It’s amazing when you have professional people design a front end!

April 12, 2016 1:13 PM

Dwarf Fortress Tarn Adams visits a convention for the second time ever.
posted by Sebmojo (46 comments total)

This is a thoughtful, in-depth PC Gamer GDC interview with one of the happier men alive at this moment.
posted by Sebmojo at 1:41 PM on April 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

I don’t even use version control. If you don’t know what that is then you’re not gonna yell at me. If you even know what version control is you’re gonna be like, ‘You don’t use version control? You don’t use source control? What is wrong with you? How can you even work?’

I’m just not cut out for it, in a sense. It’s been 15 years, so the reasons have change over time, but that’s my current understanding of it. I kind of have an academic background, so I am kind of like, ‘Put it out there.’ That’s my default mindset, but it just seems risky to me.

This, to my mind, is the most terrifyingly old-school thing about DF.
posted by zamboni at 2:04 PM on April 12, 2016 [32 favorites]

Dwarf Fortress is so opaque to me (a strategy gamer) that I can only interact with it via AARs. And at that point, I'm read procedurally plotted fantasy fiction, and might as well sit down with a real book.

I file this game in the same place I put EVE Online - neat that it exists, but happy for people who enjoy it, but I can only appreciate it from afar
posted by thecjm at 2:05 PM on April 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

This is mostly great, but I found "You’re not gonna be programming on a yacht a year from now" kind of a painfully tasteless non-question of a thing to say. I mean, you wouldn't imagine saying this to someone engaged in writing a long book or making a difficult series of sculptures; more than anything it seems a symptom of a pretty deep misunderstanding about what it is that he's doing, or maybe just of the pervasive get-rich-quick-scheme milieu of the tech world.
posted by RogerB at 2:06 PM on April 12, 2016 [4 favorites]

If you're not going to read the whole article, you should at least read the story about how they ended up with drunk cats. [Trigger warning: dead (virtual) cats]:

A: It’s funny how I have popular bugs, right? You shouldn’t have popular bugs. But the most popular bug with the latest release, I added taverns to fortress mode, so the dwarves will go to a proper establishment, get mugs, and make orders, and they’ll drink in the mug. And, you know, things happen, mugs get spilled, there’s some alcohol on the ground.

Now, the cats would walk into the taverns, right, and because of the old blood footprint code from, like, eight years ago or something, they would get alcohol on their feet. It was originally so people could pad blood around, but now any liquid, right, so they get alcohol on their feet. And then I wanted to add cleaning stuff so when people were bathing, or I even made eyelids work for no reason, because I do random things sometimes. So cats will lick and clean themselves, and on a lark, when I made them clean themselves I’m like, ‘Well, it’s a cat. When you do lick cleaning, you actually ingest the thing that you’re cleaning off, right? They make hairballs, so they must swallow something, right?' And so the cats, when they cleaned the alcohol off their feet, they all got drunk. Because they were drinking.

But the numbers were off on that. I had never thought about, you know, activating inebriation syndromes back when I was adding the cleaning stuff. I was just like, ‘Well, they ingest it and they get a full dose,’ but a full dose is a whole mug of alcohol for a cat-sized creature, and it does all the blood alcohol size-based calculations, so the cats would get sick and vomit all over the tavern.

The original bug report is, ‘There’s cat vomit all over my tavern, and there’s a few dead cats,’ or whatever, and they’re like, ‘Why? This is broken.’

People helped me with this. We were all looking and figuring out, ‘What the heck is going on here?’, and that was the chain of events. It’s like doing the detective work to figure out that entire chain of events is what happened. You can see how adding just a tavern that gave the opportunity for spilling alcohol, which was really uncommon before, now all the spilled alcohol starts to, form in one location where something could start to happen. You activate bugs and little parts of code from eight, six years ago where you just didn’t balance the numbers because it didn’t matter. You don’t want to spend time doing balancing that doesn’t matter, because then you lose a couple of days doing something for no reason.

Q: So the cats’ inebriation system was just based on any organism would have the potential to get drunk.

