"It's not like people see our $50,000 a year and think 'Hey, I want a piece of that pie.' They'd much rather look towards things like Minecraft, where there are hundreds of millions of dollars."
The brothers have this massive, massive blindspot regarding the importance of the UI. That $50,000 cap they perceive is barely scratching the surface of what would be possible for them if they made the damn thing a bit more accessible to the average person. It's great that their small niche base loves ASCII art and doesn't mind fumbling their way through a hostile interface in order to play the game, but that is the primary reason the game stays confined within a tiny niche corner of the gaming market.
They have the real possibility that if they did that seed work, even just on exposing an API into the game, as opposed to venturing into a full-on UI overhaul, that enough new people would be introduced to the game that they could hire a third developer to focus specifically on the API and UI aspects of the game, leaving them free to keep working on the bits they love.
But do you know much about dwarf fortress? The brothers have responded to questions about this a number of times (regarding UI) but more importantly than that, it appears that they don't particuarly care about making the big bucks.
They are totally happy just pottering along with a loyal hardcore following, earning a very middle class salary, doing something they are massively passionate about. In fact, it seems that what they have is all they ever want in life. They are in their nirvana.
I don't disagree with you. I think I'm just bitter because I hate bad UIs and it stops me from properly exploring the game. I don't understand why they don't care about the fact that so many people will never experience their creation because of the unnecessary barrier they've created.
Their creation has a bad UI. The barrier is a part of the work. You could take the swearing out of The Godfather in order to make it more accessible, but what people would be accessing would not really be The Godfather anymore.
The swearing in The GodFather is an important part of the story. It contributes to the end goal of those who made the film. The bad UI in Dwarf Fortress is not deliberate. It is the result of neglect of that aspect of the game. People who play the game and enjoy it do so despite the UI. I have yet to meet someone who thinks the existing UI makes the game better in any way.
It's not clear from your original top level post whether you've played the game and are complaining about the UI quirks described elsewhere in this thread, or if you're talking about the ASCII art.
If you're talking about the interface design, keyboard commands etc, ignore this comment.
If you're talking about the ASCII art I would say it absolutely is deliberate. DF is actually a sequel (Slaves to Armok, God of Blood, Chapter 2: Dwarf Fortress) and the first game was 3D. They chose to make DF a roguelike ASCII art game because if they had tried anything else, it wouldn't be half as deep as it is now. The ASCII art enables the depth that the game has developed.
As I said, if you are primarily arguing that they should keep the ASCII art and revamp the interface, you can safely ignore this comment.
> I don't understand why they don't care about the fact that so many people will never experience their creation because of the unnecessary barrier they've created.
Would people care to experience it if they could? I've always assumed with this (and a number of other things in life) that being a bit of a niche interest (or in this case a lot of a niche interest) in part creates the niche interest. There have been many rogue-a-likes with more modern interfaces but they have either not attracted or not managed to keep up the interest that this one has. Perhaps it is a nostalgia thing, perhaps it is a "nerd" thing; what-ever it is it works for them and their audience and changing the game to appeal to a larger audience might both fail to do so and make the existing fans wander off (and make it less enjoyable for the developers to work on: they seem to be getting quite a kick out of their baby and its current fans and don't want to lose that).
The comparison some make with minecraft on the "being a bit niche creating a niche" thing is quite fair, and this "if you were more like that you might have a much larger audience" comments perfectly valid, but minecraft's niche being an order of magnitude or few bigger might be in part due to luck (right thing, right time, critical mass didn't hit to early or too late, ...) rather than just the relative prettiness and intuitiveness.
Caveat: I've played neither Dwarf Fortress nor Minecraft, so I may not really have a clue what I'm talking about.
You falsely attribute a niche's draw to the fact that it's niche. I find it unlikely that people would base their interest in a game on its popularity, or lack thereof. If the game is fun, people will play it. If it's not, they won't.
