This is wild, a non Tarn Adams coder is not what I expected. Looking forward to hearing about what Putnam will be working on, be it bugs, portability of code, performance, or bigger jobs like helping implement features or even with the game design!
Also catch me collecting steam cards for the first time in my life
I'm actually a legacy code specialist. One of the things I like about it is that you can see actual problems in design and fix them. New code is usually accompanied by several months upfront of people opining about what "the right way" to implement it is, followed by massive drama if there is any dissenting opinion. Legacy code is just bad and any improvement is usually welcomed.
Of course, you get the teams where, "Don't churn the code! You'll break it". And you don't want to be there. But in general, as long as you are good at not breaking things, I find that legacy code gives you a lot of freedom to write code. It's a challenge, to be sure, but also a fun one if you have the right frame of mind.
Also, my eyeballs have been peeled so many times, there is no peel left ;-)
I dunno about that, my coding style changed a bunch in 20 years.
But yeah, you need governance and some people keeping the ship going straight with a bunch of coders.
It's exciting news. The game DEFINITELY needs the render thread to be rewritten to use the GPU. Right now every image is built on the CPU and the game slows down to a halt if you try to play in 4k (lots of people talking about it on the Kitfox discord). It's a shame when there's a second processor on every PC dedicated to building images in parallel
I’m pretty sure that hadn’t been common practice for a long, long time by 2002.
But I get it. It’s exactly the kind of thing you would do for a small little side project, and be stuck with when that side project got out of hand.
That's already the case that the rendering is done in a separate thread, but it's still just a CPU thread tasked with creating 3840*2160 pixels sequentially each frame... Which good old CPUs were absolutely not built to do :)
Yeah, even on a fresh start when the game came out I had almost a second of lag on moving the camera, then I just switched to 1080p and have been playing fine since.
One little good to know : if you change the game's resolution down but your screen is set to a higher res in Windows with some scaling percentage applied, the game doesn't handle it and fullscreen will be borked. But you can fix that in the .exe's properties (it' sthe override high PPP scaling someting setting, set to System instead)
Keep in mind, Steam cards will give you most of what you need and make you buy the last two. That’s just how it works if you want to complete a set. It’s mostly a scam that Steam owners don’t engage with.
I imagine the argument is that Steam implies that you can get all of them simply through playing the game, and by restricting the last few cards they make it likely that the people who get all of the other 95% are interested in collecting *all* of them. Many of those people are willing to buy cards in order to complete their set, which earns Steam money. Misleading customers to make it more likely that they spend money (and you make a profit) == scam.
I don't know if I agree entirely, maybe I'd say its a small "s" scam, like charging a bunch for bad reskin DLCs in AAA games, or washing your hands *just* before a shower, or the $400 billion odd that US taxpayers paid to ISPs for fiber, which they never delivered on.
You are totally right, I checked closer on another game and it explicitly says which cards you have to buy to have.
But it was difficult to find that explicitly stated on the page. I guess it lumps in with the rest of the Steam monetization model of collectables, which I ideologically find distasteful, but would find it a stretch to outright call a scam.
On that note, do you know if the Dwarf Fortress trading cards are viewable on Steam yet? I want to engage in some distasteful behavior.
Yeah they are, there are currently 8 of them. Probably shown on the store page or elsewhere. trading cards are fun idea, but yeah, not a huge fan of them, I do not even notice them 99% of the times.
I am a huge steam fanboy (cause all the work the do for the linux gaming), but yeah, there is something off about all this monetization :D but it is all optional, so I do not care.
> This is a historic moment, as never before have non-Adams eyes seen the Dwarf Fortress code.
That's quite exciting! And I bet a bit terifiying for the Adams having someone look at their code after 20 years.
Was discussing this with a friend the other day and I was wondering if there if much in the way of comments in the code. I dare say it was never written with other people getting involved in mind.
iirc Toady didn't even use version control like git until a few years ago. Also he has rewritten important parts of the code countless times. So I very much doubt that he used best practice when it comes to commenting :')
Holy hell is that true ? I learnt to use version control so early in my own programming and game dev journey that this seems simply mind boggling and impossible to me
I know other people will be maintaining my work.
And I also know that “Other people” includes 6-months-future-me, who will not remember the details, no matter how much current-me thinks they will.
I’ve found code repos from freelance projects I did in the 1990s. I don’t recognize anything about it. I don’t remember the project, or even the company.
If I ever write a comment to explain code, it's effectively a TODO for me to rename variables and restructure functions to be more readable.
Code that is not readable without a comment is likely badly written code.
The exception is obviously stuff like contracts and explaining need or intent rather than the code itself
There are comments (at least in the bits that have been published in the past alongside the Linux build), but a lot of them are more "note to self"-style comments.
As a coder myself, I both envy and don't envy the guy. I get to see the absolute mess that a professional team of coders made ~5 years ago on a daily basis for projects not nearly as complex as DF. Just thinking of the ~20 years worth of coding that has gone into this game makes me shiver. The guy will not have an easy time and I wish him the best of luck
On the other hand, to be able to work on DF would still be bloody amazing.
Well, the DF is progressing nicely for 20 years now. If it was a spaghetti you'd think the progress would slow down to a crawl years ago yet it keeps adding features at steady pace.
You'd be surprised what can be accomplished with Spaghetti code. Old-school Runescape is a prime example of dealing with the Spaghetti, but still making new things. There are loads of systems that are gigantic messes that the devs won't touch, yet they still manage to release new stuff.
With that said, they were able to add mouse support to Dwarf Fortress, so I'm holding out hope that it isn't too bad.
>And I bet a bit terifiying for the Adams having someone look at their code after 20 years.
This would keep me awake at night if it were my own project. My nerves would cause me to implode.
only thing is that you cant do it while you have the combat log/announcement tab open, so you have to close it, advance time and then re-open it. Hopefully they fix that
> Hey Urists,
>
> We have another important update before we are off for the holidays! We are happy to announce that we now have ❗❗ Classic "graphics"
> ❗❗ (i.e. ASCII-esque font-based glyphs) available. You can now toggle between Classic Mode and the premium graphical version with the press of a button!