A: Yeah, right now it’s any creature that has blood, and that includes, like, an octopus. I don’t know if an octopus can get drunk or not.

Q: Now we have to find out.

posted by benito.strauss at 2:06 PM on April 12, 2016 [55 favorites]

RogerB, I think the reporter was trying to compare him to Notch, who also created a cult hit with a rabid fanbase. At least, that's how I read it.
posted by Hactar at 2:17 PM on April 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

For shame, Sebmojo.

*lols discreetly*
posted by Sebmojo at 2:27 PM on April 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

I forget in DF if demons have blood, or if they have fire in their veins. I wonder what that scenario looks like.
posted by boo_radley at 2:28 PM on April 12, 2016

Concerned Ape is the (next) New Notch. And that's a great thing.
posted by bonehead at 2:29 PM on April 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

I forget in DF if demons have blood, or if they have fire in their veins

They're procedurally generated, of course, each world has different ones!
posted by RogerB at 2:34 PM on April 12, 2016

I file this game in the same place I put EVE Online - neat that it exists, but happy for people who enjoy it, but I can only appreciate it from afar

I feel like I need to start keeping an eye out for people using the "I love reading about it but don't want to play it" line, so that I can identify the games I need to play.

I mean, my top four favourite games are something like: EVE Online, Dwarf Fortress, Nethack, and Kerbal Space Program.
posted by 256 at 3:08 PM on April 12, 2016 [16 favorites]

more than anything it seems a symptom of a pretty deep misunderstanding about what it is that he's doing, or maybe just of the pervasive get-rich-quick-scheme milieu of the tech world.

$ = points. The more you have, they more you're winning.
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:08 PM on April 12, 2016

I think it more comes from having at least something of an understanding of Tarn's attitude. I mean, Dwarf Fortress has enough of a following that they easily could be making more people. The journalist jokes about a PS4 exclusive, but they totally could hire somebody at this point to work on the interface and make something like that happen. They would sell plenty of copies of name recognition alone. They could make a business plan and get venture capital, no problem. There is no end of opportunity to monetize this cultural force they have created.

Instead, they've put exactly enough effort into fundraising that Tarn and his brother can live comfortably (I think their total combined income from Dwarf Fortress is something like $100k per year at this point) and then stopped thinking about it. I trust that the journalist was trying to delve into that mindset a little so that Tarn would comment on it. And it worked.
posted by 256 at 3:16 PM on April 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

I mean, you wouldn't imagine saying this to someone engaged in writing a long book or making a difficult series of sculptures;

Why not? It's not a criticism. It's an acknowledgement of Tarn Adams' priorities as an artist. He could make more money from Dwarf Fortress, but all he wants to make from Dwarf Fortress is more of Dwarf Fortress. I think pretty much everyone with even a passing interest in DF recognises that clarity of vision as a good thing.
posted by howfar at 3:35 PM on April 12, 2016 [4 favorites]

In context it's clearly a joke.

If DF has too high a bar to entry to actually play, it's worth investigating Rimworld, essentially a Firefly-themed Dwarf Fortress-lite with a much lower barrier to entry and a very active dev.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:36 PM on April 12, 2016 [5 favorites]

Dwarf Fortress is so opaque to me (a strategy gamer) that I can only interact with it via AARs.

Also, I'm pretty dumb when it comes to things like strategy games, but I can play Dwarf Fortress and enjoy it. If I can do it, I'm certain you can too. You don't have to go in without assistance; as the article mentions, there are a bunch of UI mods to make things easier.
posted by howfar at 3:37 PM on April 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

I file this game in the same place I put EVE Online - neat that it exists, but happy for people who enjoy it, but I can only appreciate it from afar

You know, I used to feel the same. About a year ago, I downloaded the Lazy Newb pack, found some You Tube videos for new players, had the wiki open, and gave it a shot.