There might actually be more to the "if it's niche, some people are more interested in it" mentality. It's anecdotal, yes, but I know that I have an odd tendency to prefer games that aren't hyper popular. New Call of Duty or Halo? I don't care how "well made" the game is, I won't play it. A tiny, unknown RPG/Rhythm game hybrid (Sequence)? I gobble it up. All my friends start playing one game? I play another. Etc. I wonder how many people might have some unconscious tendency to gravitate toward those games which are no very popular, or if I'm just an oddball.
Maybe DF being a niche helps in some way. I don't know. But I do know that the UI is, almost objectively, not good. I know it's why I stopped playing. Once you get more than 20 dwarfs or so, managing who does what is ridiculous. (at least without external tools. I think the popularity and almost necessity of some external tools really does show that the UI can be atrocious at some points. (also note this is not a comment on the ASCII nature of the game, that's fine))
But the game being different in the ways that make it get called niche are usually why people talk about it publicly. It is certainly a major part of the discussion on most occasions when I hear of it.
While the interface puts many people off once they are there, would the game get quite as much discussion if it was much more like other games rather than being somewhat more unique (for better or worse)?
I agree that if the game is fun people will play it. The problem is getting them to try the game for long enough to know if it is fun. Popularity is obviously a factor in achieving that since lots of people associate mass marketed products with blandness, juvenility, etc.
I can think of half a dozen people amongst my immediate social circle who have expressed interest in playing Dwarf Fortress "if it wasn't for the interface". Anecdote != data, but from my experience the building blocks of the game appeal to a lot of people who are thoroughly put off by its level of inaccessibility.
Haven't been following much of Dwarf Fortress, either, but according to the post, I'm confident that they care. For instance, the 1.0 version should have a more consistent interface, tutorials and context-sensitive help menus.
It's probably just that there are plenty more things that they care more about than revamping totally the UI.
I understand they're working on the game out of passion, but I feel like they should bite the bullet and spend a good chunk of one of their update cycles on the UI. I remember reading patch notes one time, where they literally re-wrote the entire damage system to account for more things. (swords don't do as much damage when wearing armor, maces cause bruises and broken bones through armor, etc.) It's not my project, and I don't want to sound entitled to something I can play for free, but I feel like they could take time away from simulating muscle fibers or something ridiculously detailed such as that, and make the game more easily playable. It honestly still feels like the debug interface a developer might put into a game with all the odd keys you have to press to activate one thing or another.
That said, they can work on what they want, as they're the developers. And they're providing the game free of charge to anyone who wants to play it. It's just a nice pipe dream of mine to be able to play the game without spending a month learning how to navigate the menus :)
You hate UIs you don't like. Which is a tautology. The interesting part here is that you've managed to convince yourself that UIs you don't like are objectively bad, and that anyone who does like such UIs is wrong in some factual way, as opposed to being 'wrong' in the purely subjective way everyone who disagrees with us on a matter of taste is.
Go too far in this direction and you end up with Jef Raskin, who disdained configurability because he thought he knew better than the people actually using the software how software should work.
There are plenty of things about UIs that are pretty objectively bad. Inconsistency, for one. I don't think there are lots of people who like having to memorize multiple ways of doing the same thing depending on the view.
All UIs are inconsistent to some extent, like with menus, or with how the steering wheel behaves when backing a car up. All we demand is that it be done well, which is a tautology.
Right, except it wasn't done well in this case. The game is great, the UI not so much. Some menus require the arrow keys to navigate, some +-, others hjkl.
It's been a while since I last played, but there is a "Designation" menu which orders your dwarves to perform specific tasks. You want them to build a staircase where there was some rock before? Awesome, they'll do it. You want them to build a staircase after you already mined the block? No can do. No warning, no error message, simply nothing happens. You need to go through the other menus, build a staircase and move it there.
Except it makes sense if you realize that designations are for changing existing terrain and the language reflects that, so using it to "carve [a] staircase" out of thin air doesn't really make sense. Building one from the buildings menu in a space that has been mined out does.
I admit there are problems with the dwarf fortress interface, major ones, like job management. However this is not one of those problems.
Or rather - it's also a problem of information architecture to borrow the parlance from another field. The internal logical structure shouldn't be reflected in the external UI unless it's intuitive or discoverable.