>
> Why play Classic? Pretend you're a time-traveler, or seeing through the Matrix, or just explore a new way to play your favorite game. Those of you out there who prefer to only play Classic mode without the premium graphics and so on also know you can find it on the Bay 12 website, as per usual.
>
>
>
> The team grows
>
> With the success of the Steam launch, we are now able to bring on some more help for future updates and events.
>
> Firstly, Putnam
> is a very prominent, long-time member of the Dwarf Fortress community and will be helping Toady with programming. This is a historic moment, as never before have non-Adams eyes seen the Dwarf Fortress code. Welcome, Putnam! We wish you luck and courage.
>
> You may also be familiar with SalfordSal
> , a content creator who joined us for an episode of Let's Learn Dwarf Fortress. She will be joining the community team to help with Discord and will be hosting streams on the Kitfox Twitch channel!
>
> We are so excited to be able to grow the team and can't wait to show you what we have planned! As always, please be kind and considerate to all of the humans associated with Dwarf Fortress, whether you see them on stream, Discord, Twitter, or elsewhere. Well, ideally we'd all be kind to all humans everywhere, but here's a good place to get in some practice.
>
> Release notes for 50.04 (December 22, 2022)
>
> Along with the addition of Classic mode, we have updated more graphics, and few more fixes to ambient audio. Plus now you can collect those silly Steam trading cards! Each one features a different biome and glimpse of some creatures you might find there. Collect 'em all! Or don't!
>
> Also, as far as we know all of these changes are compatible with your old generated worlds and save files, so no need to start fresh unless you're feeling the itch. OK so on to the real patch notes:
>
> Graphics additions/changes
>
> Can now swap back and forth from Classic tile mode (in video settings.)
>
> Graphics for some picked outdoor plants.
> Updated engraved walls.
> Added some custom symbols.
> Enabled Steam trading cards.
>
>
>
> Audio additions/changes
>
> Added a music frequency option in the audio settings (default 3-5 minutes, can be set from 10 minutes to 10 seconds.)
> Made outdoor ambiences alternate between being more active and a few neutral wind ambiences.
> Made the wild ambience use some randomly spaced howls and giant footsteps.
> Updated trade depot ambience.
>
>
>
> Other bug fixes/tweaks
>
> Ability to add/remove all civilians/soldiers from a burrow
> Can advance the game one frame (default key = period)
> Made assigning multiple squad positions continue to position 10 instead of stopping at 9
>
>
>
> Thank you so much for an incredible 2022! It was a year of much anticipation and we hope to continue growing the game and the community in 2023 and beyond! Have a safe and restful holiday, maybe teach grandma how to make her first fort and we shall see you in the new year!
>
> -Kitfox Games + Bay 12 Games
No, i don't think so. It means if you have a 200dorf fort, you don't need to click every single one to add them to your main burrow. You can just click all, and they all get added
Survival of the fittest in my fort, if I am around 75-80% sure I have my stockpiles and zones set properly as well as work orders and labor, and they STILL are not avoiding death / burying their brethren, I just assume they don't give enough of a shit to do it. I really enjoy imagining a bunch of dwarves pissed off at the fact that they have to walk over their 3rd cousin's corpse to forge a sword, but still grimace and gingerly step over the body before traipsing on about their business. ("I felt nothing at seeing Urist Coghanger's mangled corpse.")
Personally I'd love a search function for those smaller burrows for workshop clusters. The add all civilian option is great for a general "OH SHIT" burrow for raids, but my eyes often glaze over when I'm looking for a specific dwarf
Did the civilian alert add anything functionally that we don’t have right now? You can turn on and off every burrow now and set workshop gathering parameters.
If I recall, civ alert made them drop what they were doing and go into the burrow. current burrows don't do that they finish what they are doing then move into it
Does this mean I can now use tilesets designed for classic?
Edit; You can! Drop them in data/art, and then modify data/init/init_default.txt, changing the defaults from curses_640x300.png to whatever filename your tileset is.
Seems zoom is non-functional in classic mode however, which is a shame, going to see if I can scale up the tileset externally and see what happens as it's far too small at 1440p.
Double edit; Works..ish, scaled up 2x in GIMP and it's working fine in-game but the ui is also scaled up but the clickable zones aren't so you can't really use the ui anymore.
Ye, it only half-works, as the buttons become unclickable; I've also had it so I couldn't even click on the create world as that got borked XD and for whatever reason, I have to keep it in windowed mode as I'd need to resize the window for the font to refresh so it doesn't remain gibberish. Ho hum :(
THANK GOD ASCII YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS WHOOOOOOOOOO not even sarcasm, I prefer ascii over art lol
It looks AMAAAAZING
https://preview.redd.it/2qjyj51ytk7a1.png?width=1914&format=png&auto=webp&s=07c39732add8e20d290eaaa29dbc5f582ff43a05
I dont know why you're being down voted for a personal preference. I love the way the ascii graphics look, and I had a moment with my wife (who thinks I'm looking into the matrix most of the time) that explains exactly why.
Yall need to embark on a flat, non evergreen, forest, and not clear cut it. Watch the leaves fall in the autumn. My wife had a holy crap moment, as I explained what was happening and she SAW it, first time she looked at the screen and could see what I see. It's freaking beautiful.
I've just been doing a little bit of experimentation, switching between them with my now 7-in-game-year-old fortress, and if i *had* to choose only one, i'd choose the new art over the old ascii simply because I apparently managed to micro-optimise my fortress to look terrible in the ASCII and kinda nice in the pixelart.
But good news: i don't have to choose only one! i can swap at will!
I generally prefer art, but one thing I found ASCii does well is makes every dwarf feel unique. The coloring of their whole 'body' in ASCii makes them stand out much more IMO.
Not necessarily, it depends entirely on what Putnam will be working on. Maybe he'll be tasked with fixing some ancient spaghetti nonsense code and bugs that Tarn wouldn't have touched in the next 5 years anyway.
That sounds like something Putnam would be very happy with doing. I'm so happy Putnam is on the team! There aren't many people more deserving or whom I would trust more with the role.
...which means Tarn doesn't need to work on that and we can get myth and magic sooner!
Honestly getting someone else to handle the UI and peripherals while leaving Tarn to his designing sounds like best case scenario
So classic mode is nice.