I won't say I built anything great, but I did have a functional Fortress that was producing crafts, trading, and fought off a horrible beast (at the cost of about 2/3 of my population). I got to the point that I was channeling water around and starting to think about how to drop it from the surface to be next to my medical center, and having grandiose plans for improving my defenses before I stepped away. It's a very steep learning curve, but the rewards of seeing the little complex you've built come alive and the dwarves acting in really strange ways is kind of amazing, and I totally understand the pull of the game now. It's a steep learning curve, but worth the effort at least once, IMO.
posted by nubs at 3:42 PM on April 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

howfar: Also, I'm pretty dumb when it comes to things like strategy games, but I can play Dwarf Fortress and enjoy it. If I can do it, I'm certain you can too. You don't have to go in without assistance; as the article mentions, there are a bunch of UI mods to make things easier.

I wouldn't recommend my way of getting to grips with Dwarf Fortress, which is to get dumped and wish for nothing more than to vanish from the world for a few weeks.

I got really, really good at Dwarf Fortress.
posted by Kattullus at 4:01 PM on April 12, 2016 [19 favorites]

Also this:

when we were putting in wood density—no one knew the density, or we couldn’t find it online anywhere, of saguaros cactus, the cactus you recognize from, like, a Western. These giant cactuses, they actually have big wooden ribs inside. They’re kind of like a vessel, like a boat, and so of course we have those in Dwarf Fortress now. So you get this wood from the saguaros, but no one knew how dense it was, and so we actually had a fan order some from, like, this saguaro wood vendor, and then he did liquid displacement or whatever and measured it and put all the data online, and then we just put it into the data file, and credited the person and stuff, and now there’s saguaro wood density.

Saguaro cacti have big wooden ribs like a boat, so of course we had to put them in Dwarf Fortress! But it was kinda reckless, because at first we didn't even know the density of saguaro wood!
posted by straight at 4:14 PM on April 12, 2016 [35 favorites]

You just know he frowned really deeply before entering the scratch value, and toyed with the idea of simulating the growth of the cactus from scratch via a plant growth/nutrients in and out algorithm.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:20 PM on April 12, 2016 [8 favorites]

I file this game in the same place I put EVE Online - neat that it exists, but happy for people who enjoy it, but I can only appreciate it from afar

I am super jealous of anyone able to just stick with one game for hours on end. I have ~320 games on Steam, because I am interested in so many types of genres and so many games look interesting to me. I have managed to slowly go through my adventure games, because I can actually beat those, but open world games? I play for a few hours and then I get the urge to play something else. Not necessarily because I'm bored, it's just I'm super anxious to play ALL THE GAMES. Also, as I have gotten older I feel like I have less time to invest in just one thing.

I think I might get Dwarf Fortress though
posted by littlesq at 4:20 PM on April 12, 2016

Seriously - try Rimworld, linked above. It's super fun and easy to play, and gives a really good feel for DF style play.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:21 PM on April 12, 2016

Oh good lord, that flowchart explaining how to get Space Invaders working inside Dwarf Fortress is a thing of terrifying beauty.
posted by Kattullus at 5:21 PM on April 12, 2016 [7 favorites]

This, to my mind, is the most terrifyingly old-school thing about DF.

I think I would be much, much more afraid of this if it wasn't Dwarf Fortress. I mean, Tarn Adams has a very specific way of working and he seems very unperturbed by the kinds of pitfalls version control solves. Making collaboration easier? Who cares? He doesn't share the code with anyone and never wants to. "What if you make a mistake and you need to revert, Tarn?" Well, he's just gonna sit down and fix it. Might take a little while, but it'll get done. Tarn Adams is the most dwarf-like game programmer I can imagine. Everything will be fine.

