Comments on: Dwarf Phwoartress: Stonesense Visualiser

By: MrBRAD!

MrBRAD! — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:56:03 +0000

Once you play the game for a while you learn the interface and a majority of the hotkeys. When this has happened, you can press tab and remove all the menu from the screen, never to be needed again.

I also don’t see why everyone wants mouse support so much? Give it a month, and you will have memorised all the hotkeys and gotten the hang of using the keyboard. A mouse won’t help you speed things up, or make anything easier at all.

PS: use shift+move cursor to jump a dozen or so tiles. Good for fast movement and lot more people than you’d think don’t actually know about it.

By: Boss

Boss — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:12:47 +0000

Finally I can actually understand this game enough to play it! Thank you RPS!!!

By: Cutman

Cutman — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:06:10 +0000

Did you add a chocolate tree?

By: PleasingFungus

PleasingFungus — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:36:08 +0000

I hadn’t actually realized that! May be time to upgrade, then.

By: Railick

Railick — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:48:32 +0000

I modded in the ability for my dwarfs to make chocolate :P Nothing goes with rum like chocolate.

By: Cutman

Cutman — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:46:13 +0000

That makes me want to create an above ground gated community for Goblins.

By: Railick

Railick — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:11:49 +0000

It should also be noted that if the dwarfs are the thing putting you off, it is very easy to mod the game so you can play as a human/elf/goblin/orc whatever else you want and build a fortress that way (or town whatever)

By: Kommissar Nicko

Kommissar Nicko — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:41:03 +0000

The latest model (40d16 or something, the one with the SDL implementation stuff) allows you to rebind your keys within the game itself, to make your + and – keys to the number-row + and – instead of the numpad ones. I.e. playable on laptops.

By: Tei

Tei — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:37:27 +0000

I understand tha fans that wish this where open sourced, even these that vocalize that desire. I understand the dev, that don’t really want to move there, hell.. is his game, his thing, and is made out of how him want to make things.

Probably the community sould make his own thing, from scractch.

I remenber something similar with MoonEdit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoonEdit

Years laters we have things like Etherpad
http://etherpad.com/
http://wave.google.com

There are ideas that are soo good, that leting die in the hands of the original author is madness, but It take the efforts of other poeple to recreate the idea from scrach elsewhere, or it will die.

Now, If you visit the page of the original author and download it, you will see that has not changed almost nothing from 2005 / 2007.

Toady could end as another Tom Dobrowolski. A guy with a good idea, that is big than one man.

By: Calcipher

Calcipher — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:55:55 +0000

I may be in the minority of this thread, but I like the interface. Does the interface take a good amount of time to learn? Yes. I’ve learned it (took me about three days) and it comes almost second nature. Is the ASCII off-putting to people? Yes. I, personally, love the ASCII. This is why I still play Slash’EM in ASCII. Is the game confusing? Yes. And, you know what, it is better for it. I know we are getting used to games holding our hands and making it easy for us to play, but I grew up on games that were hard and I miss those days.
As far as the ‘he should open source the game’ argument. I think this is crazy. Open sourcing DF would not allow the devs to develop the world they want, would deprive them of their income, and might cause the game to be less coherent in the long run. Would you ask the makers of other games to open source them? How about Ben There, Dan That? The game is buggy, certainly it should be open sourced? And before you think I’m against open source, I’ve been working in the computing industry for a long time and almost everything I work with daily is open source; I just don’t think that people should have to open source their stuff if they don’t want to.

By: Richeh

Richeh — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:45:48 +0000

Sorry, it’s ridiculous to demand that the developer – who made his game completely free for you to play – optimizes his life to deliver the maximum efficiency of entertainment into your own. The guy likes to code fast and loose, probably so he can add features as they occur to him. Dwarf Fortress is a labour of love and that’s likely a big reason why it’s so deep, involved and bloody good.

And he likely doesn’t want to get other developers in because there’s a mountain of code that only he understands, and sharing the project abstracts him to the level of team leader from the programmer / designer he wanted to be – and contributors would inevitably want creative input.

If you don’t like how he’s doing it, don’t play it. It’s not life-essential.

By: Tei

Tei — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:05:32 +0000

uhjk is not scrolling, is resizing, sorta.