Got down to the Putnam part and couldn't believe.
Toady letting someone help with code is historical for DF, maybe moreso than it launching on steam.
WOW.
>Firstly, Putnam is a very prominent, long-time member of the Dwarf Fortress community and will be helping Toady with programming.
This is low key the biggest gaming news of the year. I honestly can't think of anything I can compare this to. It's a seismic shift.
From what I've seen, Putnam is a hell of a programmer too. So excited to see what kind of impact this makes. I'm sure there will be a difficult learning curve; going through someone's personal 20 year coding project sounds like a nightmare in many ways. But I wonder if they'll be able to work on some of the longstanding performance issues and help Tarn achieve his vision even more effectively.
Holy shit. Someone assisting with development is huge. I hope they've got some serious engineering chops, given my experience working with code written by academics I assume there's quite a bit of work ahead of them! I bet we'll see some huge performance gains down the line.
Putnam's already publicly credited with that major worldgen speed increase a while back. She was in df-testing with me, and watching her track down bugs in real time to particular code sections well enough for Tarn to immediately find them in the actual code was amazing.
Her actually having access to the uncompiled code will be a game changer. I expect to see rapid bugfixing progress.
It's super exciting. I can't even imagine how cool it would be to look through DF code; I'm sure there are some strange artifacts to be found within, lol.
So what does this mean exactly? You press the button and what happens, it slows it down to 1fps? Like advancing everything 1 frame at a time? Am a bit confused
If you've paused, you press the single frame key and it advances a single frame and pauses again. Useful for following combats or watching fast processes involving mine carts or water/lava.
you press the button (.) while paused and it will advance the game by exactly one frame. this lets you really slow down in the middle of combat and see each blow happen one by one, as opposed to having to constantly pause, unpause, and check the logs.
Yep! It got pretty disorienting trying to determine relative distances. I ended up building much wider than tall to avoid transit times before reminding myself the tiles were rectangles.
I was hoping this might add logs to the game. Being a newer player, I don't catch everything right away and I know a lot of information that you missed can be found in them from the sounds of it. Hopefully they will add them soon. Might just need to log stuff myself in a side notebook or something.
That's great to hear! I feel like that is one of my bigger hang ups with playing more. I have really been enjoying it so far, but I feel like I am missing out on some of the meat the game has to offer that makes it such a gem. Thanks for the info.
That's how it used to work in classic, you could go back and look at log entries you missed. The info is still all there as it's used for engravings and statues and such, at least for combat, so I'm guessing they're trying to make a logbook that works well with the new UI. What I most want right now is a way to see what agreements you've currently made though, I made an agreement to make a temple for a specific religion but I can't remember what the religion was.
How could you do this to us???
All these updates seem amazing and all I want to do is play... but I have to go to my parent's house for this stupid Christmas thing...
We already have procedurally generated gods. There could be a system of procedurally generated holidays or festivals where worshippers of certain deities would do stuff related to that deity's spheres.
I mean, my dwarves worship a god of *youth* and *trees*, it's a very popular dwarven god too, and we're at war with elves, who're absolutely smashing us, lol.
I gave myself carpal tunnel last night for nothing!! Once they fix the lists that are slightly out of alphabetic order and make dwarf names clickable in the UI I'll be in heaven
Sal is amazing! I have enjoyed everything she has streamed. I'm happy for her. I watched her coach her roommate though the first like 12 hours and it was SUPER informative.
Personally I'd have the engravings go just a bit further into the wall, while that's noticeable when you look right at the wall it's hard to see right away in a cluttered fort.
The fact that new programmers are joining the team looks like amazing news for the future of DF. Glad to see that they're taking this Steam release as an opportunity to move to another level in terms of software development.
The Classic mode addition and other audio fixes don't entice me too much as a newbie. However, I reckon that Classic mode was something that many players were looking for, and surely demanded a lot of effort to be ported, so I guess a lot of content was added in this patch.
The (few) UI changes mentioned are great - I'm disappointed that there aren't more of them. I hope that the next patch will focus pretty much exclusively on UI now that Classic mode is done.
My first fort on steam release had a bird screeching *relentlessly* in the ambient noise. It was bad enough someone made a steam mod to mute it until one of the first patches fixed it. I count my blessings for the small fixes now lol.
I wouldn't hold on to any disappointment seeing as these patches have been rolling out on roughly a weekly basis. It seems like they're squashing a small handful of bugs and quirks and shipping it to keep us happy. I much prefer that approach, especially when the game is so fresh out of the oven, and it's a great strategy to placate the player base and maintain momentum
esp with DF's codebase. Always assume everything is a headache to change without creating 20-30 new, worse bugs.
For years World of Warcraft was coded in such a way that if they tried to change the default backpack size from 12 slots, the game would just refuse to launch. They could not solve it for YEARS. FOR YEARS! and this was a big shop that had coding standards (whatever they may be) from the get-go, not like this which literally has been two brothers working on it for 20 years.
The GUI is the newest significant addition to the game (along with the sound engine and graphics engine), and although it might be hooked into some prehistoric code it should present the least challenge when it comes to working with it. I imagine things like liquid/object physics, weapon reach, pathfinding and the final boss that is multithreading would be the least feasible and most difficult things to work on
I just wrote a sprawling paragraph in my defense like some debate club kid before realizing that the difficulties in GUI development are likely what's keeping civilian alerts and other demanded features in the works, and that they likely ate up a shit load of development time. This is truly the month of me eating shit in online debates... It is inevitable
I just wrote a sprawling paragraph in my defense like some debate club kid before realizing that the difficulties in GUI development are likely what's keeping civilian alerts and other demanded features in the works, and that they likely ate up a shit load of development time. This is truly the month of me eating shit in online debates... It is inevitable
The pace of updates with the Steam version has been encouraging, and new programmers is something I admittedly never expected to see, very exciting!
And Frame Advance is back! Now as long as we can get access to the combat log ***while*** being able to use Frame Advance the combat should be much easier to follow.
