9 ms·

I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they es

by flurb 17d ago

I'm still pissed about the fact that they essentially gave the finger to everyone who has been long-term supporters - when they added the G to their UI, they essentially scrapped the old. In favor of a mouse-driven design, they dropped the old, keyboard-driven UI. Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - before they partnered with Kitfox, they used to publish how much they were receiving. Tens of thousands of $ a month, mind you. For monthly contributions at that level for many, many years I would expect at least a nod - instead they straight-up told everyone they'd abandon keyboard users, a decision later recanted. That said, Dwarf Fortress holds a special place in my heart. Only regret I have is that I didn't track how many hours I put in. In excess of 10k, I'm sure.

fireant 15d ago
The new GUI is... not great. But the UX old UI was downright awful. There were like 5 different paradigms how to use individual screens, not just layouts, completely different ways to navigate and interact with controls. After couple tens of hours you memorized the arcane keyboard invocations to do what you wanted, but it never felt intuitive.
nottorp 17d ago
They also dropped the Mac version. They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh. [1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.
- bigyabai 17d ago
  The game runs fine in Proton, including with dfhack. You can probably get it working on your Mac with a tiny bit of Crossover/Wine/GPTK tweaking.
  - hamdingers 17d ago
    That's missing the point. There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't. Can't be too mad about it though, it was free back then too.
    - bigyabai 17d ago
      macOS has changed a lot more than Windows or Linux did in the last decade. It's hardly Tarn's fault, here.
      - S-E-P 17d ago
        macOS is also just a proper PITA through and through. I'm annoyed that I can't play it on my m4 but I also understand that supporting macOS has always been a nuisance. If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.
        evilduck 17d ago
        FWIW DF and DFHack work flawlessly through Crossover on macOS on my M2 and my M5
        cyberpunk 16d ago
        It’s kind of insane that we can play windows x86_64 games on macos arm almost perfectly. I got a bit annoyed with it being slightly jank and built a (linux) gaming pc for my kids in the end but it worked fine for most things for a while.
    - DarmokTanagra 17d ago
      [flagged]
    - zamalek 17d ago
      What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports. Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense. Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).
- flurb 17d ago
  I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme. Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?
- rkido 17d ago
  While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.
  - scratcheee 17d ago
    I don’t think it has anything to do with their gaming specific capabilities, just their general philosophy matches poorly with the games industry. Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down. As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit). There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.
    - Shitty-kitty 17d ago
      Optimization and bug hunting makes supporting multiple graphics api's a pain. I really don't understand Apple's stubborn refusal to make vulkan drivers. Between Apple and the better performance on SteamDeck, I can see PC game developers seriously considering Vulkan over directx.
      - somenameforme 16d ago
        Sony's PS3 is an interesting comparison. It had some borderline ridiculous hardware by the standards of console development. I mean that both as a positive in terms of theoretic capability, and as a negative in terms of practical usability. Sony had a huge market, so I think they were banking on developers bending over backwards to build things to the strengths of the PS3 which would be such an undertaking that it'd almost undoubtedly have left the PS3 version of stuff as definitive, and other platforms operating as second class citizens. Unfortunately for them developers took the path of least resistance and ended up doing the exact opposite.
- gloryjulio 17d ago
  Mac gaming is a pain in the **. It's Apple's fault. It's fine they can't justify the maintenance.
- goda90 16d ago
  You might be interested in running games from your headless boxes with this: https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine
  - nottorp 16d ago
