DwarvesH (Dwarf Fortress for the rest of us?)

I just started playing DF for the first time this weekend. I think it's the type of game I'd lose my life to. I've been interested in the game for a long while, but have been intimidated by it. In my search for more accessible alternatives, I found DwarvesH, an isometric DF style game in development.

Dev Blog

YouTube Channel

This is the video that got me interested:

This looks exactly like DF, but with a much better interface and less features.

Between this and Goblin Camp, Dwarf Fortress is becoming its own genre. I think that's a good thing.

I'm not impressed with what we can see of the engine. If you look closely, dwarves take no time to move from place to place. The whole game pauses while it animates dwarves moving to where they need to be, and then something is done. So you can get, like, 6 of your dwarves frozen in place while the one dwarf that was off doing something else scoots like lightning to his position, and then everyone does a 'move'.

I think the real Dwarf Fortress would benefit VERY MUCH from this style of interface, but that's about as far as it goes.

Gremlin wrote:

Between this and Goblin Camp, Dwarf Fortress is becoming its own genre. I think that's a good thing.

I wish. I would love a genre of more simulated worlds, middle-management level of user control, harsh consequences, procedurally generated content, and emergent fun. Instead I see clones.

I think it's interesting how many games now feature the word biome.

Hi and thank you for taking interest in the game!

I would like to clear up a little confusion if possible:

Malor wrote:

I'm not impressed with what we can see of the engine. If you look closely, dwarves take no time to move from place to place. The whole game pauses while it animates dwarves moving to where they need to be, and then something is done. So you can get, like, 6 of your dwarves frozen in place while the one dwarf that was off doing something else scoots like lightning to his position, and then everyone does a 'move'.

I think the real Dwarf Fortress would benefit VERY MUCH from this style of interface, but that's about as far as it goes.

This is not the way things work. It is not a simplistic engine in witch everybody takes moves one by one. Instead, it uses time compression. Time flow accelerates to accommodate the shortest actions so you can follow it in real time without having to pause the game. Digging takes a lot of time depending on material, but it roughly takes two hours. Moving a cell only takes a second. So while all your dwarves are digging, time will flow very fast. Look at the in game watch when no one is moving. It will jump minutes, even hours. When dwarves do short actions, time will slow down. Look how to clock starts moving slow again when one of the dwarves who was previously digging finishes and starts moving to a new destination.

While this is happening the rest of the dwarves are still working, but time slowed down to accommodate the walking rate of that dwarf. This is why they appear to be frozen in time.

At first this feature is counter intuitive, but it does have the advantage of not having to wait a lot for dwarves when issuing huge orders, like massive deforestation or digging out a considerable area. And dwarves have a very high walking speed because walking is not fun: building is fun! No use seeing your dwarves move slowly from destination to destination, especially since when walking time flows slower and things seem to take longer, relatively speaking of course.

But this video is old and since I toned down time compression a little. It is still a very important mechanism, but it no longer causes time to flow so fast that you need good reflexes to have a successful map. The gameplay needs to be tactical, not twitch based. And the rate of time passage can be altered in game though a panel.

Always nice to see a dev stop by.

DwarvesH wrote:

But this video is old and since I toned down time compression a little. It is still a very important mechanism, but it no longer causes time to flow so fast that you need good reflexes to have a successful map. The gameplay needs to be tactical, not twitch based. And the rate of time passage can be altered in game though a panel.

Amen.

Thanks for coming by, DwarvesH. Hopefully you'll stick around.

Just to make sure I'm not missing out, there's not a publicly released build is there?

Very interesting. And welcome!

Thank you for the warm welcome!

LiquidMantis wrote:

Thanks for coming by, DwarvesH. Hopefully you'll stick around.

Just to make sure I'm not missing out, there's not a publicly released build is there?

No, there is not. I'll only do a release when I have a sizeable feature set. It is a small project, so doing a severely underwhelming demo would do more harm than good IMO, even if the demo is perfect technically and plays as intended.

I'll stick around, so if anybody has questions, suggestions or anything, feel free to post.

PS: What is the problem with my quote tags? I can't seem to get them to work.

The forum has different office ranks for each member based on number of posts. You are still a Coffee Grinder and hence can't use quotes and a bunch of other things I'm forgetting at the moment. Just hang around and chat a bit, it will go away soon.

This forum has daily spam attempts, so Certis and Elysium try to limit the damage by preventing new accounts from being able to link to anything. To do that, they disable all tags.

That time dilation/compression mechanic is a pretty smart idea.

Looks neat. I will admit, I've taken a couple of stabs at Dwarf Fortress but can't seem to invest the time it takes to grok it. Anything that can simplify getting into that style of game without a huge frontloaded learning curve would be welcome. =)

Ranger Rick wrote:

Looks neat. I will admit, I've taken a couple of stabs at Dwarf Fortress but can't seem to invest the time it takes to grok it. Anything that can simplify getting into that style of game without a huge frontloaded learning curve would be welcome. =)

Taking the time to learn DF only leads to years of time dumped into the game. I both fear and look forward to the day when a very similar game removes that barrier to entry.

Looks like the developer is working on his own 3D engine for the game:

I don't care about 3D, I just want a reasonable interface, and I want the game to actually work, instead of developing a blizzard of bugs after a few years of simulation.

Malor wrote:

I don't care about 3D, I just want a reasonable interface, and I want the game to actually work, instead of developing a blizzard of bugs after a few years of simulation.

Have you listened to the latest dorf talk podcasts? Toady seems to be much more in the work out bugs stage (albeit mainly in adventure mode).