serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
The Myth, the Legend. Long Developed, never knowing release. Until now.
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Dwarf Fortress coming to Steam
- Thread starter serra2
- Start date
- PC
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- Tags
- dwarfs what a twist!
The Myth, the Legend. Long Developed, never knowing release. Until now.
LordInsane
Loyalist to the Alvarian Merchant's Guild
- Location
- Bohuslän, Occupied Norway
Available: time is subjective
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, it's got Steam Workshop support, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody puts in a UI mod sooner or later.
serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
PC Gamer with the interview
Article: PC Gamer: What's the scale of the sprites? 32x32?
Tarn Adams: Yeah, the sprites are 32x32, but some of the creatures like elephants or dragons can be larger, spreading out into neighboring tiles a bit. Importantly, the text won't be the same size as the sprites (Dwarf Fortress to this point has had the ability for modders to add creature graphics, but the creature and text sprites had to be the same size, which was awkward and led to some pretty ingenious work from modders to overcome the limitation.) It's still possible to zoom out to get a larger view of your fortress, but we decided that 32x32 would give Mike and Meph enough room to be expressive and tackle some of the more complicated workshops and items.
Did you have any input or requests or desires for the new graphics style, or did you leave that up to Kitfox and the artists to decide?
We interact with them frequently, almost daily. Sometimes there are long conversations preceding the first pass on a set of tiles, especially when some code/tech decisions have to be made, and sometimes a pig or loom appears suddenly in a thread and we're like, wow, cool! Though we have the final decision on every tile, and we have input and preferences, sure, we're often delighted with the art they come up with. Since both of the artists have been around DF for so long, many of the needs of the project are understood without requiring our input.
It sounds like underneath the new graphics and sound, Dwarf Fortress is essentially unchanged. But in putting the game in front of a wider audience, are you now thinking about bigger changes? Controls, UI, that sort of thing?
We've been talking about this, yeah, and by necessity, just due to the 32x32 tiles, some elements of the UI are going to change and we'll take advantage of that to make things a little easier on people. We're hopeful that we can do accessibility work beyond the addition of graphics and ease of installation that'll come with the Steam/itch version. It's still too early in the process of hashing out interface designs etc. to have specific information, but we've been having these discussions.
Karlito
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
That would require some kind of backend API to be developed though.
Good to see they're thinking about this sort of thing though. My dream feature is a ground following camera view, so you can see what's going on outside in a place with many elevation changes.
serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
On the reason to come to Steam
Article: "You get older!" Adams says, with a big belly laugh to cover up his obvious nervousness. "That's basically what it comes down to."
Not long ago, he explains, Zach had a cancer scare. Even with a good insurance plan, the costs to tease things out were high. When Adams looked at his own plan he was shocked.
"We were looking at the health care prices," Adams says. "If it had been me — we grew up in the same town, right; we have all the same doctors and everything — I would have been wiped out."
Dwarf Fortress — also known by its full name, Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter 2: Dwarf Fortress — has always been available for free. Bay 12 subsists on donations from fans, which have always streamed in at a steady pace through their website. A few years ago, as a nod to modernity, they tossed up a Patreon page. But the slow drip of funding isn't enough to build up the horde of treasure required to fight a medical emergency here in the United States.
"It's just scary," Adams says, referring to the health care system. "The whole thing. So that was on our minds. But also, the whole crowdfunding environment has been a little bumpy, just in terms of how Patreon changes. [...] That's just how it is in games in general. People just feel kind of a little squeezed right now."
And so the brothers at Bay 12 are doing something they thought they'd never do. Nearly 16 years into the project, they've pulled the trigger on a plan to make a proper commercial release. But how they're planning to do it is the remarkable part.
Joviwan
LOAD. AIM. SHOOT.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Jesus christ. There's few things more depressing atm than "We had to start selling this game because we can't afford health care"
- Location
- Cyberdyne Factory #101
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm definitely optimistic about this version, especially since some of the titans of the DF community are working on it. Meph and Mike Mayday are developing the graphical tileset, for example.
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Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Rewriting the graphics code to not be horrifically slow, yes.
Well, I succeeded at that. It's a negligible proportion of the runtime in modern DF, while it used to be 20-40%. It's just a pity that I had no idea how to code at the time... it was a decade ago, and I had only barely started learning to code.
serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
If Dwarf Fortress sells millions on Steam, its creators will give the money away 'as fast as possible'
Article: I ask about what I think is a real possibility: Dwarf Fortress sells a million copies at $20 each. What is his life after that?
"There's no reason we'd get up to a million copies, but if we did, that's at the point where Zack and I would both have like 5 million dollars, and I don't know what that means," he says. "Is that going to corrupt my morality somehow and turn me into a strange person? Because that seems to be a thing that happens. That's why I'm thinking, just try to pitch it away as fast as possible. People expect me to take care of myself, that's what I'm going to do, make sure that my health is in order, make sure that the game is in order, and the rest of it? You know, there are a lot of people and animals and other stuff that are in trouble. Kids that don't have school supplies. All kinds of stuff. It's like Brewster's Millions, right? You've just got to get rid of it, man, that's how I feel about it."
He does see money changing a few things. They might hire someone to help with graphics programming in the future so he can focus on developing Dwarf Fortress's upcoming features, like a long-gestating magic system. He wants to keep paying the artists to work on the game after the initial Steam release. And if money as a concern really does go away for life, he says, why not release the source code?
- Pronouns
- They/Them
EVERYTHING IS EXCELLENT, BUY BUY BUY!
serra2
Himouto! Sylvanas-chan
A wild update appears
Article: Now that Dwarf Fortress developer Bay 12 Games is focusing on the upcoming Steam release, designer Tarn Adams has shown off some of the new version's visual improvements, which ditch the ASCII look for something a bit more expressive, though still low key.
The new style adds some clarity that the old version lacked, according to Adams. He compares the two and shows how Dwarf Fortress Premium will do a better job of showing players they can walk up slopes and climb hills. In the classic view, the slopes are just little triangles that look more like trees, so new players don't immediately know what they're looking at.