    I know how to stream ty :) And I do use that option, as i said, for games that you play in finite sessions and that have a beginning and an end. Also as I said, I don't use it for forever games (mmos or endless simulators like DF) by choice. My playing pattern for those is not finite and relatively long sessions. I fire them for a short break, do something in them, close them and move along. If you have to turn on a separate box for that half your short break is gone with booting and shutting down. And you may lose interest before the other box is finished booting. Same for running games under crossover. Start crossover - SLOOOW. Wait for the game to start through the layers of emulation - SLOOW. It's fine if it's a weekend and I want to play say Dishonored [1] for a few hours. It's not fine if I want to spend 20 min improving a build in Minecraft and then go do irl stuff. [1] Dishonored is an example of the type of game I'd jump through hoops to play. I've always streamed it actually. No idea how it runs in Crossover.
- musictubes 16d ago
  The sad thing is that current Macs are perfect machines for DF. The recommendation was always to get as fast a single threaded machine as possible with the biggest cache. Even the least expensive Macs are monsters in those regards. The game is more multi-threaded than before but still is dominated by single threaded performance.
numeri 17d ago
It makes me sad to think about. I would love to get into the new UI, but the immersion just won't come back. My muscle memory, hands firmly on the keyboard, is too persistent, and playing with the new UI feels like stumbling around and misclicking.
DarmokTanagra 17d ago
I know what you mean, but I have been playing since 2008? and the last few updates have been pretty great.
speff 17d ago
I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds. Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit from their perspective shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.
wetpaws 17d ago
[dead]
forrestthewoods 17d ago
I don’t understand. I don’t know what “added the G to their UI” means. Also sounds like they added back the keyboard support so there’s literally no issue? > In excess of 10k, I'm sure. Sure sounds like you got your moneys worth.
- KylerAce 17d ago
  Ui+g=gui. As in since they added graphics
prydt 17d ago
Yeah my biggest issue has been that none of my muscle memory transfers over and it adds another hurdle to ever getting back into the game.
threedliams 17d ago
I was under the impression that the classic keyboard-only version was kept up to date with the Steam version? They're both on patch 53.16[1][2] which was released simultaneously on 8/5, so it doesn't look to me like keyboard-only is forgotten or left behind unless I'm missing something. [1] https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ [2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
- tekacs 16d ago
  Sadly no – the current 'classic' is just the Steam game without the steam features AIUI – i.e. still the mouse-oriented UI. 0.47.05 is the last keyboard version AFAIK.
  - threedliams 16d ago
    Ah I see, I misunderstood. I just tried the latest classic version and it was all mouse. I agree then that it's disappointing as someone who has played both versions
poulpy123 17d ago
They chose to have social security over a keyboard only interface for a game they continue to publish for free.
- ShinyLeftPad 16d ago
  It's sold for $30 now. The old version is free but that's not updated anymore apparently. When he asked whether long time supporters would want to pay $30 bucks for the game I don't think that was implied? Seems fair to be annoyed.
  - foo12bar 16d ago
    The free version is still being updated. Both the free version and the paid version are on v53.16: https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ https://steamdb.info/app/975370/history/ https://steamdb.info/app/975370/history/
    - simonh 16d ago
      Yes, but apparently the latest free versions don't have the keyboard UI either. In this context old version means keyboard version.
      - foo12bar 16d ago
        So, the developer updates both the free version and the paid version with the latest features (the only difference is the free version is sans GUI), and continues to serve the older free keyboard only 0.47 version on his website, and I'm supposed to be upset by this? Because he dropped the keyboard UI feature? DFHack already added back the keyboard cursor, anyway: https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/tools/toggle-kbd-cursor.html https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/tools/toggle-kbd-curs...
        no_multitudes 16d ago
        This DFHack command just toggles the 'enable keyboard cursor' feature. The issue is that the new keyboard cursor only works under specific scenarios, like designating digging sites. I don't think there's a way to use the keyboard cursor for everything like in 0.47. (I agree with your broader point that it's not reasonable to be angry at Bay12 for dropping this feature.)
mempko 17d ago
The new updates got me back into dwarf fortress. I'm sure there are more players now then ever before.
db48x 17d ago
What you are asking for is completely unreasonable. There’s no way that one programmer can maintain two completely separate UIs. Keep in mind that they could not simply “add graphics” to the existing interface, they had to write a completely new one that was not based around fixed–size character cells.