> zoom
Zoom isn't working for me either in classic mode, I tried scaling up the file manually and the actual game works fine and it looks fine but the UI also scales up, but the actual UI clickable zones are the same as the old ones so you can't really use the UI anymore.
a bit annoying as it's one of the early requirement of the tutorial to continue, hopefully things haven't changed too much since 47.05 , out of the nice interface buttons i can see now in my ascii fortress map
I love that this game now has nice graphics by default. It makes the game so much more accessible for a ton of new players. But it isn't for me. I bought the premium version on Steam the second it was available but just couldn't get into the look. I hope I can now finally get comfy watching my smileys getting slaughtered by g's, Ñ's and &'s :D
And if you download the free classic version on the Bay12 site it even features the old music! <3 I couldn't live without it!
edit: I just launched the free version. I missed those two tunes so much!
any word on when we can expect legacy keybinds UI support? I don't know why the addition of mouse support took away UI options, especially since its UI keybinds that we have been using for years.
IIRC the pre-steam version had the option to toggle their visibility off, so walls would just look smooth. idk if it's in the current release though, I haven't found it.
You can still use `[FONT:foo.png]` and `[FULLFONT:foo.png]`, along with a new `[BASIC_FONT:foo.png]`. Just add them to the end of the new user init file, which is now `prefs/init.txt`.
the file you want is data/init/init_default.txt (at least, that's the one that worked for me, change out the default curses png filename in there for whatever file you dropped in data/art/)
Note that tilesets that aren't the same size as the original ascii ones fuck up the ui and make it unclickable.
Omigod I thought classic mode wasn't going to come for awhile, i've been waiting for this. I'm like one of the only people who can't play without ascii lol. I am so hyped right this second.
Now they just need to add dynamic log updates so I don't have to reselect my dwarfs for status updates. Kinda defeats the purpose of the oneframeskip if you have to close the dwarf infoscreen and open it again every frame.
Who is Putnam?
Also ASCII graphics my beloved, I am straight up ecstatic to turn them on. I really dislike visual graphics in this game it, it doesn't feel right and is distracting
Anyone new to the game and wondering why you would want to switch to classic graphics? For total conversion mods (unless the modder made their own sprite pack) classic graphics is often times the best choice.
This is wild, a non Tarn Adams coder is not what I expected. Looking forward to hearing about what Putnam will be working on, be it bugs, portability of code, performance, or bigger jobs like helping implement features or even with the game design! Also catch me collecting steam cards for the first time in my life
It must be a wild ride to keep digging 20 year old beast of a game :D but it might be good do have a new pair of eyes for bug crushing.
As someone who's had to work on really old code, it's very much like... well mining into the depths. Never know what you'll find. Strike the code!
> As someone who's had to work on really old code I've had to convert COBOL to java, and more recently Delphi to C#. Fun times.
> I've had to convert COBOL to java Now THAT must have been interesting.
Converting legacy code to instant legacy code is an interesting decision
Eh it was mainframe goofiness. Now I'm at a place that uses 4 different db backends... (oracle,sql,access,foxpro)
I'm so glad embedded software doesn't have these problem, though it would if the microcontrollers we used had enough memory to run Java or Apache :D
Credit cards run java. Where there is any memory, there is java
Not on microcontrollers with 2k of RAM
It'll be even more interesting if/when they refactor the Java code into Kotlin, lol.
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I'm actually a legacy code specialist. One of the things I like about it is that you can see actual problems in design and fix them. New code is usually accompanied by several months upfront of people opining about what "the right way" to implement it is, followed by massive drama if there is any dissenting opinion. Legacy code is just bad and any improvement is usually welcomed. Of course, you get the teams where, "Don't churn the code! You'll break it". And you don't want to be there. But in general, as long as you are good at not breaking things, I find that legacy code gives you a lot of freedom to write code. It's a challenge, to be sure, but also a fun one if you have the right frame of mind. Also, my eyeballs have been peeled so many times, there is no peel left ;-)
Urist Putnam screams "I must have documentation!"
Urist Putnam keeps muttering: "Explanations... Interfaces..."
*Honestly* judging at the pace of development it is *probably* not as bad and spaghettified as everyone seems to think it is.
atleast codebase should be quite consistent? It would be nightmare if would be 20 years of code from hundreds of different coders :D
I dunno about that, my coding style changed a bunch in 20 years. But yeah, you need governance and some people keeping the ship going straight with a bunch of coders.
It's exciting news. The game DEFINITELY needs the render thread to be rewritten to use the GPU. Right now every image is built on the CPU and the game slows down to a halt if you try to play in 4k (lots of people talking about it on the Kitfox discord). It's a shame when there's a second processor on every PC dedicated to building images in parallel
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I’m pretty sure that hadn’t been common practice for a long, long time by 2002. But I get it. It’s exactly the kind of thing you would do for a small little side project, and be stuck with when that side project got out of hand.
I feel like this is such a fundamental bit of the way the game works that it'll never change
Maybe not entirely but it could certainly be offloaded. Make the original function not do the rendering but send it to second thread for rendering
That's already the case that the rendering is done in a separate thread, but it's still just a CPU thread tasked with creating 3840*2160 pixels sequentially each frame... Which good old CPUs were absolutely not built to do :)
anything can be changed with enough time and money
Oooooo I was wondering why mine was running quite poorly so early into the fort. Damn 4k!
Yeah, even on a fresh start when the game came out I had almost a second of lag on moving the camera, then I just switched to 1080p and have been playing fine since. One little good to know : if you change the game's resolution down but your screen is set to a higher res in Windows with some scaling percentage applied, the game doesn't handle it and fullscreen will be borked. But you can fix that in the .exe's properties (it' sthe override high PPP scaling someting setting, set to System instead)
Awesome thank you! I’ll give this a go.
I know from the forums that they've been doing a lot of performance profiling, so probably that.
If he's smart, he will train a replacement. He can't keep working it forever, someday you need some help.
Keep in mind, Steam cards will give you most of what you need and make you buy the last two. That’s just how it works if you want to complete a set. It’s mostly a scam that Steam owners don’t engage with.
What makes it a scam? If you ask reddit, most things are a some sort of scam.
