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Comment by jplur | Hacker News Reader

Fun to note DF is a massive voxel simulation that displays a 2D slice as ascii. There's some neat third party visualizers that can hook into it's memory to show more. http://i.imgur.com/PTj1QpL.jpg

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Wow. I'd definitely play it with that UI.

I often wonder why games almost never have swappable (or even just scriptable) UI-s that could allow player to use shorthands through UI drudgery.

For many popular roguelike games different tilesets are common. Search for "dwarf fortress tileset".

I'd recommend installing the Lazy Newb Pack instead. It has all the tools and tileset you need preconfigured:

http://lazynewbpack.com/

Now that's what I needed to try this game. Last time I tried, I spent hours and hours downloading tools and never ever got to play the actual game!

Also read some introductions. Some tips like "no aquifer" for your first settlement really ease it.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Quickstart_gui...

> Wow. I'd definitely play it with that UI.

You may want to take a look at Gnomoria (http://gnomoria.com), which is basically "DF clone with sensible voxel graphics". For example: http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/45067176442464...

It's not a scriptable interface, but it is much saner than DF's, with a limited set of consistent hotkeys/toolbars/panels.

Gnomoria is to Dwarf Fortress as Nano is to Vim. It's much easier to learn to play and fun, but it's about 1/10 the magnitude.

DF badly needs that for the key combinations. They're complete nonsense, and in all the time I've spent playing, I've always needed a cheat-sheet for even the things I didn't do all that rarely.

But I'm guessing that's not trivial to implement if you haven't already started doing it that way, and for something like Dwarf Fortress, it would probably be a lot of effort for not a significant amount of result - after all, everyone's already got their cheat sheet...

Nitpick: It's not ASCII. It's simple 2D bitmaps. You can't play DF in a character console.

You can, actually. I'm pretty sure the text output mode should still work.

I wouldn't recommend it, because it's noticeably slower than the SDL or OpenGL renderers, but you can.

I usually play it on a tty, partly because silly decisions, but also I can ssh into a my system that has it installed. I haven't seen a 'noticeable' slow down, but then again most of my forts barely make it to 80 dwarves.

Huh, I didn't know that, thanks. But still, the DF that most people recognize as DF is not an ASCII/text game, even though it looks kinda like it.

Hmmm.... that's always been my chief complaint about DF - that it isn't text/console based ...

I don't want to run DF on my local system - I want my DF world running on a server in a rack somewhere and I connect over screen/SSH when I need to.

Is that a sane use-case with recent DF releases ?

From my experience a few releases ago, the game is completely playable in text mode, over SSH. Like others have said, it's a little slower. I think some key combinations work differently too.

I believe it was originally displaying extended ASCII in a nCurses console, and switched to bitmaps with SDL. The majority of the world is still visualized by those character codes and two colors, but entities can be assigned arbitrary sprites http://i.imgur.com/zuMdqbv.jpg

Actually it was the other way around. It was originally a graphical game which deliberately used a set of bit-mapped tiles drawn from the CP437 (not ASCII!) font found on many old computers. It later grew the option to add in extra graphics, so that a dwarf or a cat is a picture of a dwarf or a cat rather than a colorized letter. In this mode it's actually an OpenGL game, although it doesn't do much with the hardware.

A release or two back it gained a true console mode which you can play on a real terminal.

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