, and nations, skill growth, a mostly correct geologic model, the depth of this game is immense. The lives of each person alive in the simulated world are recorded and details are explorable etc. They model the languages spoken by the various races, basically an incredibly creative group of people just recursively modeled the world for something like 15 years adding depth where they wanted and the result is Dwarf Fortress.
And the current languages are pretty much just Markov-chain-based placeholders for an eventual much more complex system with, presumably, actual grammar and all. Procedurally generated for every new world created.
Does anyone know how they implemented the graphics for the new DF version? I'm still hoping for a Mac or iOS version, but that would be much easier if they used OpenGL ES, which they might not have with only one developer.
> but this should eventually help with bug fixes, ports
Having dabbled in dwarf fortress over the years, I think they did a really nice job on the steam release. It must have been a daunting project to streamline most/all of the features in DF.
The labor system is the biggest thing that got refined.
Instead of painstakingly assigning jobs to dwarves in a very fine grained process through the labor menu for each individual, dwarves are assigned to jobs.
That is, the vast majority of jobs are by default assigned to all dwarves, and the game intelligently assigns work based on dwarf skill and pathing distance. You are free to tweak labor settings from there, for instance by assigning a forge to be the exclusive workplace of a legendary weaponsmith and only making weapons at that forge, or specializing miners to only mine so that they won't find themselves cleaning fish when idle between mining gigs. You can also create custom work profiles more akin to the old setup, enabling or disabling specific tasks and then assign that profile to specific dwarves if you want to get so detailed. However I find the new system works very well.
I don’t think the old system cared about either proficiency or proximity, it just picked whomever was available. Besides, there was no way for the player to "make all labora enabled by default" in the previous versions, or even "enable/disable one particular labor for all", because you could only toggle labors for a single dwarf at a time.
Proximity, yes. But unlike before if you do decide to let everyone do everything now you’ll still end up biasing toward a set of dwarves that consistently gain proficiency instead of a freewheeling rotation of everyone doing everything and nobody getting good at anything.
It is a new paradigm to play through, and the immediate reaction a lot of old time players had was negative on this, but the idea was that instead of having to micromanage every labor for every dwarf, you can just let most things be open to anyone and it won’t be super wasteful.
There are a number of changes like that which are geared toward making something less tedious, even if some people don’t like the the change on principle.
I do think there is a lot of work to be done on the new DF but they’re out the gate running. Really need to implement a system to stop dwarfs from trapping themselves, which admittedly was never part of the base game but DFhack did a lot of QOL stuff that they should really incorporate into this new version.
> I'm quite certain that proximity has been accounted for for many years.
Except for when you desperately need someone to pull that lever to raise the drawbridge to head off a horde of feral elves, and it assigns the job to a staggeringly-sober one-legged basketweaver who's having a party in a copse of trees halfway across the map.
While vampires and other undead members of your society can be problematic, a setup where you can trap them in a lever room is highly convenient. They don't have any feelings and will have near 100% availability to pull a lever.
That's a good question! I am not too familiar with how job assignment worked under the hood in classic DF so I can't really answer. I'm mostly going off of a devlog and a followup reddit post from one of the Kitfox folks.
There's a massive difference between Steam DF and the previous DF that I played (granted, that was probably in 2019).
It's a totally new UI between the two versions: it's much friendlier to a broad population while still retaining the same game mechanics.
[edit] I'll also add my favorite change: performance. Before the steam version I always ended up abandoning my fort because the framerate just became unbearable. In the steam version I have yet to encounter these issues.
I don't know the classic version all too well (because I never got into it despite multiple attempts), but the Steam release is generally much more approachable (so far I have put over 50 hrs into it and love it).
It has a simple tutorial, the interface is fully mouse driven, there's sound effects and music, and the tile graphics really do a great job to visualise what's going on in the game.
Sounds I need to stay well away from this game for now haha, I bounced off Factorio several times over the last few years and got wildly addicted to it a couple months ago. I imagine a similar fate could be in store with DF if I let myself peek in.
