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.
Ahh Dwarf Fortress... (Score:5, Interesting)
Where else can you drain the ocean, trap whales in lead cages, load them into lead minecarts, and send them careening down the steep, steep slope to hell as a kinetic anti-demon weapon?
Oh, and if it weren't for DF, there would be absolutely no source for the solid density of Saguaro wood [dwarffortresswiki.org] online (it's 430 kg/m^3 for anyone wondering).
Ultima Ratio Regum (Score:3, Interesting)
Another one to watch:
http://www.ultimaratioregum.co... [ultimaratioregum.co.uk]
http://www.ultimaratioregum.co... [ultimaratioregum.co.uk]
"It's an incredibly exciting project that could end up in the same rarefied sphere as Dwarf Fortress - a complex simulation of ASCII worlds that have history, detail and depth. The current release is capable of generating a world and the basic history of the cultures that have evolved upon it, but there isn't a huge amount to do beyond the procedural riddle puzzles contained in scattered ziggurats. A typical early feature of many games, eh?
As for the rest, it's all detailed in the development plan and a new announcement suggests it'll be on the road to completion sooner than expected. Developer Mark Johnson will be working on the game full-time for a year from September. And there isn't a Kickstarter in sight."
http://www.rockpapershotgun.co... [rockpapershotgun.com]