Dwarf Fortress Gets Biggest Update In Years 138
An anonymous reader writes Dwarf Fortress, the epic, ASCII text-based, roguelike citybuilding game, just released its biggest update in years. The game is notable for its incredible depth, and the new release only extends it. Here are the release notes — they won't make much sense if you don't play the game, but they'll give you a sense of how massively complex Dwarf Fortress is. It's also worth noting the a team of modders has recently released a new version Stonesense utility, which renders the game in 3-D from an isometric point of view. "[T]he utility relies on DFHack, a community-made library that reads the game's memory and can be parsed, thus allowing for additional utilities to render things while bypassing the initial ASCII output." If you're unfamiliar with the game, here's an illustrated depiction of an amazing story generated by the game.
PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack - Get it! (Score:5, Informative)
If you even have a passing interest in playing dwarf fortress... make sure you get PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack. In this pack you'll find useful tools such as "Dwarf Therapist", which make the game so much easier to play. Other addons also give amazing atmospheric music and sound effects! (Currently a lot of this only works the the previous version, but that will be fixed soon)
Re:PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack - Get it! (Score:4, Informative)
Also, if you've never played DF, it is probably best to either wait a couple months until the worst bugs are fixed and the wiki etc are updated, or just grab the previous versions. This new version will still be quite rough at the edges and some of the info on the wiki, youtube etc will be outdated.
I'm pretty excited about the new release, I've been playing for a couple years and I hope that especially the AI behaviour has been improved although it is not listed in the change log as such...
Re:Is it still braindeadly single-threaded? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes... From what I gather, the developer ("Toady") is an autodidact that doesn't use any sort of version control and no multithreading. Although the simulation might be difficult to run in multiple threads, I think the path finding is one of the biggest CPU drains and that should be embarrassingly parallel. Also, he is really giving the community a tough time by having a monolithic game engine + GUI instead of some sort of modular system, which would allow the many programming-savvy fans to build tools much more easily (tools such as dfhack and therapist now use direct memory hacking, which is annoying (therapist needs root access, dfhack encapsulates df itself) but also unstable.
Re:Is it still braindeadly single-threaded? (Score:2, Informative)
It still is, because Toady still doesn't know how to multi-thread. As an example, generating a big world with 1000 years takes forever. By 500 years, the game begins to hang (because the UI only updates after every year has been simulated) for several seconds at a time. I left it around three hours and it still wasn't done. And following the logic, I couldn't even see the year it was on. I would have had to wait until a year had been simulated to have the UI update. I just killed the process.
Then again, this is the first release after this dev cycle. Bugs are expected. Toady said that he was going to optimize things.
Hopefully he'll learn how to multi-thread sometime within the next... ten years.
Re: Is it still braindeadly single-threaded? (Score:4, Informative)
For one unit, sure. The CPU problem in DF (as far as I understand) is that there are 200 dwarves, 100 goblins and 400 kittens all trying to pathfind at the same time. Unless I miss something, each of these units van pathfind in parallel since they don't "know" about the other's paths.
I still like... (Score:3, Informative)