I've got a decent run on a side project right now, and I've noticed that (no surprise) when I get into a new game, all of a sudden all of my "healthy" hobbies like guitar, weightlifting, and coding go out the window.
Definitely planning to take a run at Dwarf Fortress eventually though.
I feel that for sure. Both the risk-of-wild-addiction part and the kills-my-other-efforts part. There are whole classes of games I don't dare play because they feel like being productive/creative but have shorter/better reward feedback loops than the things I'd rather be doing.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I'm now writing short post each day, and think it is better spent time then playing Factorio for two hours, like my friend does.
I haven't played the Steam version, but it's my understanding the menus aren't keyboard-based anymore. That alone is a massive undertaking, Dwarf Fortress has an insane number of submenus for them to figure out good GUI places for them all.
Everything used to just be in a central massive "press a single letter for this specific submenu" sub-screen on the right third of the screen, with multiple submenus to navigate to what you're trying to do.
Yes, they also implemented a tutorial, which I think is new, and reordered and reorganised the menus iirc. (This is from memory so I could of course be wrong).
This isn't true, as far as I know. Some menus are, but hotkeys have been changed quite a bit. Quite a few menus seem mouse only.
I can't ABABABABABAB to add a bunch of beds to a carpenter anymore, DD doesn't mine.
The hotkey path for placing doors in the steam version is bananas. Still a great game! Hoping there's a mod or a patch that lets me use the classic keys with the new interface eventually though.
Yes, there are some definite losses in the move to a mouse based interface. I'm glad I had enough of a break from my last ASCII DF play, so my muscle memory isn't driving me insane. Some of the hotkeys are a little rough (requiring a big stretch across the keyboard or two hands on the kb but I'm using a mouse now..) and I hope they get another pass.
The real move is to get in the habit of forbidding your fancy stuff by default, and then using "closest material" and "keep building after placement" for all furniture.
Agree there's definitely some quirks with building and making things not via work orders. Even for queuing up a couple of copper greaves at a metalworker's shop (because my king is obsessed with demanding their creation and banning their export), I opt for work orders rather than going through and selecting armor -> copper -> greaves twice.
Or when 20 something dwarves plummet into lave in a tragic mining accident and you need to engrave all the slabs? awful. On the whole, the UI stuff is a significant improvement, though.
Are you certain? I've played the classic version for ten years and the Steam release has completely different hotkeys, and is missing keyboard control for some tasks entirely.
One example of "something was a pain in the ass but no longer is" streamling is that you can dig a stairway across levels and it will put a down stair on the top level and up/down stairs on the middle levels and a up stair on the bottom level.
In the "the feature is less complex" in the steam version (note most of these are still in the simulation, just missing from the GUI so inaccessible to the player), some examples are:
- Health and body part level damage
- Reading historical logs
- Ammo
- Idlers counter
Is it true that you can't manually choose what kind of stairs to place anymore if you want to? I read a Steam review that claimed that your stair example is true, but it doesn't always work perfectly and there's no way to manually specify what kind of stairs you want. Honestly kept me from buying the game for now.
As far as I can tell: yes.
The top z-layer of designated stairs will always become pure down, the bottom layer pure up.
But I think you can get around that by designating one more z-level than you need, and then removing that. Blueprint mode or designation priorities might also work.
Tell you what, I am going to try now, will post my results shortly.
Edit: Yes this works. After finishing the designation, it will change to the corresponding stair type. By doing one more z-level, you move the "down/up only" layer there, and can remove it. The designations in the level below will not change as a result.
For anyone wondering: Yes, this is still an improvement over the old way of doing it.
Well, it is fairly impactful in that if the automatic stair generation puts a down stair where an up/down stair should have been, there is no way to completely fix it. You can build the correct stairs, but it will never be carved out of natural rock since that rock has been removed. Call me crazy, but that's a distinction that matters to me in what is effectively a procedural story generator.
More generally, it speaks to a level of sloppiness that tells me I'm better off waiting a couple of years. I've played a lot of buggy DF builds over the years. It's just part of the experience, but I don't have as much free times as I used to so I'd rather wait than play through the bugs these days.