I'm really glad to hear he's making a much more livable income these days. There was an article a few years back detailing the somewhat precarious existence him and his brother led, and it made me real sad to think this singular obsession, the one that's brought so many other people joy, the one Adams left a professor gig to work on full-time, could barely afford to feed its creators.
posted by chrominance at 6:10 PM on April 12, 2016 [11 favorites]

(also, thanks to the article and this thread, Rimworld and Project Highrise are on my radar, so that's fantastic. "SimTower but with zoning law" is a siren call to very, very few people, but I am one of them.)
posted by chrominance at 6:13 PM on April 12, 2016 [6 favorites]

So you get this wood from the saguaros, but no one knew how dense it was, and so we actually had a fan order some from, like, this saguaro wood vendor, and then he did liquid displacement or whatever and measured it and put all the data online, and then we just put it into the data file, and credited the person and stuff, and now there’s saguaro wood density.

This section made me worry that somewhere out there, there's a DF fan with a BAC meter dropping cats into beer puddles.
posted by zamboni at 6:38 PM on April 12, 2016 [17 favorites]

I have a secret pet theory that in 25 years or so, we are going to look back on dwarf fortress as the first hint that our own universe was simply a vast, very detailed simulation from which sentient 'life forms' (humans) evolved as an emergent property of said simulation.
posted by some loser at 7:40 PM on April 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm mainly amused that Dwarf Fortress's fans, of all people were deterred by a mildly clunky donation form.

If anything, I'd expect that, given his audience, he'd get more donations by putting a captcha on the donation form, and setting the font to Wingdings.
posted by schmod at 7:50 PM on April 12, 2016 [20 favorites]

I wouldn't recommend my way of getting to grips with Dwarf Fortress, which is to get dumped and wish for nothing more than to vanish from the world for a few weeks.

I got really, really good at Dwarf Fortress.

Katullus withdraws from society...


Low-hanging one-liners aside, +1 to all the above suggestions for making your entry into Dwarf Fortress easier whether it's using the Lazy Newb Pack, watching videos, and using the wiki. In my case, I started off following the Quickstart guide on the wiki slavishly. Once you get down the basics of digging, building workshops and having them make stuff (namely furniture, traps, and booze), and farming you basically have everything you need to keep your dwarves alive.

Also important is using what I would consider a critical add-on, Dwarf Therapist. At its simplest it allows you to bypass the horrendous in-game UI for assigning labors to dwarves by letting you assign individual/groups of labors to individual/groups of dwarves with a single click. At its most complex you can even have it automatically assign dwarves to labors based on their current skill, physical/mental aptitude (e.g., creativity for craftsdwarfs, strength for miners), and ratios that you set between the different things you want done (more miners/mechanics if you're making megaprojects, more engravers if you want to smooth ALL THE STONE). I haven't figured out how to do that last because the documentation is not very clear on how it works, but it's there!

Also yesss to Rimworld
posted by coolname at 8:43 PM on April 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

Dwarf Fortress is so opaque to me (a strategy gamer) that I can only interact with it via AARs.

After bouncing off the game twice, what finally got me going was the Lazy Newb Pack and the Getting Started book from O'Reilly. The book is really good at getting you over the initial hump, even though it's a little behind the game right now.

Once you're growing food and making tools you have enough of the basics down to make the game fun.
posted by vanar sena at 9:55 PM on April 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ah I see coolname already beat me to much of that. I can't say enough nice things about Dwarf Therapist. It's the spreadsheet interface that games like this demand. I've spent so much time tuning the labour allocation algorithms in DT it's a little embarrassing.
posted by vanar sena at 10:03 PM on April 12, 2016

Google DeepMind should tackle Dwarf Fortress next. That's a version of Skynet I could live with.
posted by Satorian at 1:27 AM on April 13, 2016

Instead of deliberately killing everyone on the planet, Skynet just "retires" the "fortress" after a disastrous attempt to channel lava flows, and sends a Terminator to explore in "adventure mode".
posted by nubs at 5:34 AM on April 13, 2016 [4 favorites]

(And having just watched Terminator: Genysis, I have to say the idea of rebooting the franchise around the idea that Skynet is a delusional AI thinking it is playing a sim sounds a lot more interesting than whatever the heck that alt-timeline hot mess was)
posted by nubs at 6:14 AM on April 13, 2016