Your 'this is all a tautology' point is neither interesting nor moves the conversation forward.
This is like making the point that the sky isn't really blue it just looks blue - technically correct, but unless you are answering the question of why it is blue, correcting somebody on this is boorish, not interesting.
In this case we are talking about Dwarf Fortress, near universally reviled for its interface, so yes, arguing that some people may theoretically prefer it is both hard to believe and makes it seem like you are just being contrarian.
In interaction design we say that you can't design an experience, but you can design for an experience. We know quite a bit about humans, the psychology they approach an interface with, their physical abilities to use an interface. With this information and a target experience you want to design for, the design choices follow.
We can objectively measure things like whether a user approaching an interface can easily understand what options are available to them, whether the user can intuitively tell what actions to take to activate those options, whether at every point the user can tell what state the system is in through its interface.
It is absolutely true that if you are developing for, say, ascii-loving adult S.U.D. gamers your design requirements will be different than if you are developing for casual gaming tweens. But we can still say that the DF interface is pretty bad for the vast majority of users who want to play the game.
Money is not the goal here, but it is a metric that indicates in general terms how engaged people are with what you're doing.
People are very engaged with Minecraft. It's spawned an entire subculture, and the impact it's had on gaming in general is considerable. It appeals to all ages, to people with wildly different expectations, and continues to provide an enjoyable experience for millions of regular users even years after they picked it up.
This is largely because you can do something useful, even if almost inconsequential, right away, and from there you can explore, discovering more depth, uncovering new aspects of the game, engaging with it by degrees. You can have fun without ever crafting a single thing, that's purely optional.
Dwarf Fortress is not any of these things and it's not for a lack of interesting content or game depth. It's that the interface is insane. It's only slightly more coherent than something like Losethos/TempleOS (http://www.templeos.org/). If you don't commit to learning Dwarf Fortress you won't be able to do anything.
I've tried on several occasions to get in to Dwarf Fortress, but the level of complexity is staggeringly high. There are tutorials that cover the basics, but these are hours long. The only game I've seen that's similar is the painstakingly realistic A10 simulator (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huVi6rdPE4I) that has an 800 page manual. At least it has a manual, though!
User interface is extremely important. Don't think it's something users will get used to.
A middle class salary they can survive on for how long? When that source of income dries up they'll be unable to continue working on their passion without spending time and effort finding an additional source of income.
Alternatively, if they open themselves up to a strategy enabling a greater income they could potentially retire in a very short time with indefinite financial security and the option to pursue their passion as long as they like.
Taking the decision of living short-term in terms of salary can be a really liberating step in anyone's life. Especially if it is because of something you love passionately.
A middle class salary they can survive on for how long?
Most middle class people aren't really financially independant either. 76% of people don't have any means to support themselves 6+ months out if they lose employment. Why should they?
Most middle class people aren't really financially independant either.... Why should they?
Those people aren't really middle class. They just think they are.
"Middle class" has political and functional meanings beyond just "having near-average income". Nobody living paycheck-to-paycheck, no matter how big those paychecks are, can really function within the middle class.
The difference between lower class and middle class isn't income, it's assets. Because only assets beget independent economic and political power.
As recently as mid-20th century, an American talking about being "middle class" would have been referring to ownership of assets. Originally, of course, middle class was anyone who was neither a serf or a noble.
If you can't afford to tell your employer "fuck you" today, then you're a serf, and you have very little leverage.
You can be middle class and live paycheck-to-paycheck. There is nothing about that arrangement that prevents some folks from having assets, there is a reason the term "house poor" exists and there is a reason why foreclosure rates shot up for middle class people in the 2009 housing collapse.
Someone who is house poor has liabilities nearly as big as their assets, so their net assets are still nearly zero.
Nobody who actually owned their house free and clear got foreclosed on.
Again, if your existence is so tenuous, you are not middle class. At least not if the word still means what it meant for the past several hundred years.