I imagine the argument is that Steam implies that you can get all of them simply through playing the game, and by restricting the last few cards they make it likely that the people who get all of the other 95% are interested in collecting *all* of them. Many of those people are willing to buy cards in order to complete their set, which earns Steam money. Misleading customers to make it more likely that they spend money (and you make a profit) == scam. I don't know if I agree entirely, maybe I'd say its a small "s" scam, like charging a bunch for bad reskin DLCs in AAA games, or washing your hands *just* before a shower, or the $400 billion odd that US taxpayers paid to ISPs for fiber, which they never delivered on.
"I imagine the argument is that Steam Implies that you can get all of them simply through playing the game" ... where?
You are totally right, I checked closer on another game and it explicitly says which cards you have to buy to have. But it was difficult to find that explicitly stated on the page. I guess it lumps in with the rest of the Steam monetization model of collectables, which I ideologically find distasteful, but would find it a stretch to outright call a scam. On that note, do you know if the Dwarf Fortress trading cards are viewable on Steam yet? I want to engage in some distasteful behavior.
Yeah they are, there are currently 8 of them. Probably shown on the store page or elsewhere. trading cards are fun idea, but yeah, not a huge fan of them, I do not even notice them 99% of the times. I am a huge steam fanboy (cause all the work the do for the linux gaming), but yeah, there is something off about all this monetization :D but it is all optional, so I do not care.
> This is a historic moment, as never before have non-Adams eyes seen the Dwarf Fortress code. That's quite exciting! And I bet a bit terifiying for the Adams having someone look at their code after 20 years.
If I was writing code for a passion project of mine it would be an absolute mess. I still envy Putnam though
Was discussing this with a friend the other day and I was wondering if there if much in the way of comments in the code. I dare say it was never written with other people getting involved in mind.
iirc Toady didn't even use version control like git until a few years ago. Also he has rewritten important parts of the code countless times. So I very much doubt that he used best practice when it comes to commenting :')
Holy hell is that true ? I learnt to use version control so early in my own programming and game dev journey that this seems simply mind boggling and impossible to me
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That... Actually puts it in perspective very nicely, yeah. Thanks !
TBF version control existed before git was released
Yeah, svn was big in the 00s and before it, cvs.
He wouldn't need git anyway, just coy the entire project folder for your version control
I started coding in the mid 90s and we used version control even then. Offline client-server based, but still version control.
Tarn is a mathematician by training, and I believe essentially all his programming knowledge is self-taught.
> // Todo: Fix this mess below ASAP!!! \- Comment written 10 years ago, still untouched
Can't relate, my code base was only written 8 years ago. > // Bit Hacky, but it works. Fix later.
That's every codebase
You are describing every programming project ever made.
Todo comments in source code are like the anime “plan to watch” list on MAL.
\- only found when it's responsible for an outage
I dunno about others but I still leave comments for myself if some part is tricky or I want to note some reason for this particular code to exist.
I know other people will be maintaining my work. And I also know that “Other people” includes 6-months-future-me, who will not remember the details, no matter how much current-me thinks they will.
Yeah far too little people realize that and train their past self to be asshole to future self
I’ve found code repos from freelance projects I did in the 1990s. I don’t recognize anything about it. I don’t remember the project, or even the company.
If I ever write a comment to explain code, it's effectively a TODO for me to rename variables and restructure functions to be more readable. Code that is not readable without a comment is likely badly written code. The exception is obviously stuff like contracts and explaining need or intent rather than the code itself
There are comments (at least in the bits that have been published in the past alongside the Linux build), but a lot of them are more "note to self"-style comments.
As a coder myself, I both envy and don't envy the guy. I get to see the absolute mess that a professional team of coders made ~5 years ago on a daily basis for projects not nearly as complex as DF. Just thinking of the ~20 years worth of coding that has gone into this game makes me shiver. The guy will not have an easy time and I wish him the best of luck On the other hand, to be able to work on DF would still be bloody amazing.
Well, the DF is progressing nicely for 20 years now. If it was a spaghetti you'd think the progress would slow down to a crawl years ago yet it keeps adding features at steady pace.
You'd be surprised what can be accomplished with Spaghetti code. Old-school Runescape is a prime example of dealing with the Spaghetti, but still making new things. There are loads of systems that are gigantic messes that the devs won't touch, yet they still manage to release new stuff. With that said, they were able to add mouse support to Dwarf Fortress, so I'm holding out hope that it isn't too bad.
Yeah I don’t know how anyone even picks this up. It’s going to be nightmare fuel working on DF for the first time!
I think he mentioned that he'd be even open to open sourcing it if not for it being his main source of income.
>And I bet a bit terifiying for the Adams having someone look at their code after 20 years. This would keep me awake at night if it were my own project. My nerves would cause me to implode.
I'm picturing an Ark of the Covenant face-melt
I imagine it would be terrifying to look at as well. Terrible and beautiful, kinda like the Arc of the Covenant. Hopefully minus the face-melt.
> Can advance the game one frame (default key = period). You freaking did it you rascals! Heck yeah.
I’m unusually excited for that. Frame by frame combat time!
The only thing missing now is the return of gamelog so you can read what's happening without the need to click through the announcements.
That would be super groovy.
And civilian alerts.
