icepotato

yeah, and sometimes new things get patched in like squad management so you can say "alternate patrolling with training", and of course it has a brand new interface, which is subtly different from all the other interfaces...

UI critiques of Dwarf Fortress are incredibly valid. But Tarn makes a living off of DF despite that, because he's trying to procedurally generate interesting stories. That's a really big challenge, and it's something very, very few other games try and do. If you check out his devlog (http://bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html) and his planned feature list (http://bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html) you can see the scope is... staggering in complexity. So the vision is what draws me, personally into the game. The fact that this is all free and driven by donations (publicly tracked here http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122396.0) just makes it even more incredible.

This complexity and vision comes with a price. As people noted below, UI is not really Tarn's focus and probably won't be any time soon. The code is not open and Tarn is pretty straightforward about not wanting to share it with anyone, because he doesn't want to introduce more complexity with non-canonical versions and churn as he continues to replace older subsystems with new ones (At least, this is my recollection of the topic, but I've been out of the loop for a while). So no, it's not going to get fixed any time soon.

Regardless, I really love this game. But I think the wiki's quick-start guide is not sufficient to get up and running with the game. So I've been maintaining my own tutorial: http://www.hailingfromtheedge.com/p/dwarf-fortress-tutorial-...

so far i'd just been beta-testing this on friends who haven't played yet. If you want to try out DF for the first time, please give my tutorial a shot and let me know how it goes!

same with starcraft: "Suppose the two players have bases on different islands, player B has a strong ground army but no income and no way to reach player A, while player A has no units and needs exactly x resources to train an army and barely defeat B. Player A starts with just enough resources to train a worker. In yet another un- reachable island, there are n locations, each of which has a main building of A (to which workers must bring the resources they collect) and x=n resources. There is also a worker in each location, but it is "trapped" behind some resource batches, and cannot reach the main building. On each path connecting two locations, there is a turret (or other static defence) of B, positioned in such a way that a lone worker traversing the path isbound to be killed, but if two workers traverse it, exactly one survives. B hopes for a draw, while A has only one strategy: Train a worker at some location, collect the resources, thus setting the second worker free, traverse a path with both workers to reach another location, and repeat. A cannot waste resources into training more than one worker, and can win if and only if the (planar) graph of locations has a Hamiltonian path."

which raises the question - what is a game? is it the collection of all possible permutations of states allowed by the rules, as in the Pac-Man generalization or this extremely weird corner case SC scenario that requires extended amounts of sub-optimal play? If I -can- construct such a bizarre and entrenched StarCraft position, is it part of "the game", or is it a weird theoretical custom map whose sole purpose is proving starcraft is np-hard to "solve"

that was a really clever way to get me to sign up for twitsprout.

yup. but instead of posting things to TSW i post things to twitter and TSW doesn't really acknowledge that as something I have "shared". even though, you know, I've shared it. Just on twitter, where my friends are and a blogger plugin picks up my posts for republishing on my blog, and not on TSW where.... you guys are :)

similarly, when I go to TSW I have to skip all the stuff that I just read in twitter.

i've been using this for a while, stepping into it whenever HN + RSS + twitter fails me. it's p good at pushing stuff I wouldn't normally read onto my lap, but right now there aren't a ton of gamers on it and that's like 80% of my desired reading material :)