Dwarf Fortress Development interview over Gamasutra

DF Physics Jhon Harris, from Gamasutra, has interviewed Tarn Adams, developer of Dwarf Fortress. The interview covers details about the history of the game, and goes as far as discussing some features of its inspiring random world generator and simulated fluid physics. Check the interview

The first overall goal of the world generator is to create enough information to produce a basic biome display. A lot of initial attempts at a world generator will start with things like “I need to lay down some forests, and some mountains, and some rivers, and some deserts…” and then when you end up with a jungle next to a desert, or a desert next to a swamp in an unlikely way, it’s difficult to fix.

Yep, I know what you mean Mr. Adams; also, would be interesting to compare JADE and DF world generators 🙂

[…]
Jhon Harris: Right. Permadeath is generally a roguelike concept, of course.

Tarn Adams: Yeah, I’ve seen some of those 7DRL contests. It’s too bad it takes so much time to undertake a large project. Time is really the only barrier for a lot of people.
[…]

It is! We are one week away from the challenge… are we ready yet?

Releases Wire VI

DoomRL 0.9.8.8

Alltough it’s still not 0.9.9, I present DoomRL 0.9.8.8, another step on the road of DoomRL’s development. 0.9.8.7 had a few serious bugs that needed fixing. Also, there’s a LOT of refactoring needed to present the features of DoomRL 0.9.9 and 1.0.0 — a lot of this refactoring has been done in this version.

Unangband 0.6.2-wip7e

This is a work in progress (and moreover interim, by Bandobras) release, so please save often and report bugs. Savefiles are compatible, unless the level you are on has fallen out of the levels range of the current dungeon, so it’s safest to upgrade when in Rivendell, Bree, Hobbiton or Bucklebury (their depths are unchanged).

3Dwarf Visualizer

Testing time! I finally feel comfortable releasing a public beta of my map visualizer, 3Dwarf. Please watch the tutorial video to get a feel of what the program is capable of. Keep in mind this is a beta, and some maps may not display correctly. I did most of my testing on forest maps, so they will look the best for now.

POWDER 095

While some maintainers may make a special Christmas Release that has neat features that provide joy and happiness to their players, the 094 Christmas Release had no interesting new features and a serious game crashing bug.

In penance, I have been running the stress test for a day now to hopefully avoid a similar embarassing release.

Dwarf Fortress 0.27.169.33g

A few more fixes, a few new init options and a new interface for bringing items to the trade depot. See the dev log for a complete list.

SteamBand 0.4.1 Final

It’s your Christmas gift — it’s here, bug free (crosses fingers), and fun. Everything that has been said before can be said again.

Steamband is a modern variant containing UI features such as a menu, extensive on-line help, bigscreen, terminal windows, memory features, an extensive custom monster and artifact list, and skill based character development.

Dwarf Fortress, Histories of Greed and Labour

A new version of Dwarf Fortress has been released, after almost a year of development and with LOTS of new, nifty features, from one of the most complex games ever created.

What new is there? according to the official release data…

Well, it has been a while. That means potential instability, so don’t get too attached to your fortresses at this point. I’ll be doing subsequent releases more often now as I solve problems. In any case, dwarf mode now has a z-axis and you can make fortresses that span several levels. Fluids behave much more reasonably, and you can walk across the world in adventure mode in the local view without having to step off of an artificial edge. And various other lots more stuff.

Full info available at the devlog

Finally some players reactions:

My first coolest discovery was when I figured out what the symbol for volcanoes was.

This was quickly topped when I realization that my volcano starting site had abundant hematite right out in the opening.

This, in turn, was displaced from its status as coolest discovery when I realized I could look inside the caldera and say hi to all the imps living inside the volcano.

Finally, the most truly ultimate discovery in my first five minutes occured when I popped the units menu open to look at the population of fire imps and such, and discovered that my fortress site has a wandering population of snailmen on the plains below. Snail. Men.

This is totally awesome, even though I’m not entirely sure why.

3 cool things I’ve so far spotted:

1. You can set the Flag [CIV_CONTROLLABLE] on any entity_default civ and you can play them in dwarf mode (Human settlers anyone?) they don’t seem to need to come from [MOUNTAIN_SETTLEMENTS] anymore.

2. You can build Huts. If you build a room with 4 walls on one level,then build some stairs up and “roof” it with construction floors, it counts as inside on the lower level. (That means, you can make rooms, place beds etc. inside) I find it rather cool to have my lumberjack live outside in the woods with a small wood stockpile nearby.

3. Hunters are FAR more effective and are FAR less likely to get killed. one hunter bought in so many deer corpses that my butcher had a problem to keep up.

Just noticed a natural cave on my map with a perfectly circular HUGE lake in it. The cave is stuffed with cave spider silk and (I assume) lots of cave spiders. The lake is inhabited by a tribe of frogmen and a solitary giant toad.The nearby mountains are roamed by packs of skeletal goats, who occasionally hop down to harass my dwarves (but thankfully not very often).

I could go on and on, as the game spawns interesting situations out of nowhere. Now, download and play it!

Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress By Tarn Adams
Forums
Wiki

Thanks to MasterGeo for the screenshots!