Hi again!

The work on the main screen continues. This time, we'll show a preliminary version of the minimap. In Classic DF, we try to give the player some notion of their surroundings with a text image:



For a given elevation slice of a hillside, you get some sky, some terrain, and some solid rock. As you move up and down, the minimap gives you a basic picture of what's going on. But of course now, we have the power of pixels to improve this:



You can see here a pixel-perfect representation of the tiles of a fort, including a large room and some little rooms that I carved out at this elevation. These are colors I picked myself, so we'll likely see some improvements here. But along with the ramp images and the multi-level display, this should help you visualize how your fort looks. Here it is in action, complete with trees going up into the sky area as the camera repositions:



We also have the date and some additional information here which used to be hidden away in a different screen. We haven't finalized the main screen layout, so this is more subject to change than usual.

Next, we have guts, courtesy of Meph. We haven't been showing a lot of dwarves to this point, since they are still in progress, so the following image is of our placeholder dwarves... our placeholder dwarves after having been subjected to the disembowelment debug function.



Note the directionality -- as the dwarves walk about, the earthworm-like viscera drag around behind them. This normally involves a bit more blood, but we're still working on it.

- Tarn

Hello again!

This time, we have an example of the new interface to show you. First, let's look at the old version of the embark screen:



Dwarf Fortress of course has been a text game up to this point, but even in that limited framework there are some elements lacking here! There's no indication for instance that both of these lists scroll or how to do it. The bottom options are a random jumble.

When you press the key to buy a new item, it takes you to a whole new screen:



This one does have scrolling instructions but still no indication of how many pages there are. The mouse doesn't work anywhere.

Here is where we are in the version we are working on:



This screen is mainly mouse-driven. The scrolling and purchase options are more clear, and we've cleaned up the options on the bottom as well.

You can continue to narrow your selections with a text filter as below:



The animals have been moved to a third tab:



Meph drew the border and Mike drew the buttons, bars and the rest, and also gave me various layout advice. Mike also has a widescreen monitor, which has helped correct issues there - this screen currently uses a customizable working area ~2000 pixels wide, centered, while the main screen uses the full width of the display for the more graphical play area.

This screen also sizes down fairly well, to a point. The menu widths compact and finally the border is removed (except for the tabs at the top), so the game is playable at smaller resolutions and window sizes.

We haven't yet finalized the order of the listed items (which are still somewhat random, as opposed to, say, sortable alphabetically or by point value.)

We're continuing to work on the main screen to get it up to this new standard. It'll be exciting to share that when it is ready!

- Tarn


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- Victoria

Hi!

The base creature pictures have been completed! As you can tell from some of the previous posts, that's a lot of animals, ha ha, as well as various fantasy critters. This also frees up Mike to do a pass on my ghastly programmer-art screens, which we should be able to show next time, while Meph continues work on items and buildings, as well as some additional work with derived creature types, like baby animals and zombies.

Here is one of the fantasy creatures, a mischievous gremlin.



Mischief here can be quite serious mischievous; gremlins like to jump on pressure plates, free animals from cages, and pull levers. Since pressure plates and levers are often linked up to important floodgates or drawbridges, they can be troublesome indeed.

Gremlins are good at sneaking, but a war dog placed at an entrance or strategic intersection is an option (you can always take them off the ropes if you want them to have a vacation from work with all their dwarf friends.)



Placing dwarf guards on patrol routes or having mechanically important areas behind some general bustle is also feasible, though gremlins wait in hiding for opportunities and can often slip through during breaks in hallway traffic. It's important not to leave a lever that can destroy your entire fortress too close to the deep cavern entrances, ha ha. If you are feeling ambitious, you can set up false levers near the caves to lure gremlins, and link them to traps that collapse or flood the lever room.

- Tarn

P.S.

Episode 24 of Dwarf Talk is here. The volume levels are a bit better this time, and the other host returned, so the original lineup is all back together, talking about the interface and playing with the myth generator.

Hello again!

Giant creatures are a staple of generic fantasy worlds, and since Dwarf Fortress strives to generate worlds which are almost as generic as possible, we have giant versions of most real-world animals in the game. You can tack giant in front of almost anything. Sometimes, this can be trouble - the pandas in our game are just called 'pandas', but a more proper name for the real-world creature is 'giant panda', so that's why we have 'gigantic pandas' for the giant version instead. The same thing happened with the 'giant tortoise.'