Totally agree, it's sad to see how companies tend to want to grow (alienating employees in the process), never let go of any client (giving them features beyond scope) and top executives wanting always bigger salaries (what do you really want with all that money anyway?)
It's not the ASCII interface. I love ASCII art, and they managed to pull a high information density. You have graphic tile sets too. Although fan-made, these have a great quality.
The problem is the inconsistent input system. The same task uses different shortcuts in each menu, which makes it hard to remember. Even selecting rectangular regions of the world is done in a particular way depending on what you are doing.
But the thing is, you get over that. Would I trade some of the depth of features for a better interface? No. Would I make the combat arcade-like in return for a better interface? No.
I play the game for the fact that it is infinitely replayable. I play it so much that the menu is now ingrained into my very being. If the interface was to change, it would confuse me. It would take a lot of getting use to. It could work out better in the future, but right now, it at least works.
Everyone who plays it has different parts they like and dislike. Personally, I'd love it to have a nice API, so I didn't have to go through DFHack for every util I want to write. I'd pick that over a new UI.
Sure, it's inconsistent, but the inconsistency is consistent. I'll take that.
That's good for you, but you ran the gauntlet (the UI) and earned the level of comfort you now have with it. Just because you're one of the brave (and extremely patient and persistent) souls who have done so, does not mean that having to do so is a good thing, or is not a significant barrier to others.
Would I trade some of the depth of features for a better interface?
But that's really not the tradeoff. A more consistent interface takes less total time to write and maintain than one that has one-offs for every situation. Inconsistency makes future development slower.
And we only see the tip of the interface iceberg. I find it highly unlikely that the internal interfaces between components are any better. Everything about Dwarf Fortress gives the impression that their source code is probably a nightmare.
Which doesn't matter, of course, so long as it runs -- until you want new features and progress grinds down to a crawl.
(Just having fun analogy time as I wake up, once I got rollin it just kinda got outta control)
I don't actually use C++, not since about 2005 anyway, but like many on HN that won't stop expressing strong opinions on the UI. The semicolons dripping everywhere are a massive UI problem. Makes it look like a Perl obfuscation competition. A modern language like Intercal does not use semicolons, well, not as much. They need to get with the program and use UTF-8 so I can program in my native Klingon. I'm sure this Stroustrup character likes his language very much, thank you, but he could make a heck of lot more money, for a lot longer, if he replaced the UI with something a little more modern and polished, like a mobile iphone app where you can end your statement lines with pink hearts and smiley faces. And C++ needs social networking and multiplayer.
C++ also has a horribly inconsistent UI, look at these two ways to add one:
blah = blah + 1;
vs
blah++;
How is the average noob off the street supposed to handle inconsistency? There should only be one way to do it; just like sex. And don't get me started on those Perl heathens.
Its just a hostile UI and C++ would be more accessible to the average person with a better UI. Because the only people who matter are the average people, F those outliers.
That's nice that some people have buckled down and learned all the peculiarities of the existing C++ UI, but we'll just have to abandon them with our "improvements". I have Stroustrup's latest edition of C++ and its bigger than my metro area phone book, which is far too long compared to the copy of K+R I got in 1983 or so which was so small it was mistaken for a copy of readers digest. Heck even "Modern Perl" sitting on my desk right now is only 280 pages in dead tree form.
Niches are inherently bad and we should all want to either conform or dominate those who conform, so its inherently, of itself, bad, if only a fraction of the population "gets" what they're doing. Just like art and music! Quantity has a quality all its own. Can't they just watch football like normal guys? I mean ten trillion horseflies can't all be wrong, or however that goes.
The brothers have this massive, massive blindspot regarding the importance of the UI.
No they don't. They keep saying over and over again that they know the UI is bad, and they know it drives away potential players. They said it right in this very article even. I am always amazed at how many people are so desperate to tell others how to run their affairs that they invent false ignorance in others so they can step in and tell them how to do things.
Comments
"It's not like people see our $50,000 a year and think 'Hey, I want a piece of that pie.' They'd much rather look towards things like Minecraft, where there are hundreds of millions of dollars."