Yes. Lets see if I can make an ASCII rendition that renders correctly. `-` is level floor, `v` is a down stair, `x` is an up/down stair and `^` is an up stair. The simplest possible stair connection between layers is a down stair above with an up stair below:
---v---
---^---
To make a very tall staircase, you can either stack pairs of stairs next to each other (this approach actually has some gameplay benefits, but isn't usually necessary):
---v-----
---^v----
----^v---
-----^---
Or, you can use up/down stairs, which are a single block that acts as both an up and a down stair:
---v---
---x---
---x---
---^---
In the ASCII game, you had to place all of these manually, so you were in full control. In the new Steam game, it's my understanding that you just select the top and bottom layers for your staircase and it automatically builds the "right" stair types for you. The problem I have seen reported is that sometimes it will erroneously designate something like this:
---v---
---v---
---x---
---^---
This staircase does not allow dwarves to transit from layer 2 up to layer 1, and permanently removes material, meaning it's not possible to completely fix the mistake.
Call me crazy if you want, but a mistake that leads to having to add a constructed tile to what should have been a purely carved room is borderline grounds for abandoning a fort in my book.
Haven't seen that bug happen so far. Wonder if it's just a case where someone had already mined out one of the tiles that should have been an up/down, so all the game could do is put a down stair. That said, I only really use stairs for exploration or project tunnels, and it's all ramps in my fortress proper.
I did notice that it seems like dwarves won't/can't dig straight up with stairs, they need another path up. Not sure if that's new or pre-existing limitation, as I haven't played classic in over a decade.
Cursor-based interfaces was probably a big one. They also have things like minimaps, dwarf sprites that reflect equipment gender and profession. It's more than just a tileset. I think they also made a new jobs template system.
That is a non charitable but fairly accurate way of phrasing it. I would say more accurate would be to say the user interface was completely rethought and much more approachable.
On the other hand, for DF veterans "just replaced the ASCII graphics with sprites and changed some hotkeys" would have been the most charitable thing they could have done. I haven't played the Steam version yet, but my reading of reviews gives me the strong impression that they've changed so much that I will have to approach it as an entirely new game.
1)Labour, as a sibling said. You no longer need dwarf therapist to play the game without losing your marbles
2)Automining veins is now part of the base game rather than a dfhack thing
3)The military UI is still confusing and counterintuitive but it's a billion times better than before. I've actually managed to effectively train, equip and station troops and deploy them in combat without having to check the wiki. There's no way I could do that in classic and I've played a fair amount of DF
4)Things like the minecart UX and the thing which specifies how bridges open etc are way less confusing than before. Small, but there are thousands of UX improvements like that.
5)Rather than sometimes it's hjkl and sometimes wasd and sometimes arrow keys and sometimes numpad and sometimes you can select a box and sometimes you select the first tile and then the last tile to get a rectangle and sometimes you select the first tile and then use hjkl (or sometimes wasd) to grow your rectangle to the size you want, now you click the first tile, then the last tile. For everything. Building bridges, specifying zones, specifying burrows, building stockpiles etc, they all work the same. (Ironically there is a keyboard cursor if you want that but it is buggy for me at the moment.)
6)The system for worldgen and embark is also a lot better. For example you don't have the 3 weird confusing maps any more, you just have a big map and if you zoom in you get another map where you can pick exactly where you want to embark and the size.
7)Notifications. They all appear on the side in cronological order with an appropriate icon, you can hover to get the basics or click to see more or interact. Right-clicking dismisses them.
I could go on but you get the idea. There are lots of examples like this. It's still DF, but at least playing it isn't some Kafka-esque bullshit nightmare.
As minor as it is, having a settings screen you can tweak ingame instead of a .txt config file in the install folder you have to twiddle with and then relaunch the game is a real nice change.
Yes they will be releasing Adventurer mode in DF Steam. There is, I've read, some quirk in the Steam store agreement where if a game has a free version they must have feature parity, so development will focus on bringing the Steam release to par with the classic version, and then both will be developed in step.
I love Dwarf Fortress and it's the inspiration for many modern simulators (and I put my $30 for Tarn with this release), but I do think that Oxygen Not Included, Rimworld, Factorio, et.al. have surpassed it.
