Remember, each creature has a bunch of parts with individual health, each tile can get stained by various materials (that can spread disease) and everything is made of various materials with all sorts of mostly-realistic properties. I mean, DF is the sole reason you can find the solid density of Saguaro rib wood on the internet and the value came from an empirical test of a small cube of Saguaro rib wood. It's in the DF raws.

So yeah, you might enjoy DF with a tile set like the LNP if you like the mechanics. But it's a super-complicated game so it takes a while to learn to control things, to learn the requirements to make various items, etc. It's not a game for everyone, you do have to sink quite a lot of time into learning it to enjoy it.

Consider Battlefield or COD Warzone, which simulate the effects of actions by multiple players (including projectile travel) in real time and still manage upwards of 100FPS of near photorealistic graphics.

Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.

Dwarf fortress is a very interesting game and a very deep simulation, but the idea that it's such a detailed simulation that graphics would not be possible is just untrue.

Honestly the UX in dwarf fortress is generally just insanely user-hostile and graphics are only a tiny symptom of that. And I say this as someone who plays and enjoys the game - I've had forts with upwards of 100 idiots^Wdwarfs in them, magma moats, breaching multiple cavern layers, surviving necromancer seiges etc. But every time I play I have to go through that thing over again where I try to figure out how to assign a pet to a person, when I set up a military squad getting them to wear the right equipment is a total chore, minecart UX is completely baffling. Also the simulation is very detailed but kind of broken in lots of annoying ways, like female dwarfs randomly dropping their babies while working, forgetting where they put them and then freaking out, random tantrum spirals because someone went out in the rain and so just decides to murder their colleagues etc.

>Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.

Compared to DF, both of those are an incredibly simple simulation that doesn't lend itself to emergent game play. If you're trying to make the argument that they're just as complicated and still have fancy graphics, that's not the case. DF is far, far, beyond anything in those "simulations" in terms of the back end.

I lament the lack of graphics in DF not because the UI is awful... I've played worse, and in fact Fallout 4's builder interface comes to mind... but because it's incomplete. Certain things that have shown up in third party utilities like Dwarf Therapist are nearly impossible to do without, making the base game more or less unplayable after a release until the third party stuff catches up.

A lot of what you mention regarding tantrum spirals has been fixed in the new release... the issues with dwarf emotions are much more balanced now. It's still the same game, though, so I haven't gotten decades into a fort yet, but I'm hopeful it'll be worth playing beyond the point it was in the past where things spiraled into angsty dwarf death.

I called this Kerbal or Skyrim Syndrome amongs friends.

Games that are no longer playable vanilla after you've had the luxuries of some of the simple convenience addons.

Thats why most have a GPU and that is why there are graphic engines, who do the rendering only of what is needed and produced by the simulation. So no, unless DF uses the gpu for simulating which I doubt, better graphics will not really affect simulation speed, if done right.

But yes, that is much harder.

There is also an ncurses renderer with plain Unicode text output for use in a terminal emulator which may be GPU accelerated, but most term software is not.

Nonsense. Rendering a grid of 2D tiles is exceptionally fast, so much so that converting font data into tiles is how you make text grids go faster!

And even if you do have a slow method, you can just run it on a different thread.

Also hopefully there's a pathfinding thread at some point.

The things that would actually help to split out are also the things that would be difficult to split out.

Pretty amusingly, DF used to spend most of its CPU on graphics. There was a graphics rewrite at some point that fixed it.

This was not written by the game's author, ToadyOne, but someone else. ToadyOne complains that he cannot understand the code anymore. For this reason, he will not open the source code again until he is dead.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/dwarf-fortress/dwarf-fortress-sourc...

Why do you think they had time to develop those features in the first place?

I'm itching to know how they are going to come up with graphical representations for all the randomly generated forgotten beasts. A character is abstract, but when you have a drawing, it conveys more meaning. I wouldn't be happy with a dragon picture or similar, while the forgotten beast was a corrosive gaseous entity.

The presentation may be a bit busy at times (if you embark on a forest, for instance), but it is otherwise fine.

Dwarf Fortress UI ergonomics is another story.

I could spend some more time learning the DF glyphs, but a picture is worth a thousand words.

I killed the Balrog in uMoria* back in the day, so I'm not a stranger to ASCII graphics. The difference between rogue-likes and DF is the extremely huge variability in the glyphs.

Edit: To continue the comparison to books, Dwarf Fortress is like an interactive textbook, Roguelikes compare to genre fiction.

*I'm a dirty save-scummer, but I still put in a bunch of time.

While I cannot speak for the developer, I can understand why they would go that route. Unless you have an interest in computer graphics, implementing them can be dreadfully dull. Unless you have an eye for design, creating the various graphical elements can lead to some interesting results.

I think this is a general feature of software that is very 'techy' for a lack of a better term. Dwarf Fortress is a pretty niche, hardcore game and people who build this sort of stuff don't always have the best sense of what a UX design ought to look like that appeals to the general user. A lot of Linux desktop software is like that too.

and the ux is not going to change radically.

Seems fairly obvious to me. The creator is playing to his strengths.