A friend pointed me to this delightful Twitter account: Dwarf Fortress Bugs
posted by jklaiho at 6:31 AM on April 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have to say the idea of rebooting the franchise around the idea that Skynet is a delusional AI thinking it is playing a sim sounds a lot more interesting than whatever the heck that alt-timeline hot mess was

Isn't that the plot of Wargames?
posted by schmod at 8:53 AM on April 13, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wargames with the addition of killer robots.
posted by nubs at 9:05 AM on April 13, 2016

As long as he has backups, I don’t necessarily mind how Adams manages his changes on a project level. I’ll admit that many popular version control tools are designed for collaboration, and so they’re not always a perfect fit for single-developer projects (that said, it’s close enough for me to use them for my personal projects... I’m scatterbrained enough that my past and future selves might as well be basically third-party collaborators).

But I wish he used them, for reasons beyond the project itself.

Think of all the news stories you’ve ever read about a record-setting auction for a draft of a famous document, or scientists discovering layers of paint underneath a famous piece, showing how it changed as it was being created.

History will look back on this early era of gaming and certainly recognize important works. Some of them, like (to 256’s point) EVE Online, NetHack, and Dwarf Fortress are likely to be highlighted for their emergent properties: their sometimes-absurd level of depth, and the extent to which they developed a community that cared about their continuing development.

Dwarf Fortress is the only example I can think of where you can identify it with only one or two auteurs. Unlike something more collaborative like NetHack, you could look at the revision history of DF’s code and perhaps understand the vision that went into different changes. Some would be like covering an errant fleck of paint on the Mona Lisa, others would reveal how her eyes follow you around the room.

If we’re unlucky, history may end up with no record of the source code for Dwarf Fortress. I truly hope Tarn and Zach have arrangements that would allow it to be archived (or open sourced!) if anything were to happen to them. But even better than that would be for humanity to have some insight into this work beyond the superficial final product, and using version control would offer a clearer understanding of that than we’ll ever get for the Renaissance painters.
posted by Riki tiki at 9:23 AM on April 13, 2016 [4 favorites]

This interview and the Homestuck thread and reading essays about David Bowie got me thinking: There are a lot of vast worlds out there that I can't get into or don't have time to get into. Worlds upon worlds upon worlds!

Even though I can't visit them, I'm delighted to know that they exist and to read little reports from them, even if I don't understand them fully. Is there a word for this situation? It seems to come up more and more as we move forward in time.
posted by ignignokt at 12:23 PM on April 13, 2016

Accelerando?

I think that there being worlds that one will never have the time to fully explore has been the case much earlier than in our present, though. How much could the medieval peasant have known about trading on the Silk Road, and the Silk Road merchant about what, when, where, and how to plant crops? Maybe a stronger argument would be the situation between two even more specialized skills instead, like between stonemasonry and composing poetry.
posted by coolname at 12:49 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

I wonder if anyone has an online game of Dwarf Fortress that others can watch.
posted by XtinaS at 1:06 PM on April 13, 2016 [1 favorite]

Dwarf Fortress does have streamers/videos on Twitch.tv; there are also a host of Let's Play videos on You Tube.

How accessible any of those are I can't speak to; Dwarf Fortress has a steep learning curve that is complicated by the user interface. I would imagine you might find videos of people playing it with ASCII graphics, to any one of a number of tilesets that modders have made; and then there will be a different level of explanation/commentary to go along with it. The ones aimed at beginners will be the ones where there are the most explanations, but those will be aimed at teaching others to play, not necessarily just focusing in on describing what is happening.
posted by nubs at 1:20 PM on April 13, 2016

In the unlikely event that anyone reading this thread doesn't know about it: the sad and terrible end to Boatmurdered.

See also Headshoots, Syrupleaf and Matul Remrit.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:23 PM on April 13, 2016

Boatmurdered is quite possibly the finest bit of game-related fiction that I have ever had the good luck to encounter. However, I am also quite fond of Nist Akath. It eventually develops a strong plot, which is sometimes imposed upon the game through memory hacking tools.
posted by Fanghorn Dungeon, LLC at 8:06 PM on April 13, 2016

I once spent a day trying to get into Dwarf Fortress. I kinda failed. But kinda not?