The brothers have this massive, massive blindspot regarding the importance of the UI. That $50,000 cap they perceive is barely scratching the surface of what would be possible for them if they made the damn thing a bit more accessible to the average person. It's great that their small niche base loves ASCII art and doesn't mind fumbling their way through a hostile interface in order to play the game, but that is the primary reason the game stays confined within a tiny niche corner of the gaming market.
They have the real possibility that if they did that seed work, even just on exposing an API into the game, as opposed to venturing into a full-on UI overhaul, that enough new people would be introduced to the game that they could hire a third developer to focus specifically on the API and UI aspects of the game, leaving them free to keep working on the bits they love.
You are, of course, totally right.
But do you know much about dwarf fortress? The brothers have responded to questions about this a number of times (regarding UI) but more importantly than that, it appears that they don't particuarly care about making the big bucks.
They are totally happy just pottering along with a loyal hardcore following, earning a very middle class salary, doing something they are massively passionate about. In fact, it seems that what they have is all they ever want in life. They are in their nirvana.
Good for them!
I don't disagree with you. I think I'm just bitter because I hate bad UIs and it stops me from properly exploring the game. I don't understand why they don't care about the fact that so many people will never experience their creation because of the unnecessary barrier they've created.
Their creation has a bad UI. The barrier is a part of the work. You could take the swearing out of The Godfather in order to make it more accessible, but what people would be accessing would not really be The Godfather anymore.
The swearing in The GodFather is an important part of the story. It contributes to the end goal of those who made the film. The bad UI in Dwarf Fortress is not deliberate. It is the result of neglect of that aspect of the game. People who play the game and enjoy it do so despite the UI. I have yet to meet someone who thinks the existing UI makes the game better in any way.
It's not clear from your original top level post whether you've played the game and are complaining about the UI quirks described elsewhere in this thread, or if you're talking about the ASCII art.
If you're talking about the interface design, keyboard commands etc, ignore this comment.
If you're talking about the ASCII art I would say it absolutely is deliberate. DF is actually a sequel (Slaves to Armok, God of Blood, Chapter 2: Dwarf Fortress) and the first game was 3D. They chose to make DF a roguelike ASCII art game because if they had tried anything else, it wouldn't be half as deep as it is now. The ASCII art enables the depth that the game has developed.
As I said, if you are primarily arguing that they should keep the ASCII art and revamp the interface, you can safely ignore this comment.
> I don't understand why they don't care about the fact that so many people will never experience their creation because of the unnecessary barrier they've created.
Would people care to experience it if they could? I've always assumed with this (and a number of other things in life) that being a bit of a niche interest (or in this case a lot of a niche interest) in part creates the niche interest. There have been many rogue-a-likes with more modern interfaces but they have either not attracted or not managed to keep up the interest that this one has. Perhaps it is a nostalgia thing, perhaps it is a "nerd" thing; what-ever it is it works for them and their audience and changing the game to appeal to a larger audience might both fail to do so and make the existing fans wander off (and make it less enjoyable for the developers to work on: they seem to be getting quite a kick out of their baby and its current fans and don't want to lose that).
The comparison some make with minecraft on the "being a bit niche creating a niche" thing is quite fair, and this "if you were more like that you might have a much larger audience" comments perfectly valid, but minecraft's niche being an order of magnitude or few bigger might be in part due to luck (right thing, right time, critical mass didn't hit to early or too late, ...) rather than just the relative prettiness and intuitiveness.
Caveat: I've played neither Dwarf Fortress nor Minecraft, so I may not really have a clue what I'm talking about.
You falsely attribute a niche's draw to the fact that it's niche. I find it unlikely that people would base their interest in a game on its popularity, or lack thereof. If the game is fun, people will play it. If it's not, they won't.
There might actually be more to the "if it's niche, some people are more interested in it" mentality. It's anecdotal, yes, but I know that I have an odd tendency to prefer games that aren't hyper popular. New Call of Duty or Halo? I don't care how "well made" the game is, I won't play it. A tiny, unknown RPG/Rhythm game hybrid (Sequence)? I gobble it up. All my friends start playing one game? I play another. Etc. I wonder how many people might have some unconscious tendency to gravitate toward those games which are no very popular, or if I'm just an oddball.
