Is Dwarf Therapist still being maintained? (I'd look it up but I'm at work and all DF stuff is blocked by the firewall as "games") DT made the difference between playable and fun DF and endless fucking about with menus.
The UX is a hurdle. There are inconsistencies and the last time I played, third-party utilities were pretty much mandatory in order to manage your dwarves effectively.
That said, the great thing about the UI is that once you've learned it you can discard it. If you know the commands you need, you can hide the 'commands' area to give you more information on the current gamestate.
FWIW, DF is absolutely fantastic at doing what it's designed to do. It's primarily a story generator not a game, which is partly why interactivity is almost an afterthought
I agree with you that the default interface is pretty miserable, but it has it's own charm in some way. Dwarves become much more manageable with the DwarfTherapist app. It acts as a usable interface extension for me. http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=66525.0
It's a proper UI and it includes in game tutorials and help pages to explain the basics of the game as well as making the game much prettier than any existing tilesets IMO.
DF is also not as 'hard' as most people think, if you start your fort in an easy location you can quickly build a self sufficient colony inside a hill or underground and make it inaccessible to most threats once you understand the basics of production in the game. And with the UI upgrades managing your dwarfs' moods is a lot easier too.
The only thing that has been preventing me from being an annoying df evangelist for years has been the horrible UI :D
I assure you, the current player base is acutely aware of how bad the UI is. It's not even that it's opaque until learned, it is sometimes just downright impossible in vanilla DF to answer certain elementary questions like "how many dwarves are set to mine?" Workflow automation is really primitive, leading to either the "constantly assign dye thread jobs through the manager so the fools will do it" problem or the opposite "oops I left the mason alone for five minutes and now I have a hundred masterwork statues in a single 5x5 square" problem. Not for nothing does Dwarf Therapist exist, and I flat out will not play the game without dfhack's workflow and autobutcher plugins.
It's still genius. But it is definitely one of those "scribbles on the wall in crayon" type works of genius. As the innards of the program itself is better understood, I expect dfhack to supplant more and more of the original UI; it already has a dwarf therapist like mode, a much better job manager, and has started venturing into fundamentally reworking the UI. I recall a plugin not too long ago that allowed you to say things like "as soon as a bed is constructed, put it here".
Yeah, I know a lot of people that use DFHack too, but that always seemed a little "cheat"-y to me. Therapist makes managing the labors of the dwarves (the most intensive thing in the game, really) a lot easier. I use Therapist with the regular ASCII tileset and I love it.
I agree. I've played DF for probably about a decade now, and the UI isn't an issue. I know every keybind so I don't really need to go searching for it. Yes, to begin with, it is a bit of a struggle, but the wiki (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/) is probably the best game wiki out there.
Get past your dislike of the UI and you'll discover a game so rich it will outlast any other.
I won't let myself play until this weekend, but I hear that the new UI actually incorporates some elements of Dwarf Therapist, making e.g. assigning jobs an order of magnitude easier.
In terms of usability, I still just find Dwarf Fortress to be a decade behind Rimworld. The fact that we had to use Dwarf Therapist for years... Rimworld just has it all on the screen within four clicks, with clear indications on how to resolve issues like mood modifiers.
Dwarf Fortress in all its complexity, embraces fuzziness in how things work, and focuses on a bit of a higher-level focus (fortresses reach many more dwarves than a Rimworld colony). However, this complexity makes the game a lot less accessible too. I hope the UI changes help bring ease of use and clarity!
I've never used Dwarf Therapist (and I realize I'm in a minority there), but I also have given him money because the interface does not bother me. Enough people are doing likewise that I don't think the interface should be a priority until the game's there.
After you spend some time in DF, the interface isn't bad at all. Actions are separated into semi-logical sections, you get a feel for what keys navigate what menus ect. Tools like dwarf therapist and dfhack alleviate the worst of the UI problems. The real problem with DF is in its performance. Any fort more than a few hours old will grind to a halt as 100+ dwarfs pathing algorithms compete for a single thread. Fluids further impact performance, and if you get invaded? Have fun with 10-15 FPS until you give up. It's extremely disappointing as these late game interactions are usually the most fun.
For me Dwarf Fortress demonstrates why good and accessible UI / UX is required and is an art of itself.
I repeatedly tried DF and despite having spent hours in similar games, this one eluded me to this day due to it's borderline unusable UI (for me at least) and art style.
I'll be happy to give it another go since the mechanics seem to be supremely refined.
It's not either the traditional DF UI or a mouse-driven interface: other alternatives would be an improved keyboard-driven interface or an interface which uses both the keyboard and the mouse well (yes, I'm aware that technically DF does have some mouse interacton: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Mouse_control).
Dwarf Fortress is an amazing game with an incredible engine, but its UI is notoriously terrible, and IMHO deservedly so. But then, I've never managed to last very long, so perhaps there's something wrong with me.
Do you use Dwarf Therapist?
reply