- AngryData 16d ago
  Wasn't the graphical interface 95% outsourced to others? And originally the graphic version was suppose to be layered on top and leave the underlying version of the game barely touched from the player's side. It was even touted as an excuse at the time to fix some of the keyboard shortcuts that were inconsistent among different submenus, and certainly not to eliminate or supersede keyboard interfaces.
  - bananaboy 16d ago
    The art was outsourced to pretty much one artist. Zach and Tarn implemented it.
  - db48x 16d ago
    Programmers and artists at Kitfox helped, but no, 95% of the work on the UI was not outsourced. Perhaps if you add in all of the countless time spent drawing sprites for all of the creatures in the game. And your understanding of “layering” is simply wrong. The _game_ is the same underneath the UI, aside from the new features that have been added and the bugs that have been fixed, but the UI was ripped out and rewritten. It could not be any other way. You are correct that the goal was not to eliminate keyboard–driven interfaces, but the rewrite did completely replace the entire UI with something new. And that new UI does not have the same structure as the old UI. For example, in the old UI you used to have to first enter the “designations” menu and then choose “dig”. So digging had the keyboard shortcut ‘d d’. To place buildings you typed ‘d b’ to “designate buildings”, and to “designate stockpiles” was ‘d p’. But now these three things are all at the top level of the menu, so simply typing ‘m’ for digging, ‘b’ for buildings, or ‘p’ for stockpiles is all you need to do. (Digging cannot be on ‘d’ because the view is now moved using the WASD keys.) There is no designate menu any more. The old keyboard shortcuts are simply meaningless. If you prefer different keyboard shortcuts then you can customize them. One of the features of the rewritten UI is that there is also a new UI for customizing the key bindings.
AngryData 16d ago
Is it really that bad? I haven't played since the GUI update but was thinking about getting into it again because I still have years of muscle memory from it. But if I am forced to use the mouse im not sure I even want to bother. There is absolutely no way I could play the game at the same speed I use to if I have to resort to mouse-only features.
- oortoo 16d ago
  IMO, the steam release is not very good. Especially if you had been used to using the top mods that existed before the steam release for ease of control.
sandworm101 16d ago
You dont want to know your hours. Perhaps my greatest shame is the number of hours i have spent on factorio. I was afk for much of that (letting the factory run) but ... i would not want other people to see the number.
Agentlien 16d ago
[dead]
EinigeKreise 16d ago
I have to agree. Sure, the new GUI is a some kind of accessibility improvement over the old, but is seriously underpowered for e.g. any kind of repetitive tasks (which are not atypical in DF). Most annoying is the fact that even though a fair number of keyboard shortcuts exist, a full pipeline often does not. It's barely more efficient to use the keyboard since you'll still have to switch over to the mouse every second action. I know that the keyboard features are coming at some point, but I doubt it's a very high priority. My hopes rest on the modding improvements; once the UI becomes moddable, the old one is recreated in an instant. Until that, I'll stick to the trusty 0.47. (I have bought the "new" game to show support and thank for all the earlier work, of course.)
klrefg 16d ago
It wasn’t “tens of thousands a month” outside of some exceptional months. IIRC usually it was in the single digits which is not fantastic for a two people in the US
- fph 16d ago
  ("single digits" here means 1000-9999 USD, not 1-9 USD.)
well_ackshually 16d ago
Dwarf Fortress used ASCII graphics & KB controls because that's what was cheap and fast to implement. Tarn & Zach always wanted proper graphics & mouse support, and has always been the vision from day one. >Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - You clicked on a button that said "support", where it was explicitly pretty much a tip jar, and now you feel entitled to keyboard controls ? You're full of shit.
polytely 16d ago
well the old versions are still available, i think they handled the transition to steam pretty well.
dfbettermice 16d ago
[dead]
oortoo 16d ago
Steam release was absolutely botched. I didn't want to say it at around the time it came out, because I wanted it to succeed... but they dropped the ball in a big, big way. Lazy Newb Pack and other fan mods are still the best way to play.
babelfish 16d ago
Adding a G to the UI is 'giving the finger' to their old players? When they include support for ASCII-like tilesets so you can play the exact same way? "Gamers" are the most entitled people on earth, I swear