The rule in Dwarf Fortress is that a giant creature should be at least as large as a black bear, even if it's a giant version of a small insect. As the real-world creatures approach black bear size, and then beyond, we apply a curve, so that the largest ones are only roughly twice as large in every dimension as their counterpart. Giant whales are very, very large, but they are just eight times as massive as a normal whale, rather than the kind of scaling you see when you go from a spider to a giant spider.

Here are some giant underground creatures:



The giant cave spider has been one of the more notorious DF creatures for many years. The paralyzing venom is quite serious, webs are nasty, it can spring from ambush, and it can also just bite dwarf-sized creatures into pieces. It is an enlarged version of the cave spider, which has a stunning venom (which is merely extremely annoying.) Giant rats are classic beings, of course. We also have large rats since it felt like there needed to be extra size gradations for ratdom.

I feel most bad about the poor giant moles that blunder into fortresses. The art doesn't make me feel better about it! Cave swallows are surprisingly colorful birds.

And here are some more modest creatures, a sample of small-but-not-too-small mammals:



As you can imagine, once we got up to a certain level of animal coverage in the game, it was important for us to get the two iconic monotremes in the game, and fortunately the community pulled through when they selected a few hundred animals to be added to the game back in 2009.

The platypus has poisonous spurs, as in real life, which can cause painful swelling. Perhaps your fortress would benefit by allowing a platypus person adventurer to become a resident monster slayer?

- Tarn

Hi!

Creatures and items, creatures and items. Here are lots of different seeds. You can grow all sorts of different real world and fantasy plants. Our dwarves like to farm a variety of mushrooms underground, but you can try aboveground plants if you like.



I put them on a glass block floor, since I accidentally put an ice floor in the last news posting when I said it was glass, ha ha. I then spread some of the new treasure items around everywhere, in each of the currency materials. You can also make coins and treasures out of non-currency metals and materials.

There were a few other treasures to lay out, but I took the screenshot early, as a lizard started eating my seeds (the guilty party still sits happily in the stockpile.) Normally you can protect seeds from vermin by using bags and barrels, and also by having some trusty cats around to hunt them and bring the remains to their dwarves.

Mike in the meantime has drawn many animals over the last several days, among them the remaining birds. Can you name them all?



I've also been experimenting with the mouse and clickable buttons and other fancy widgets. Animals next to the animal buttons, items next to the item buttons, rather than text text text. DF has had a little patchy mouse support in the past, but we're going to improve that situation for Steam. Hopefully I'll have some to show soon! Artists have to do a pass on my programmer art first, he he he.

-Tarn


After a 6 year hiatus, the DF Talk podcast has restarted! Join Rainseeker, Capntastic and the Toady One (Tarn!) as they talk about Dwarf Fortress and answer questions from the forum.

You can listen to it here, but fair warning... the volume levels are wonky. (In the words of Tarn, they "suck". Heh.) I figured it was still worth sharing though - think of this as the test run of better and more volume-controlled episodes to come! ;)

- Victoria

Hello!

Workerly progress on items and other art the last few week. It's an eclectic mix, as in the first image here:



Glass block floors, wooden floors, and dwarves, of course, like metal floors. Some of their favorite weapons are here as well, and shields, and trap components. You can use an enormous corkscrew to make a screwpump to move liquids around the fortress, but you can also place one in a weapon trap.

And why not add a giant axeblade, a serrated disc and various spikes? Hmm... dwarves have to clean them when they are jammed up with goblin bits, that's one reason, but a resilient dwarf can handle that job just fine.

Here are swords made of various materials being shown off by the proud Debug Creature that arranged them on the arena floor.



And more weapons and tools, along with a few reasons why you might want your dwarves to keep weapons around. These critters can all be found underground.



On the left we have a naked mole dog and a molemarian. The naked mole dog is like the real world naked molerat, but it is bigger, hence dog. The molemarian... is like a centaur, but instead of placing a human upper torso on a horse body, you place a moledoggy human upper torso on a naked mole dog, and then replace the head with a mole dog head... so it's just a lot of naked mole dog with some grabby arms.

Up top, the voracious cave crawler and the magma man. Occasionally, legendary generals will make a journey to the depths during world generation and tame voracious cave crawlers for use in war. Magma men, on the other hand, are just not safe to have around at all.

On the right, longer critters! A giant earthworm and a giant olm. You'll find that Dwarf Fortress has a lot of giant creatures...

- Tarn

--


The Debug Creature's face is such a mood.



- Victoria

Heya!

A bit of a mini-interruption from the regular updates you've been getting from Tarn (don't worry, they're still happening), but as part of the Guerrilla Collective showcase on June 13, we revealed a first look at the work-in-progress gameplay of the Dwarf Fortress Steam Version!