My main issue with DF is that the main challenge of the game, combat, is pretty boring and rife with issues. For example, let's say I'm new to the game and want to put some XBow dwarfs behind a few fortifications in my base. Will the dwarfs intelligently do this when a siege happens? Is there a specific way to tell the AI that specific spots are where the Dwarfs should stand to defend? No and No.
Instead I will either have to painstakingly set up individual zones / burrows for each individual defender or the dwarfs will just ignore the fortifications, even if they are in a burrow! And they'll just sit there and ignore invaders breaking through your kill zone unless you specifically micromanage them into 1-wide spaces with fortifications facing the kill zone, and even then they might just run outside your fortress on the other side of the fortifications so they're close to where you ordered them to.
Rimworld on the other hand, (for all of its flaws around random and explosive damage), will at least let you draft a pawn, order it to stand behind a wall, and the pawn will get a significant cover bonus even without fortifications. They're smart enough to lean out and attack on their own too.
I say all this not to criticize DF but to say that the genre has come a long way, and I hope that with this success they're looking at weaknesses like this in the gameplay loop so that folks don't just take 20+ years of goodwill as a replacement for the possibilities ahead.
You are correct about logistics, but that is such a small part of DF to nitpick on that I have to push back. The logistics aren't the Fun part, and no other game has come close to DF on the Fun stuff.
DF things that come to mind that no other colony-sim has:
- 3 dimensions (z-levels) and all of the shenanigans (hydraulics, creative traps, etc) that go with them
- geological and historical civilization simulation
- the inter-relatedness of the game session to the history of the world is a story-generating masterpiece.
- The "zones" (surface, caverns, spoilery places) and how different they feel. Oxygen Not Included does this kinda, but not as deeply.
- Three different games in one using the same procedural engine and world: Adventure Mode, Legends Mode, Fortress Mode (Steam edition is currently missing Adventure mode and it will probably be a while).
- The "flavor" procedural systems: Villain, Religion, Instrument/Music, Literature, Forgotten Beasts. They don't have tons of impact on gameplay, but it makes the lore so much more rich.
- Sub-biome "surroundings" regions (Good, Evil, Savage, Benign) which have large effects on gameplay. Evil areas can be hilarious Fun.
- the pacing feels just right to me. It's not realistic from a simulation perspective (skills increase too quickly, it takes very little time to build complex things, etc), but it "gets to the good parts" in a very satisfying duration in my opinion. The combat takes longer than it should, but then stories can happen.
This narrow view is like claiming Minecraft only has about 2 hours of gameplay, because that's how long it takes to beat the ender dragon. It's perfectly possible to enjoy dwarf fortress in a completely sealed off fortress.
The problem with every game that attempts to be in DF's genre (Rimworld, O2NI, etc) is that, as commercial products first, they lack depth. They're built to be a game first and foremost, rather than than an art project that's fun to to explore. The surface level game mechanics are fun, in many ways improvements over Dwarf Fortress's. But they cannot compete with the incredibly rich simulation complexity that DF has obtained. World generation, history generation, characters with complex feelings and motivations, mechanics that interact with other in myriad ways. DF is a fantasy world simulator first, and a game a distant second.
And that's its biggest strength: compared to other games in the genre, DF is infinitely replayable, because there are an infinite number of interesting things to experience. Kings gaining power thanks to backroom deals with criminal organizations blackmailing their competitors, Necromancers forming towers to hold their book club meetings where they discus "An Analysis of Urist Svolgen's Musings on ovin Gentrout's Review of The Secrets of Life and Death", a werepanther that repeatedly terrorizes not just your fortress, but also all the surrounding sites drowning in a lake because they turned back into a human while trying to swim across a moat.
Can combat be improved? Of course. But I'll take additional mechanics that explode into emergent behavior any day. And I would love to find another game that even comes close, but Rimworld sure as shit ain't it.
> that the main challenge of the game, combat, is pretty boring and rife with issues
It might be the most 'challening' part of the game, but combat is not at all why I play the game, and neither are any specific gameplay mechanics the reason to be honest.