by flurb 17d ago

fireant 15d ago

The new GUI is... not great. But the UX old UI was downright awful. There were like 5 different paradigms how to use individual screens, not just layouts, completely different ways to navigate and interact with controls. After couple tens of hours you memorized the arcane keyboard invocations to do what you wanted, but it never felt intuitive.

nottorp 17d ago

They also dropped the Mac version. They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh. [1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.

bigyabai 17d ago
The game runs fine in Proton, including with dfhack. You can probably get it working on your Mac with a tiny bit of Crossover/Wine/GPTK tweaking.
- hamdingers 17d ago
  That's missing the point. There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't. Can't be too mad about it though, it was free back then too.
  - bigyabai 17d ago
    macOS has changed a lot more than Windows or Linux did in the last decade. It's hardly Tarn's fault, here.
    - S-E-P 17d ago
      macOS is also just a proper PITA through and through. I'm annoyed that I can't play it on my m4 but I also understand that supporting macOS has always been a nuisance. If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.
      - evilduck 17d ago
        FWIW DF and DFHack work flawlessly through Crossover on macOS on my M2 and my M5
        cyberpunk 16d ago
        It’s kind of insane that we can play windows x86_64 games on macos arm almost perfectly. I got a bit annoyed with it being slightly jank and built a (linux) gaming pc for my kids in the end but it worked fine for most things for a while.
  - DarmokTanagra 17d ago
    [flagged]
  - zamalek 17d ago
    What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports. Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense. Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).
flurb 17d ago
I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme. Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?
rkido 17d ago
While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.
- scratcheee 17d ago
  I don’t think it has anything to do with their gaming specific capabilities, just their general philosophy matches poorly with the games industry. Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down. As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit). There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.
  - Shitty-kitty 17d ago
    Optimization and bug hunting makes supporting multiple graphics api's a pain. I really don't understand Apple's stubborn refusal to make vulkan drivers. Between Apple and the better performance on SteamDeck, I can see PC game developers seriously considering Vulkan over directx.
    - somenameforme 16d ago
      Sony's PS3 is an interesting comparison. It had some borderline ridiculous hardware by the standards of console development. I mean that both as a positive in terms of theoretic capability, and as a negative in terms of practical usability. Sony had a huge market, so I think they were banking on developers bending over backwards to build things to the strengths of the PS3 which would be such an undertaking that it'd almost undoubtedly have left the PS3 version of stuff as definitive, and other platforms operating as second class citizens. Unfortunately for them developers took the path of least resistance and ended up doing the exact opposite.
gloryjulio 17d ago
Mac gaming is a pain in the **. It's Apple's fault. It's fine they can't justify the maintenance.
goda90 16d ago
You might be interested in running games from your headless boxes with this: https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine https://github.com/hgaiser/moonshine
- nottorp 16d ago
  I know how to stream ty :) And I do use that option, as i said, for games that you play in finite sessions and that have a beginning and an end. Also as I said, I don't use it for forever games (mmos or endless simulators like DF) by choice. My playing pattern for those is not finite and relatively long sessions. I fire them for a short break, do something in them, close them and move along. If you have to turn on a separate box for that half your short break is gone with booting and shutting down. And you may lose interest before the other box is finished booting. Same for running games under crossover. Start crossover - SLOOOW. Wait for the game to start through the layers of emulation - SLOOW. It's fine if it's a weekend and I want to play say Dishonored [1] for a few hours. It's not fine if I want to spend 20 min improving a build in Minecraft and then go do irl stuff. [1] Dishonored is an example of the type of game I'd jump through hoops to play. I've always streamed it actually. No idea how it runs in Crossover.
musictubes 16d ago
The sad thing is that current Macs are perfect machines for DF. The recommendation was always to get as fast a single threaded machine as possible with the biggest cache. Even the least expensive Macs are monsters in those regards. The game is more multi-threaded than before but still is dominated by single threaded performance.

numeri 17d ago

It makes me sad to think about. I would love to get into the new UI, but the immersion just won't come back. My muscle memory, hands firmly on the keyboard, is too persistent, and playing with the new UI feels like stumbling around and misclicking.