I was intrigued by this article in the New Yorker. It had been a while since I'd spent any quality time gaming, but my favorite games were always of the SimCity or Civilization varieties. So I picked a Sunday I didn't have any plans for, cracked a bottle of Maker's, and went to town.

First off, DF is only available for Windows or 32-bit Linux. I don't know anyone who's used a 32-bit Linux build since, oh I dunno, the Pentium days, but whatever. I don't have a Windows box, and I didn't want to screw around with the libraries on any of my work VMs, so I went ahead and installed a 32-bit image of I think CentOS. The fact that I needed to install a whole new operating system in order to play DF somehow seemed very DF.

And then there was the game itself. Playing it was a lot lot like programming. And by that I mean, not knowing how to do stuff, googling for how to do stuff, and then finally doing stuff. And here's where the game's legendarily clunky interface really got in the way. I would try to do stuff and nothing would happen, and I didn't know if I was doing it wrong, or if nothing happened because nothing was supposed to happen. The lack of animation meant I didn't have any cues. I couldn't even tell if the thing I tried to do was even attempted. And then there were the menus. Oh god the menus. Endless menus. All the menus. Fucking menus. Some of them navigable by +/-, some by up-arrow/down-arrow. Navigating menus : the very essence of fun.

Look, I know this is the age of indie gaming, and I'm supposed to find ASCII graphics and roguelikes charming for some reason, but yeah, it's lost on me. I don't get it. But that alone wouldn't be enough to put me off. It's the fact that you just don't get a whole lot of feedback when you try to do something. It's hard to know if you're doing it right.

No, I never quite reached the point where I was having fun. And yet ... I get what people like about this game. I got far enough where I'd actually built a tiny fortress. I dug a room and declared it a meeting place. I was asked if I wanted to make it a tavern or some other kind of meeting place. I glanced at my (several-times-refilled) glass of Maker's and thought, "tavern, of course." And boom! I had a tavern -- a real, working tavern! It had a name and everything! With dwarves lounging around and drinking and telling stories instead of doing all the things I told them to do! And an underground garden where they were growing some kind of grain, which fed a working still that had its own frigging staff (!) and produced some sort of booze for my dwarves' drinking pleasure. Holy shit -- this game was awesome! Sorta.

So yeah, I get what people like about this game, but I don't know how long I'd have to play it before it would actually become fun or even slightly intuitive. If I want to do what is essentially googling error messages, I might as well be doing actual work.

I dunno, maybe some of the various mods/front-ends make this game more playable? I just assumed they'd all be really buggy. Maybe I should try one of them?

I still have my 32-bit CentOS image hanging around.
posted by panama joe at 7:11 AM on April 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I would certainly recommend getting a tileset; I, for one, cannot handle the ASCII. And Dwarf Therapist seems a must for managing labour and job orders for the dwarfs.

That being said, I think part of the appeal of DF is the fact that just getting the bare rudiments going - a farm, a still, some smelting or crafting - can feel like an achievement. It isn't a casual game by any stretch of the imagination - it takes a while to get anything set up, and once it is set up, nothing ever runs smoothly, and so your attention is constantly being dragged between all the various things that you're trying to keep going and then the new projects you need/want to start.

I don't know how many hours you'd have to put it to make it feel intuitive; I got my minimal fortress going with everything set pretty much as easy as it was possible to be, and it still felt like I had run a marathon while doing math problems. Once I broke into the caverns below, I gave up because that represented a whole different set of challenges and learning I wasn't ready/willing to take the plunge on. And looming over all of it is the fact that the collapse of your Fortress is pretty much the inevitable end of the game. It's a peculiar approach to fun; I think the draw (at least for me) is in the stories that it generates, and now that I've dabbled enough in the game to understand the mechanics, I can read the AARs with a bit of deeper appreciation.
posted by nubs at 7:47 AM on April 14, 2016 [2 favorites]