Maybe DF being a niche helps in some way. I don't know. But I do know that the UI is, almost objectively, not good. I know it's why I stopped playing. Once you get more than 20 dwarfs or so, managing who does what is ridiculous. (at least without external tools. I think the popularity and almost necessity of some external tools really does show that the UI can be atrocious at some points. (also note this is not a comment on the ASCII nature of the game, that's fine))
But the game being different in the ways that make it get called niche are usually why people talk about it publicly. It is certainly a major part of the discussion on most occasions when I hear of it.
While the interface puts many people off once they are there, would the game get quite as much discussion if it was much more like other games rather than being somewhat more unique (for better or worse)?
I agree that if the game is fun people will play it. The problem is getting them to try the game for long enough to know if it is fun. Popularity is obviously a factor in achieving that since lots of people associate mass marketed products with blandness, juvenility, etc.
I can think of half a dozen people amongst my immediate social circle who have expressed interest in playing Dwarf Fortress "if it wasn't for the interface". Anecdote != data, but from my experience the building blocks of the game appeal to a lot of people who are thoroughly put off by its level of inaccessibility.
Haven't been following much of Dwarf Fortress, either, but according to the post, I'm confident that they care. For instance, the 1.0 version should have a more consistent interface, tutorials and context-sensitive help menus.
It's probably just that there are plenty more things that they care more about than revamping totally the UI.
I understand they're working on the game out of passion, but I feel like they should bite the bullet and spend a good chunk of one of their update cycles on the UI. I remember reading patch notes one time, where they literally re-wrote the entire damage system to account for more things. (swords don't do as much damage when wearing armor, maces cause bruises and broken bones through armor, etc.) It's not my project, and I don't want to sound entitled to something I can play for free, but I feel like they could take time away from simulating muscle fibers or something ridiculously detailed such as that, and make the game more easily playable. It honestly still feels like the debug interface a developer might put into a game with all the odd keys you have to press to activate one thing or another.
That said, they can work on what they want, as they're the developers. And they're providing the game free of charge to anyone who wants to play it. It's just a nice pipe dream of mine to be able to play the game without spending a month learning how to navigate the menus :)
You hate UIs you don't like. Which is a tautology. The interesting part here is that you've managed to convince yourself that UIs you don't like are objectively bad, and that anyone who does like such UIs is wrong in some factual way, as opposed to being 'wrong' in the purely subjective way everyone who disagrees with us on a matter of taste is.
Go too far in this direction and you end up with Jef Raskin, who disdained configurability because he thought he knew better than the people actually using the software how software should work.
There are plenty of things about UIs that are pretty objectively bad. Inconsistency, for one. I don't think there are lots of people who like having to memorize multiple ways of doing the same thing depending on the view.
Unless it's clear how to get from one view to the other and which view you use is optional. Then that might be a feature :)
All UIs are inconsistent to some extent, like with menus, or with how the steering wheel behaves when backing a car up. All we demand is that it be done well, which is a tautology.
Right, except it wasn't done well in this case. The game is great, the UI not so much. Some menus require the arrow keys to navigate, some +-, others hjkl.
It's been a while since I last played, but there is a "Designation" menu which orders your dwarves to perform specific tasks. You want them to build a staircase where there was some rock before? Awesome, they'll do it. You want them to build a staircase after you already mined the block? No can do. No warning, no error message, simply nothing happens. You need to go through the other menus, build a staircase and move it there.
Except it makes sense if you realize that designations are for changing existing terrain and the language reflects that, so using it to "carve [a] staircase" out of thin air doesn't really make sense. Building one from the buildings menu in a space that has been mined out does.
I admit there are problems with the dwarf fortress interface, major ones, like job management. However this is not one of those problems.
I'm afraid it is still a UI problem.
Or rather - it's also a problem of information architecture to borrow the parlance from another field. The internal logical structure shouldn't be reflected in the external UI unless it's intuitive or discoverable.