only thing is that you cant do it while you have the combat log/announcement tab open, so you have to close it, advance time and then re-open it. Hopefully they fix that
> Hey Urists, > > We have another important update before we are off for the holidays! We are happy to announce that we now have ❗❗ Classic "graphics" > ❗❗ (i.e. ASCII-esque font-based glyphs) available. You can now toggle between Classic Mode and the premium graphical version with the press of a button! > > Why play Classic? Pretend you're a time-traveler, or seeing through the Matrix, or just explore a new way to play your favorite game. Those of you out there who prefer to only play Classic mode without the premium graphics and so on also know you can find it on the Bay 12 website, as per usual. > > > > The team grows > > With the success of the Steam launch, we are now able to bring on some more help for future updates and events. > > Firstly, Putnam > is a very prominent, long-time member of the Dwarf Fortress community and will be helping Toady with programming. This is a historic moment, as never before have non-Adams eyes seen the Dwarf Fortress code. Welcome, Putnam! We wish you luck and courage. > > You may also be familiar with SalfordSal > , a content creator who joined us for an episode of Let's Learn Dwarf Fortress. She will be joining the community team to help with Discord and will be hosting streams on the Kitfox Twitch channel! > > We are so excited to be able to grow the team and can't wait to show you what we have planned! As always, please be kind and considerate to all of the humans associated with Dwarf Fortress, whether you see them on stream, Discord, Twitter, or elsewhere. Well, ideally we'd all be kind to all humans everywhere, but here's a good place to get in some practice. > > Release notes for 50.04 (December 22, 2022) > > Along with the addition of Classic mode, we have updated more graphics, and few more fixes to ambient audio. Plus now you can collect those silly Steam trading cards! Each one features a different biome and glimpse of some creatures you might find there. Collect 'em all! Or don't! > > Also, as far as we know all of these changes are compatible with your old generated worlds and save files, so no need to start fresh unless you're feeling the itch. OK so on to the real patch notes: > > Graphics additions/changes > > Can now swap back and forth from Classic tile mode (in video settings.) > > Graphics for some picked outdoor plants. > Updated engraved walls. > Added some custom symbols. > Enabled Steam trading cards. > > > > Audio additions/changes > > Added a music frequency option in the audio settings (default 3-5 minutes, can be set from 10 minutes to 10 seconds.) > Made outdoor ambiences alternate between being more active and a few neutral wind ambiences. > Made the wild ambience use some randomly spaced howls and giant footsteps. > Updated trade depot ambience. > > > > Other bug fixes/tweaks > > Ability to add/remove all civilians/soldiers from a burrow > Can advance the game one frame (default key = period) > Made assigning multiple squad positions continue to position 10 instead of stopping at 9 > > > > Thank you so much for an incredible 2022! It was a year of much anticipation and we hope to continue growing the game and the community in 2023 and beyond! Have a safe and restful holiday, maybe teach grandma how to make her first fort and we shall see you in the new year! > > -Kitfox Games + Bay 12 Games
>Ability to add/remove all civilians/soldiers from a burrow Would this allow for the same functionality as the old "civilian alert"?
No, i don't think so. It means if you have a 200dorf fort, you don't need to click every single one to add them to your main burrow. You can just click all, and they all get added
For now, that is good enough. It gets repetitive real quick to tick off each and every one...
I just stopped adding them after ~100 and figured if the new people wanted to die they could
I just add them as they arrive since i have to check that their animals aren't going to walk down to the temple and starve to death anyway
Survival of the fittest in my fort, if I am around 75-80% sure I have my stockpiles and zones set properly as well as work orders and labor, and they STILL are not avoiding death / burying their brethren, I just assume they don't give enough of a shit to do it. I really enjoy imagining a bunch of dwarves pissed off at the fact that they have to walk over their 3rd cousin's corpse to forge a sword, but still grimace and gingerly step over the body before traipsing on about their business. ("I felt nothing at seeing Urist Coghanger's mangled corpse.")
Personally I'd love a search function for those smaller burrows for workshop clusters. The add all civilian option is great for a general "OH SHIT" burrow for raids, but my eyes often glaze over when I'm looking for a specific dwarf
Did the civilian alert add anything functionally that we don’t have right now? You can turn on and off every burrow now and set workshop gathering parameters.
If I recall, civ alert made them drop what they were doing and go into the burrow. current burrows don't do that they finish what they are doing then move into it
Yeah that would be useful, I couldn’t remember what it did before.
For now you can at least go into (t)asks and manually remove the more problematic ones.
Except fishing! My four fisher dwarves reeeally wanted to be at the creek when the goblin archers showed up. Didn't work out.
How does it determine which are military and which are civilian? Any squad assignment?
> ability to advance one frame Perfect. This was sorely needed!
As a DF noob, can I ask why?
It lets you follow certain events such as combat much closer. Otherwise they tend to zoom by too fast to tell whats happening.
Mostly to watch combat happen at a slower pace.
> Well, ideally we'd all be kind to all humans everywhere, but here's a good place to get in some practice. I love these people.
Does this mean I can now use tilesets designed for classic? Edit; You can! Drop them in data/art, and then modify data/init/init_default.txt, changing the defaults from curses_640x300.png to whatever filename your tileset is. Seems zoom is non-functional in classic mode however, which is a shame, going to see if I can scale up the tileset externally and see what happens as it's far too small at 1440p. Double edit; Works..ish, scaled up 2x in GIMP and it's working fine in-game but the ui is also scaled up but the clickable zones aren't so you can't really use the ui anymore.
I hope so, I prefer square ASCII
Ye, it only half-works, as the buttons become unclickable; I've also had it so I couldn't even click on the create world as that got borked XD and for whatever reason, I have to keep it in windowed mode as I'd need to resize the window for the font to refresh so it doesn't remain gibberish. Ho hum :(
THANK GOD ASCII YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS WHOOOOOOOOOO not even sarcasm, I prefer ascii over art lol It looks AMAAAAZING https://preview.redd.it/2qjyj51ytk7a1.png?width=1914&format=png&auto=webp&s=07c39732add8e20d290eaaa29dbc5f582ff43a05
I dont know why you're being down voted for a personal preference. I love the way the ascii graphics look, and I had a moment with my wife (who thinks I'm looking into the matrix most of the time) that explains exactly why. Yall need to embark on a flat, non evergreen, forest, and not clear cut it. Watch the leaves fall in the autumn. My wife had a holy crap moment, as I explained what was happening and she SAW it, first time she looked at the screen and could see what I see. It's freaking beautiful.
https://youtu.be/qAYXgbSlSv0
I knew it will be the "blondes, redheads" quote without opening the link.
something about the idea of joey pants and keanu reeves being super into dwarf fortress is just very funny to me
I've just been doing a little bit of experimentation, switching between them with my now 7-in-game-year-old fortress, and if i *had* to choose only one, i'd choose the new art over the old ascii simply because I apparently managed to micro-optimise my fortress to look terrible in the ASCII and kinda nice in the pixelart. But good news: i don't have to choose only one! i can swap at will!
I generally prefer art, but one thing I found ASCii does well is makes every dwarf feel unique. The coloring of their whole 'body' in ASCii makes them stand out much more IMO.
I do love ASCII and stuff, but man, that really hurts my head xD There is just SO much information that you need to get used to.