Note: Gameplay UI is in progress, and is not indicative of the final look.


The gameplay video includes:

• Developer commentary from co-creator, Tarn Adams
  
• Real time footage of a world map being generated and a first embark
  
• New graphics including workshops, bodies of water, dwarves, and trees

Hope you enjoy. We're excited! :)

Cheers,
Victoria

Hey.

The main project we've been focusing on recently is the depiction of bodies of water. In Dwarf Fortress, that can mean a lot of things: still pools, rocky brooks, wide rivers, oceans, lakes, underground lakes, city sewers, and channel and cistern and noble-drowning facilities you produce in your own fortresses.

This is the current status of the rocky brooks.



We're using sixteen frames of animation, which is a first for DF, ha ha, and we might touch this up with some flow direction indications and variants. Dwarves can walk across these, so it's important that they don't look very deep.

This is a deeper, more opaque pool of water that the dwarves prefer not to drink from, but which can have turtles and moghoppers for the dwarves to catch, to add to their food variety and allow for shell crafts. Or to keep as pets. Or for your zoo terrariums and aquariums.



Here are the larger workshops - the kennels and the siege workshop. Many animals can be brought from a wild to a semi-domesticated to a tame state.

This is not entirely safe! But it is good to have mostly friendly critters running about the fortress.



Here are some minecart tracks! Build them with wood, stone or metal, or carve grooves into cavern floors or glaciers.



With the availability of wheelbarrows, it's not always practical to produce a lot of infrastructure just to cart off stone, but you can always use them to do routine hauls of finished goods, or let your dwarves take a fun ride. Take a ride yourself in adventure mode. Or fill a cart with rocks and crash it against an obstacle as an improvised boulder shotgun. Or use serrated discs. People always find a way to turn DF features into weapons!

- Tarn

Hi!

The main part of the game we've been updating for the last while is the tree display.

Way back when the classic game was first released in 2006, and for some years after, trees were simply a single text tile, an up arrow for a pine tree, say, and you'd chop them down and get a piece of wood. As the game progressed and got a third dimension of terrain, this became insufficient, and we moved over to multi-tile trees.

Even using text, growing and display these was a bit of a challenge. Here are our tree trunks from the text version:



Don't strain too hard if you don't see them, but spot the brown and white O's? Those are tree trunks down on the ground level. The first part we tackled was getting these displayed, and making sure they were distinguishable from the trunks of trees that had been chopped down. The artists accomplished this with foliage shadows and lively roots:



Now, once you go upward, the situation gets more complex. In Dwarf Fortress, there are thick trunks that can be climbed, heavy branches that can be walked across, light branches that can't be walked upon, and even groups of leafy twigs out at the very edges. Jumble all of that together in text, and you have the old display:



This is one altitude level up from the previous text picture. All of those tile types are there, but it's difficult to parse, to say the least. We wanted to make that easier to understand.

So let's take a look at one of our new trees:



We are going up and down the tree with the camera - the trunk branches north and south immediately, and then thins out as we move vertically, until only leafy twigs remain at the top.

When we put it all together in a forest, and move the camera up one level, we obtain the following:



There's still a lot to take in, but the trees can be distinguished from each other (the leaves of different trees don't touch each other. This is called crown shyness.) The 'trunk' tiles which cannot be traveled through all have a pillar to distinguish them.

So if one of your dwarves is scared up a tree by a wild predator, you'll expect to see them clinging next to a trunk or sitting on one of the heavy branches. On the other hand, if they are using a stepladder to pick fruit, you'll find them in the leafier sections without heavy branches where the fruit grows.

Don't forget you can sign up for these updates to appear straight in your inbox by joining the newsletter.

- Tarn

Hello!

One of the main things we've been working on recently is updating the world map. As with almost everything in Classic DF, the world map is displayed using ASCII symbols. It looks like this:



This particular world is a medium sized 129x129 one (currently you can make a large world at 257x257, down to a pocket world at 17x17). If you haven't played before, even from the ASCII image, you can probably tell what is water versus land, and that the top is the icy part. And maybe find some trees and deserts. However, some of the other symbols are likely more difficult to distinguish, or maybe it just looks entirely unreadable.

Here is our work-in-progress graphical map of the same world:



The image is larger and square since we've moved from 8x12 ASCII glyphs to 16x16 tiles. There's still quite a bit to do with river mouths and wetlands and oceans and mountains and trees and so on, of course. But we've arrived at a point where it accomplishes the goal of making the world map more easily understood and thought it would be fun to share.

- Tarn