Re:The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress (2011)
by andrewclunn on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @11:51AM
(#13755102)
This. The UI is the final step. Right now it's about experimentation and determining the ideal game mechanics. The obtuseness means that the most obsessive and hard core are your play testers. This is a bad UI as part of good game design for what the current goals for dwarf fortress are.
Re:The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress (2011)
by civilian on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @04:42PM
(#13758239)
As far as I understood, the UI is there to stay. The creator wrote his own game engine that is optimized for printing ascii to a screen-- it's not architected in a way that can plug-and-play with a different renderer.
Cogmind is an interesting example of pure ASCII holding itself to a very high UI standard.
Here is a quick animated gif with a few examples of interactions:
http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2014/1...
I've found that this particular game has found its niche because of what it is.
The point of the creator is this: the game isnt even past pre-alpha. Lots of things will change, which a UI will only bog down.
So for example rimworld is still currently 2d. (will possibly change), but that a big change
DF plans to change the full world gen and design in the next arc - its a reasonable view.