The previous game thread is right around here . For those of you who haven’t found it yet, Dwarf Fortress is a detailed, highly complex, and generally extremely well thought-out real time strategy game. It basically involves dropping a squad of dwarfs into the middle of a fantasy world with food, beer, and mining equipment, and watching as they either build a great fortress or fail in ways that are often disturbing and always hilarious.
In any event, as per the linked thread, a couple of the board members tried a collaborative game in which we passed the save game around every so often and made up funny in-character journal entries to explain the bizarre things that happened in the game. Since the last thread sank the game has undergone some fairly significant upgrades, the most significant probably being the inclusion of a z-axis which now lets you dig vertically, in addition to horizontally. I haven’t played the new version much, but I understand that you can now (theoretically) start out in the wilderness, dig your way under a goblin (or human, or elf, or theoretically dwarf) settlement, get your army ready, and break into their compound from underground.
Anyway, it sounds like an awful lot of fun, so I thought I’d check to see if enough veterans and/or new players are around to make a second go of it.
Depends on what you mean by improvement. The current alpha version shows the framework for isometric projection to be implemented in the future, at least in some of the status screens, but officially we’re still on ascii-flavored tiles. However, there are a few mods that you can use to spice things up. http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/List_of_user_graphics_sets seems to be a pretty standard choice, and someone recently compiled a bunch of popular tilesets that, when applied together, make it look somewhat like Exile 2.
So the tiles have gotten really, really good, but we’re still stuck with a tileset: no 2.5 dimensions yet.
Oooo, I loved me the Exile 2 graphics. Got a link to that? As I think I mentioned in the last Dwarf Fortress thread, I’d love this game if not for the ASCII.
I can’t seem to find the forum that originally hosted the collection, so I uploaded it to a free download service right here. That should be a zipped version of the entire game including the new graphics, so you can simply unzip it and play. It’s version 0.27.169.33d, which I understand is what all the cool kids play. 33e is the newest release, but apparently it’s still pretty buggy.
Allow me to also point you towards a very detailed walkthrough that takes you step-by-step through the basics of the game in it’s current version. I highly recommend it, as the game has gone through a significant number of changes since we played DF collaboratively on the board. The fluid dynamics are driven by an honest physics engine that apparently makes 'em behave somewhat realistically, farming has been significantly easier, and you can now dig down instead of just out. (Speaking of which, I’d really appreciate it if someone could give me the six-year-old explanation about how to change z-levels. < and > don’t seem to do it, and my stairways just sit there, taunting me with hints at subterranean treasures that my poor dwarves have so far failed to see.
Oh! And build on a river!! I can’t understate the importance of that, especially once you start bringing in immigrants. Ponds, lakes, and other stagnant bodies of water can now eventually be drained, but rivers and other sources of running water don’t run out.
My problem with the tilesets is I have a hard time telling dwarfs apart. I’m used to the different colours, with the tilesets I can’t tell if the approaching goblin horde is about to be slain by my group of soliders or horribly murder a bunch of my farmers.
I’m on .32a, which does, so i’d guess so. It should just be when you’re out of any menu, or if you’re building or designating (so you can match up stairs). I seem to recall that there’s a way to get at the control scheme, but I can’t rememeber what it is, unhelpfully.
Don’t mention it! Interesting people in DF is almost always a good cause.
Just expect to die the first few times, hence the game’s slogan: “Dying is fun”. Because it is. Thus far practically all of my fortresses have been dismal failures, but I’ve learned a lot and had loads of fun every single time.
Great! I recommend making sure that you’re on 33d, though, and not 33e; apparently the latter was just released a few days ago, and is still extremely buggy.
Never heard of this before but I’m downloading 33d to give it a whirl. I’m game for a joint venture if you get one off the ground and want to include someone clueless. I plan on playing my own game as well just to see how it goes.
Do I need to have a certain object in focus, or be in a specific menu for it to do the trick?