According to you. Is it so hard to imagine others may disagree? Must you downvote?
Your 'this is all a tautology' point is neither interesting nor moves the conversation forward.
This is like making the point that the sky isn't really blue it just looks blue - technically correct, but unless you are answering the question of why it is blue, correcting somebody on this is boorish, not interesting.
In this case we are talking about Dwarf Fortress, near universally reviled for its interface, so yes, arguing that some people may theoretically prefer it is both hard to believe and makes it seem like you are just being contrarian.
Well, even Tarn Adams himself agrees: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_o...
I must not. I have refrained from voting because opinions.
In interaction design we say that you can't design an experience, but you can design for an experience. We know quite a bit about humans, the psychology they approach an interface with, their physical abilities to use an interface. With this information and a target experience you want to design for, the design choices follow.
We can objectively measure things like whether a user approaching an interface can easily understand what options are available to them, whether the user can intuitively tell what actions to take to activate those options, whether at every point the user can tell what state the system is in through its interface.
It is absolutely true that if you are developing for, say, ascii-loving adult S.U.D. gamers your design requirements will be different than if you are developing for casual gaming tweens. But we can still say that the DF interface is pretty bad for the vast majority of users who want to play the game.
But instead UI people just say it's bad, period. That's the problem.
Money is not the goal here, but it is a metric that indicates in general terms how engaged people are with what you're doing.
People are very engaged with Minecraft. It's spawned an entire subculture, and the impact it's had on gaming in general is considerable. It appeals to all ages, to people with wildly different expectations, and continues to provide an enjoyable experience for millions of regular users even years after they picked it up.
This is largely because you can do something useful, even if almost inconsequential, right away, and from there you can explore, discovering more depth, uncovering new aspects of the game, engaging with it by degrees. You can have fun without ever crafting a single thing, that's purely optional.
Dwarf Fortress is not any of these things and it's not for a lack of interesting content or game depth. It's that the interface is insane. It's only slightly more coherent than something like Losethos/TempleOS (http://www.templeos.org/). If you don't commit to learning Dwarf Fortress you won't be able to do anything.
I've tried on several occasions to get in to Dwarf Fortress, but the level of complexity is staggeringly high. There are tutorials that cover the basics, but these are hours long. The only game I've seen that's similar is the painstakingly realistic A10 simulator (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huVi6rdPE4I) that has an 800 page manual. At least it has a manual, though!
User interface is extremely important. Don't think it's something users will get used to.
Is this not a short-sighted view?
A middle class salary they can survive on for how long? When that source of income dries up they'll be unable to continue working on their passion without spending time and effort finding an additional source of income.
Alternatively, if they open themselves up to a strategy enabling a greater income they could potentially retire in a very short time with indefinite financial security and the option to pursue their passion as long as they like.
I don't think you'll find many people disagreeing with you. It's a decision they've made. What else is there to say about it?
Taking the decision of living short-term in terms of salary can be a really liberating step in anyone's life. Especially if it is because of something you love passionately.
Most middle class people aren't really financially independant either. 76% of people don't have any means to support themselves 6+ months out if they lose employment. Why should they?
http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/index.h...
Those people aren't really middle class. They just think they are.
"Middle class" has political and functional meanings beyond just "having near-average income". Nobody living paycheck-to-paycheck, no matter how big those paychecks are, can really function within the middle class.
The difference between lower class and middle class isn't income, it's assets. Because only assets beget independent economic and political power.
As recently as mid-20th century, an American talking about being "middle class" would have been referring to ownership of assets. Originally, of course, middle class was anyone who was neither a serf or a noble.
If you can't afford to tell your employer "fuck you" today, then you're a serf, and you have very little leverage.
You can be middle class and live paycheck-to-paycheck. There is nothing about that arrangement that prevents some folks from having assets, there is a reason the term "house poor" exists and there is a reason why foreclosure rates shot up for middle class people in the 2009 housing collapse.
Someone who is house poor has liabilities nearly as big as their assets, so their net assets are still nearly zero.