It's hard to put my finger on why I enjoy the game so much, but the fact that the game is about drunken and (mostly) grumpy dwarfs building a fortress inside a mountain in a world with a generated history and lore has a lot to do with it. The same game in a science fiction / space colony setting would be entirely unappealing to me for instance.
Haven't tried it yet, but I expect that you can use the scheduling menu to set up what you describe once, and switch them onto that schedule as needed. You'd want to set up a schedule with multiple station commands, each with a dwarf count of 1, on each tile you want them to stand.
Then you can swap them with a couple clicks between training, off duty, and whatever station schedules you need.
Context: One of the developers got cancer, and while he was okay this time (health-wise and financially), they realized maybe some financial security would be smart given how much treatment could cost: https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xypb5/the-dwarf-fortress-cr...
Also, generally, it's a way to express solidarity with the reality that a lot of time there's no "hoping for good news", "buck up" is a horrible thing to say, and just... well, fuck cancer.
There is an unmeasurably large amount of suffering due to cancer. Not just from the people that have directly experienced it. Watching helplessly as it consumes the bodies and minds of your loved ones is devastating. Its likely that someone expressing that sentiment has dealt with that fallout. My heart goes out to them.
I don't know if it's thought of in popular culture as "coming from" a specific source, but I know people have been saying it for a lot longer than the internet. It's been independently coined a million times at least. It's really the only thing you can think to say sometimes to sum up the experience for everybody involved.
I think until you have someone close experience it you can't truly appreciate the sentiment. From my experience, having someone go through it is an awful, helpless time. I've heard having parents go through alzheimers is similar.
Surely you mean cancer is not only to blame?! Even then, that only applies to cancer than doesn’t manage to destroy or end your life… it’s still a horrible scourge that causes great anguish in any health care system conceivable.
It has not yet been addressed to my knowledge, but I'm hoping that with an additional developer on board, it will come more quickly even if it's not a top priority.
i saw someone on reddit write up getting it working repackaging the steam version it with wineskin or something like that. it was enough work that i though, “meh, i’ll wait”.
i’m not going to bother with parallels or some other emulation solution. i can be patient.
I’ll have to take you at your word because that link sent my browser into an endless refresh loop, but that is crazy. How is Wine’s performance on an M1? Asking for a friend.
Having enjoyed DF immensely, for free, in the past, I bought DF on Steam to support the Toady One and Three Toe. The UI changes make the game much more approachable. It still has a steep learning curve. But, I don't need to run a dwarf job manager alongside the game. The one thing that I would love to see added is the ability to create and reuse blueprints. Third party macro tools did this job in the past.
Congratulations on your much deserved success Toady One and ThreeToe.
> steam version [...] I guess I could try running it with Wine
Seems like you're not familiar with Proton[0], The "Wine + enhancements" compatibility layer that the native Linux version of Steam uses to run the majority[1] of significant Windows games.
User reports are that DF runs without problems under proton[2,3,4]
Anecdotally, as a thoroughgoing and (evidently) shameless cheapskate, I can report the free "classic" ascii only Windows version[5] works well under stock Wine-staging via apt on my Ubuntu laptop.
Having said all that, I share your sadness that a native Linux version wasn't released along with the windows Steam release, though reportedly it is planned for the future[6,7]
It's gonna be 500,001 when I'm done with my current game. It's at the #1 spot on my Steam wishlist. I try not to buy a game until I'm actually ready to play it these days, so it's coming soon just not quite yet.
It's crazy how much money they were leaving on the table this whole time.
My mind is trying to wrap my head whether their lives would have been better or worse had they done this much sooner. I'm not sure I have a conclusion.
I’m guessing worse: they’ve had years to refine this game. To see an example of what a game without that refinement period looks like, just see any early Paradox release.
They can be satisfied that they didn’t start charging until they had a refined product.
Also, they could focus entirely on their own vision for the project instead of being totally reliant on delivering for the marketplace.
They had "slack" (in the slack/moloch sense) to try out weird ideas that may not have been possible if they were relying on sales revenue instead of donations to stay afloat.
