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Comment by zyxley | Hacker News Reader

I will continue to have no interest in Dwarf Fortress until it has an actual UI instead of whatever insane random combinations of controls the developer felt like adding on any particular day.

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That's one of the reasons why Minecraft is so much bigger than DF.

These guys just don't get it. DF can be SOOOOO much better, yet they are working on adding features instead making the game better.

Here's the difference: DF is Toady's baby, his life work. Toady has the idea for it, and he does not want anyone else working on the code. Minecraft started out very rough around the edges, and only started polishing it once it had already hit it big and he could hire other people.

With a one-developer game, you don't spend time polishing things. You bounce around different areas, adding things as you wish. Letting yourself get bogged down in polishing details that aren't exciting makes you start looking for other things to do, losing interest in the project altogether.

Minecraft was developed by one person - Markus Persson (aka Notch), at least till 2011 when it already got insanely popular.

A perfect analogy! Toady's baby is legally blind, is very dumb, is very slow, speaks 4 languages in different contexts but none fluently, is very ugly, and is not fun for 99% of people who play with it.

There are cures for all of these problems, but he refuses to treat or allow anyone else to treat his baby.

It's fun enough for enough people, myself included, for him to live off the project. And that's enough for him.

For now. What happens when interest slowly peters off as the current fanbase gets bored or distracted with other areas of their lives?

...then he does some user-facing stuff to lure them back and add new ones?

This project isn't some attach-rate-obsessed no-value-add startup. As long as he can pay his rent, he doesn't need to make anyone happy but himself.

Ah yes. It's obviously they who don't get it. All they've done is create and turn into a career their pet project. Obviously they should just listen to all those that want to radically change what the game is rather than iterate on the design they (and many others) enjoy and see where it leads.

There is a reason DF has inspired so many others (including the creator of minecraft), and it was't the graphics.

Which do you think is more likely, that they don't get it, or you don't get them?

Come back in 11 years and see if Minecraft is still so much bigger than DF. There's a difference between UIs crafted for hooking new users and those designed for long term use by experts.

Basically: you're starting the equivalent of a "vim vs. IDE" flame war, and adding just about as much value.

DF is inefficient and inconsistent even with the hotkeys memorized. It's no vim.

I'm sure minecraft will be smaller by then, but that's because it's far less complex and development is basically nil at this point. Nothing to do with how the controls are implemented.

Actually, modded Minecraft sees an enormous amount of activity, particularly of late it seems. It's started cannibalizing my DF time, of all things--vanilla Minecraft is dull by comparison.

DF sees a little of this with dfhack and all the mods on the forums.

Yes, there is a bounty of mod activity, but it is rare for mods to outlast the source game by a decade.

I'm not sure Minecraft's all that relevant a comparison - it's little more than a glorified Lego set. It's easy to have an accessible UI when you don't have to interface with much more than "Point at something", "Hit something" and "Place something". You might as well compare it with FarmVille - after all, it's a hell of a lot "bigger".

> These guys just don't get it. DF can be SOOOOO much better,

Maybe. Or maybe it would lose its soul and become yet another pretty game with boring back stories.

I'm torn about that, but I can't help notice that the reason why the stories of your dwarves are so engrossing and so unbelievably epic and real is because 100% of Today's time is spent working on these stories instead of a pretty GUI.

The problem with DF GUI is not that it is not pretty, but that it is not effective at all. Additional colors, alpha channels (like looking at 2-3 depth cross-sections instead of one), no fixed font size, so smaller info screens, proper zooming (boy, how useful that would be), smoother scrolling to not get lost, etc.

I understand they do not want to invest time in these, but all they need is to open up a TCP port and have a protocol that accept commands and returns some game state. Then we could make all kind of open source clients, some fancy (2D, 3D, 4D, whatever) some crazy (multi-screen setups), web frontends or android thin-clients to cloud hosted DF, etc.

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