Nobody who actually owned their house free and clear got foreclosed on.
Again, if your existence is so tenuous, you are not middle class. At least not if the word still means what it meant for the past several hundred years.
Totally agree, it's sad to see how companies tend to want to grow (alienating employees in the process), never let go of any client (giving them features beyond scope) and top executives wanting always bigger salaries (what do you really want with all that money anyway?)
Happiness, as elegance, is in simplicity.
It's not the ASCII interface. I love ASCII art, and they managed to pull a high information density. You have graphic tile sets too. Although fan-made, these have a great quality.
The problem is the inconsistent input system. The same task uses different shortcuts in each menu, which makes it hard to remember. Even selecting rectangular regions of the world is done in a particular way depending on what you are doing.
Inconsistency is awful for users.
But the thing is, you get over that. Would I trade some of the depth of features for a better interface? No. Would I make the combat arcade-like in return for a better interface? No.
I play the game for the fact that it is infinitely replayable. I play it so much that the menu is now ingrained into my very being. If the interface was to change, it would confuse me. It would take a lot of getting use to. It could work out better in the future, but right now, it at least works.
Everyone who plays it has different parts they like and dislike. Personally, I'd love it to have a nice API, so I didn't have to go through DFHack for every util I want to write. I'd pick that over a new UI.
Sure, it's inconsistent, but the inconsistency is consistent. I'll take that.
That's good for you, but you ran the gauntlet (the UI) and earned the level of comfort you now have with it. Just because you're one of the brave (and extremely patient and persistent) souls who have done so, does not mean that having to do so is a good thing, or is not a significant barrier to others.
But that's really not the tradeoff. A more consistent interface takes less total time to write and maintain than one that has one-offs for every situation. Inconsistency makes future development slower.
And we only see the tip of the interface iceberg. I find it highly unlikely that the internal interfaces between components are any better. Everything about Dwarf Fortress gives the impression that their source code is probably a nightmare.
Which doesn't matter, of course, so long as it runs -- until you want new features and progress grinds down to a crawl.
(Just having fun analogy time as I wake up, once I got rollin it just kinda got outta control)
I don't actually use C++, not since about 2005 anyway, but like many on HN that won't stop expressing strong opinions on the UI. The semicolons dripping everywhere are a massive UI problem. Makes it look like a Perl obfuscation competition. A modern language like Intercal does not use semicolons, well, not as much. They need to get with the program and use UTF-8 so I can program in my native Klingon. I'm sure this Stroustrup character likes his language very much, thank you, but he could make a heck of lot more money, for a lot longer, if he replaced the UI with something a little more modern and polished, like a mobile iphone app where you can end your statement lines with pink hearts and smiley faces. And C++ needs social networking and multiplayer.
C++ also has a horribly inconsistent UI, look at these two ways to add one:
blah = blah + 1;
vs
blah++;
How is the average noob off the street supposed to handle inconsistency? There should only be one way to do it; just like sex. And don't get me started on those Perl heathens.
Its just a hostile UI and C++ would be more accessible to the average person with a better UI. Because the only people who matter are the average people, F those outliers.
That's nice that some people have buckled down and learned all the peculiarities of the existing C++ UI, but we'll just have to abandon them with our "improvements". I have Stroustrup's latest edition of C++ and its bigger than my metro area phone book, which is far too long compared to the copy of K+R I got in 1983 or so which was so small it was mistaken for a copy of readers digest. Heck even "Modern Perl" sitting on my desk right now is only 280 pages in dead tree form.
Niches are inherently bad and we should all want to either conform or dominate those who conform, so its inherently, of itself, bad, if only a fraction of the population "gets" what they're doing. Just like art and music! Quantity has a quality all its own. Can't they just watch football like normal guys? I mean ten trillion horseflies can't all be wrong, or however that goes.
No they don't. They keep saying over and over again that they know the UI is bad, and they know it drives away potential players. They said it right in this very article even. I am always amazed at how many people are so desperate to tell others how to run their affairs that they invent false ignorance in others so they can step in and tell them how to do things.