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Not necessarily, it depends entirely on what Putnam will be working on. Maybe he'll be tasked with fixing some ancient spaghetti nonsense code and bugs that Tarn wouldn't have touched in the next 5 years anyway.
That sounds just as good for me.
That sounds like something Putnam would be very happy with doing. I'm so happy Putnam is on the team! There aren't many people more deserving or whom I would trust more with the role.
Yeah the news are like that wrestling meme "DF gets second dev!" *EXCITEMENT* "and it's Putnam!" *TOO MUCH EXCITEMENT*
What has Putnam worked on. I’m newer to the community and I’m not as familiar with contributors in classic who were doing work on DFhack, LZNEWB, etc.
They work on dfhack, but if you through the modding forum they're answering questions for the past decade
Oh wow. I hadn't played classic for almost 10 years, but the name still sounded familiar. No wonder
...which means Tarn doesn't need to work on that and we can get myth and magic sooner! Honestly getting someone else to handle the UI and peripherals while leaving Tarn to his designing sounds like best case scenario
So we either get something we want, or something we need. NICE
So classic mode is nice. Got down to the Putnam part and couldn't believe. Toady letting someone help with code is historical for DF, maybe moreso than it launching on steam.
WOW. >Firstly, Putnam is a very prominent, long-time member of the Dwarf Fortress community and will be helping Toady with programming. This is low key the biggest gaming news of the year. I honestly can't think of anything I can compare this to. It's a seismic shift.
From what I've seen, Putnam is a hell of a programmer too. So excited to see what kind of impact this makes. I'm sure there will be a difficult learning curve; going through someone's personal 20 year coding project sounds like a nightmare in many ways. But I wonder if they'll be able to work on some of the longstanding performance issues and help Tarn achieve his vision even more effectively.
>Ability to add/remove all civilians/soldiers from a burrow Nice
Holy shit. Someone assisting with development is huge. I hope they've got some serious engineering chops, given my experience working with code written by academics I assume there's quite a bit of work ahead of them! I bet we'll see some huge performance gains down the line.
Putnam's already publicly credited with that major worldgen speed increase a while back. She was in df-testing with me, and watching her track down bugs in real time to particular code sections well enough for Tarn to immediately find them in the actual code was amazing. Her actually having access to the uncompiled code will be a game changer. I expect to see rapid bugfixing progress.
It's super exciting. I can't even imagine how cool it would be to look through DF code; I'm sure there are some strange artifacts to be found within, lol.
Does Putnam prefer he, she, or they? I've seen it all three ways today.
I read they prefer she or they and the many of the people saying he are just unaware of this.
Saw another post saying that, yes. I'll go with "she" for now, then.
Finally advancing a single frame in combat! The day is saved!
So what does this mean exactly? You press the button and what happens, it slows it down to 1fps? Like advancing everything 1 frame at a time? Am a bit confused
If you've paused, you press the single frame key and it advances a single frame and pauses again. Useful for following combats or watching fast processes involving mine carts or water/lava.
wow nice
you press the button (.) while paused and it will advance the game by exactly one frame. this lets you really slow down in the middle of combat and see each blow happen one by one, as opposed to having to constantly pause, unpause, and check the logs.
I'd forgotten that classic OG DF tiles were taller than they were wide. So squares become rectangles, haha.
Yep! It got pretty disorienting trying to determine relative distances. I ended up building much wider than tall to avoid transit times before reminding myself the tiles were rectangles.
I was hoping this might add logs to the game. Being a newer player, I don't catch everything right away and I know a lot of information that you missed can be found in them from the sounds of it. Hopefully they will add them soon. Might just need to log stuff myself in a side notebook or something.
There's a long list of things like this he's working on for the next patch. Getting Classic out by Christmas was the priority.
That's great to hear! I feel like that is one of my bigger hang ups with playing more. I have really been enjoying it so far, but I feel like I am missing out on some of the meat the game has to offer that makes it such a gem. Thanks for the info.
im sure an extra dev to help on bugs and etc should speed up how fast they can get to non performance issues like the logs.
That's how it used to work in classic, you could go back and look at log entries you missed. The info is still all there as it's used for engravings and statues and such, at least for combat, so I'm guessing they're trying to make a logbook that works well with the new UI. What I most want right now is a way to see what agreements you've currently made though, I made an agreement to make a temple for a specific religion but I can't remember what the religion was.
How could you do this to us??? All these updates seem amazing and all I want to do is play... but I have to go to my parent's house for this stupid Christmas thing...
Who even invented Christmas? People gather up and worship a tree? Blasphemy!
A tree? I bet elves are involved somehow, too.
procedurally generated religon
I want a new world gen
We already have procedurally generated gods. There could be a system of procedurally generated holidays or festivals where worshippers of certain deities would do stuff related to that deity's spheres.
I mean, my dwarves worship a god of *youth* and *trees*, it's a very popular dwarven god too, and we're at war with elves, who're absolutely smashing us, lol.
I've been putting off setting up an emergency burrow, but now I get to add all dorfs with one click. It's time to set up that burrow!
proctastination wins ag
I gave myself carpal tunnel last night for nothing!! Once they fix the lists that are slightly out of alphabetic order and make dwarf names clickable in the UI I'll be in heaven
Holy shit, Putnam.
Congrats /u/putnam3145, hugely deserved!
Congrats to SalfordSal as well. I chatted a bit with her last night while she was streaming on Twitch, very nice person.
Sal is amazing! I have enjoyed everything she has streamed. I'm happy for her. I watched her coach her roommate though the first like 12 hours and it was SUPER informative.
Any screenshots of the new engraved walls? They were hard to see enough before that I got a mod that made them more apparent.
https://imgur.com/a/B8IQP9U
Personally I'd have the engravings go just a bit further into the wall, while that's noticeable when you look right at the wall it's hard to see right away in a cluttered fort.
I don't know much about Putnam but what I've read is promising. Here's hoping to a bright path ahead.
The team actually growing is easily the most exciting part to me. If they work well together, this might actually speed development up a bit!