It comes down to your personality, I think. Whether you prefer to finish a project and move on, or whether you want to polish a product until it’s perfect. This is conscientiousness taken to the extreme, you could say.
I’m sure their chosen way of working has made them a lot happier than launching a half-baked game as “early access” ten years ago. Even though that could have afforded them a much more comfortable lifestyle, I have a feeling the gaming public might have gotten tired of the game and moved on.
I'm so excited to see where they go from here. My fantasy is a version of DF where entity movement isn't locked to a grid, that would open the door for real animations, smooth movement, or even a 3D version.
None of that requires a non-grid based approach. Many puzzle games are grid based but have smooth animation and movement, and rendering it all in 3D is pretty orthogonal. The big problem would be making the entities non-abstract enough that their animations could make some kind of sense visually.
I kinda figured that but I wanted to couch my opinion because the last time it came up I got yelled at a lot when I wanted the sprites to face right when moving right.
They have a roadmap [0] for DF that, assuming historical development velocity, will take another 5 odd years to complete. The big upcoming (ignoring the never ending yak shaving that tends to lead DF development) is the Myth and Magic update. Also, boats.
Don't know why this comment got down voted. I'm really interested in the game, I even wrote to the developers asking when a linux version would be available. Here's the conversation:
Me: Are you guys planning on a Linux version? By that I mean a version with graphics, as the one you released on steam. Thanks
Them: Yeah! The existing code for linux was a little too fiddly to update (I'd always been doing symlinks or whatever that just weren't great and we generally want to do a better job). We've already started the ball rolling bringing somebody on. It won't be in December, but with the existing code we're hopefully it won't take forever and ever.
I play it on the steam deck, it works. The input is fiddly (though there are some impressive community input configs that use radial/grid menu popups from the touchpads to issue commands), but it does work.
Subthread: anyone else wants to join my support group for people who don’t get these games? I tried rimworld, which seemed much easier to get into, and it seems like a sims-like game except that unlike sims it’s very unintuitive. I’ve been trying to figure out how to enjoy this game the same way I enjoyed sims when I was younger, and it dawned on me that I never really played sims the “correct” way and rather just did things because I wanted to see these things happen in my sims people’s lives. That makes sense. But what’s a colony? What do I want to do with that colony? I got confused by the lack of feedback from my decisions (or the complexity and depth of every decisions you can make) and realized at some point that I was not enjoying the game coz I was just trying to figure out the mechanics in order to win. Maybe I’m playing it wrong. Maybe the whole point of this game is to have some sort of digital terrarium?
>I never really played sims the “correct” way and rather just did things because I wanted to see these things happen in my sims people’s lives
That is exactly how to play DF. There is no winning. Just do what you want, see what happens. I'm working on creating the greatest library in the world, hoping to get elven and human visitors to learn and contribute even more knowledge.
It does get harder as I get older to enjoy this stuff, but I have my moments.
I wonder if the experience of playing Rogue and NetHack is more akin to being an “individual contributor” in a project, whereas in Dwarf Fortress you are a “manager”?
Maybe now is the time to find out. I look forward to buying it!
I’m happy to see them doing well. I remember playing DF a bit in college and just blown away by the devs and their undying love for the game, all whilst doing it for free no doubt.
Steam version needs some more polish but it will come. Bought at release and on a 4k display, multi core system, top of the line gpu and more ram than I know what to do with I get a paltry mid 30s to 40s gfps and scrolling the map is a pain so it's near impossible to play due to the jank but the patches have been frequent, hope they get around to fixing these issues soon.
The discord thread linked has that and a ton of other things tried as well such as fractional scaling on gpus, disabling game features, sdl1.2compat which is newer sdl backported etc.
KitFox is publishing the game and taking over customer support. They probably funded the music and art, but I don't know if that's confirmed or not.
It's likely they went with KitFox because they already had a relationship. One of the founders of KitFox is Tanya Short, who's edited two books on procedural game design with the DF programmer, Tarn Adams.
To go from $15k to $15M, x1000, in a matter of weeks must feel incredible. Particularly after 15 years of hard work.