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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

In addition to DF I also play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a venerable (and actively developed!) roguelike with the classic ASCII look, and I'd like to present a counterpoint: once it became possible to play DCSS online using the graphical tiles interface rather than the ASCII look, new players overwhelmingly prefer the graphical. Stats that I have seen indicate >95% choose the graphical tiles.

I myself still play both DCSS and DF in ASCII mode, but it seem reasonable to presume that the reason that old hands like us are fine with the ASCII look is because everyone who wasn't fine with it has self-selected themselves out of the sample. If their goal with the DF Steam release is to bring in new players (and compete with the likes of e.g. Rimworld, whose players are accustomed to graphics), then I see this as a sound decision.

(And of course, seconded that DF's nonsensical command UI is going to continue to stymie their efforts here.)

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Similarly, Cogmind's success is partially because it learned all the hard-won lessons on good game UI of the last decades, plus the importance of a fancy tile-set:

https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/

It does, however, also have the fanciest abstract ASCII graphics I've ever seen.

(the other reason is that it's just a damn good game)

Never knew this game existed. Love the aesthetic.

I think there's a big diference - in DCSS, it's extremely important to know whether that 'g' you're looking at just some random gnoll, or crazy Yiuf. In dwarf fotress, it's pretty rare that it really matters. The ascii graphics are also a bit nicer - especially when it comes to stuff like drawing walls.

I play DCSS in tiles mode and DF in ASCII mode. It's not that I think graphics are a bad usability feature, I just think they're over-emphasized because they're the first thing people see.

Adding graphics to DF means more new players give it a try, but most of them are going to bounce off of the wildly inconsistent menus. It's an acquisition funnel thing; the total players will be incoming players times the percent that are okay with the graphics times the percent that are okay with the menus. My assertion is just that in DF's case the menus have room for a bigger lift, because they're really that bad.

The military menu was always the one which I had difficulty with, training and equipping dwarfs, etc.....

>new players overwhelmingly prefer the graphical

Maybe because they're not used to ASCII look? What are the stats for old players? The tiles version has laughably low information density, I can't imagine playing it for any extended period of time.

> What are the stats for old players?

Well, the stats for old players are subject to survivor bias.

> The tiles version has laughably low information density, I can't imagine playing it for any extended period of time.

I cannot speak for DF specifically, because perhaps the tiles do indeed have bad distinguishability, but from purely an HCI point of view images can contain a lot more visual information than a single character glyph + a color can, so that does not hold up generally.

What may apply to you is that you have already learned to "read" the ASCII mode, and therefore have to spend less conscious effort to make sense of it than of the tiles version, and that it therefore is indeed easier for you to play in.

>images can contain a lot more visual information than a single character glyph + a color can

In any tiled implementation of roguelike, Tiles are way larger than equivalent characters, so clearly in practice they don't.

Humans are very good at recognizing different letters. Images that differ by a few pixels, not so much. At the resolution at which the letters are displayed it's impossible to have an equivalent image that is recognizable in any way.

The fact is that in ascii mode I can see a large chunk of the level, including the entirety of my character's field of view. In tiles version, my screen is not large enough. I have to scroll just to see what my character is currently seeing. How is this better, or playable at all?

I've not liked nethack for over 20 years because of the ASCII look.

I'd say I played a lot of Pixel Dungeon on my phone compared to this.

Not everyone who grew up with DOS games has fond memories. I'm not one to chase the latest 3d graphics, but sometimes new things can be better for some people.

Anecdata, but even for Rouge in the early-mid 80s I had a version of Rogue on our Mac. It had graphical glyphs for everything. I loved that much more than the classic ASCII graphics when I'd dial into my Dad's work computer & play that way

Not to mention the lack of mouse support.

Native yes, but I think DFHack enables that... or DwarfTherapist

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