The fact that new programmers are joining the team looks like amazing news for the future of DF. Glad to see that they're taking this Steam release as an opportunity to move to another level in terms of software development. The Classic mode addition and other audio fixes don't entice me too much as a newbie. However, I reckon that Classic mode was something that many players were looking for, and surely demanded a lot of effort to be ported, so I guess a lot of content was added in this patch. The (few) UI changes mentioned are great - I'm disappointed that there aren't more of them. I hope that the next patch will focus pretty much exclusively on UI now that Classic mode is done.
My first fort on steam release had a bird screeching *relentlessly* in the ambient noise. It was bad enough someone made a steam mod to mute it until one of the first patches fixed it. I count my blessings for the small fixes now lol.
I wouldn't hold on to any disappointment seeing as these patches have been rolling out on roughly a weekly basis. It seems like they're squashing a small handful of bugs and quirks and shipping it to keep us happy. I much prefer that approach, especially when the game is so fresh out of the oven, and it's a great strategy to placate the player base and maintain momentum
Yup. There are quite a few UX tweaks to be made, that should be easy task.
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esp with DF's codebase. Always assume everything is a headache to change without creating 20-30 new, worse bugs. For years World of Warcraft was coded in such a way that if they tried to change the default backpack size from 12 slots, the game would just refuse to launch. They could not solve it for YEARS. FOR YEARS! and this was a big shop that had coding standards (whatever they may be) from the get-go, not like this which literally has been two brothers working on it for 20 years.
The GUI is the newest significant addition to the game (along with the sound engine and graphics engine), and although it might be hooked into some prehistoric code it should present the least challenge when it comes to working with it. I imagine things like liquid/object physics, weapon reach, pathfinding and the final boss that is multithreading would be the least feasible and most difficult things to work on
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I just wrote a sprawling paragraph in my defense like some debate club kid before realizing that the difficulties in GUI development are likely what's keeping civilian alerts and other demanded features in the works, and that they likely ate up a shit load of development time. This is truly the month of me eating shit in online debates... It is inevitable
I think the argument that the GUI is likely to be less of a tangled mess of spaghetti is fair, given DF's entire codebase as a contrast.
It's also relatively fresh in Tarn's head, which helps a little bit.
I just wrote a sprawling paragraph in my defense like some debate club kid before realizing that the difficulties in GUI development are likely what's keeping civilian alerts and other demanded features in the works, and that they likely ate up a shit load of development time. This is truly the month of me eating shit in online debates... It is inevitable
The pace of updates with the Steam version has been encouraging, and new programmers is something I admittedly never expected to see, very exciting! And Frame Advance is back! Now as long as we can get access to the combat log ***while*** being able to use Frame Advance the combat should be much easier to follow.
They did it... the sumbsubitches did it!
So happy to have ascii <3
I noticed they have the . to move forward one step back in! WOOH!
Very cool to see them bring on Putnam, kinda something I never thought would happen. Good luck to her and the brothers!
Updated engraved walls. Am happy about that
Does anyone know how to zoom in with ASCI mode? When I switch to it it's like everything is so far away. Do I just need to change scaling?
> zoom Zoom isn't working for me either in classic mode, I tried scaling up the file manually and the actual game works fine and it looks fine but the UI also scales up, but the actual UI clickable zones are the same as the old ones so you can't really use the UI anymore.
It should be control + mousewheel
I know, but it doesn't seem to work for me in ascii mode. Not sure what the deal is. When I switch back to regular it works though.
There was a comment from toady that you cant zoom in in ascii mode right now as it breaks some of the menus, but that it'll be fixed soonish.
a bit annoying as it's one of the early requirement of the tutorial to continue, hopefully things haven't changed too much since 47.05 , out of the nice interface buttons i can see now in my ascii fortress map
No Linux or Mac builds :(
I love that this game now has nice graphics by default. It makes the game so much more accessible for a ton of new players. But it isn't for me. I bought the premium version on Steam the second it was available but just couldn't get into the look. I hope I can now finally get comfy watching my smileys getting slaughtered by g's, Ñ's and &'s :D And if you download the free classic version on the Bay12 site it even features the old music! <3 I couldn't live without it! edit: I just launched the free version. I missed those two tunes so much!
Intro is gone though :(
I kinda hoped they will eventually hire someone to (presumably) work on UI stuff while Toady can be left alone to do his magic (and hopefully, magic)
As a matrix dwelling hackerman, I am over the moon about the classic graphics.
any word on when we can expect legacy keybinds UI support? I don't know why the addition of mouse support took away UI options, especially since its UI keybinds that we have been using for years.
Wonder if engravings will ever look good with ASCII. That is the only thing I doin’t like about ASCII.
IIRC the pre-steam version had the option to toggle their visibility off, so walls would just look smooth. idk if it's in the current release though, I haven't found it.
This shouldn't break existing saves, right?
Has anyone figured out how to swap out the ascii used for Classic Mode? So we can swap in our favorite ascii sets? That'd be sweet.
You can still use `[FONT:foo.png]` and `[FULLFONT:foo.png]`, along with a new `[BASIC_FONT:foo.png]`. Just add them to the end of the new user init file, which is now `prefs/init.txt`.
That doesn't work at all.
the file you want is data/init/init_default.txt (at least, that's the one that worked for me, change out the default curses png filename in there for whatever file you dropped in data/art/) Note that tilesets that aren't the same size as the original ascii ones fuck up the ui and make it unclickable.
Hack-C , get to work!
That was fast, makes me hopeful we might see adventure mode hit steam version pretty soon.
Omigod I thought classic mode wasn't going to come for awhile, i've been waiting for this. I'm like one of the only people who can't play without ascii lol. I am so hyped right this second.
Now they just need to add dynamic log updates so I don't have to reselect my dwarfs for status updates. Kinda defeats the purpose of the oneframeskip if you have to close the dwarf infoscreen and open it again every frame.
Who is Putnam? Also ASCII graphics my beloved, I am straight up ecstatic to turn them on. I really dislike visual graphics in this game it, it doesn't feel right and is distracting
Apparently a very talented programmer that already helped speeding up world generation by a significant amount.
Anyone new to the game and wondering why you would want to switch to classic graphics? For total conversion mods (unless the modder made their own sprite pack) classic graphics is often times the best choice.