DarmokTanagra 17d ago

I know what you mean, but I have been playing since 2008? and the last few updates have been pretty great.

speff 17d ago

I understand why they did it - medical emergencies and all. Have to pay the bill somehow. But yea, 0.47.05's still my go-to. Just can't vibe with the new UI/keybinds. Old controls were on their roadmap for a long time, but the benefit from their perspective shrinks as time goes on. I doubt we'll see it at this point.

wetpaws 17d ago

[dead]

forrestthewoods 17d ago

I don’t understand. I don’t know what “added the G to their UI” means. Also sounds like they added back the keyboard support so there’s literally no issue? > In excess of 10k, I'm sure. Sure sounds like you got your moneys worth.

KylerAce 17d ago
Ui+g=gui. As in since they added graphics

prydt 17d ago

Yeah my biggest issue has been that none of my muscle memory transfers over and it adds another hurdle to ever getting back into the game.

threedliams 17d ago

I was under the impression that the classic keyboard-only version was kept up to date with the Steam version? They're both on patch 53.16[1][2] which was released simultaneously on 8/5, so it doesn't look to me like keyboard-only is forgotten or left behind unless I'm missing something. [1] https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ [2] https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/

tekacs 16d ago
Sadly no – the current 'classic' is just the Steam game without the steam features AIUI – i.e. still the mouse-oriented UI. 0.47.05 is the last keyboard version AFAIK.
- threedliams 16d ago
  Ah I see, I misunderstood. I just tried the latest classic version and it was all mouse. I agree then that it's disappointing as someone who has played both versions

poulpy123 17d ago

They chose to have social security over a keyboard only interface for a game they continue to publish for free.

ShinyLeftPad 16d ago
It's sold for $30 now. The old version is free but that's not updated anymore apparently. When he asked whether long time supporters would want to pay $30 bucks for the game I don't think that was implied? Seems fair to be annoyed.
- foo12bar 16d ago
  The free version is still being updated. Both the free version and the paid version are on v53.16: https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ https://steamdb.info/app/975370/history/ https://steamdb.info/app/975370/history/
  - simonh 16d ago
    Yes, but apparently the latest free versions don't have the keyboard UI either. In this context old version means keyboard version.
    - foo12bar 16d ago
      So, the developer updates both the free version and the paid version with the latest features (the only difference is the free version is sans GUI), and continues to serve the older free keyboard only 0.47 version on his website, and I'm supposed to be upset by this? Because he dropped the keyboard UI feature? DFHack already added back the keyboard cursor, anyway: https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/tools/toggle-kbd-cursor.html https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/tools/toggle-kbd-curs...
      - no_multitudes 16d ago
        This DFHack command just toggles the 'enable keyboard cursor' feature. The issue is that the new keyboard cursor only works under specific scenarios, like designating digging sites. I don't think there's a way to use the keyboard cursor for everything like in 0.47. (I agree with your broader point that it's not reasonable to be angry at Bay12 for dropping this feature.)

mempko 17d ago

The new updates got me back into dwarf fortress. I'm sure there are more players now then ever before.

db48x 17d ago

What you are asking for is completely unreasonable. There’s no way that one programmer can maintain two completely separate UIs. Keep in mind that they could not simply “add graphics” to the existing interface, they had to write a completely new one that was not based around fixed–size character cells.

AngryData 16d ago
Wasn't the graphical interface 95% outsourced to others? And originally the graphic version was suppose to be layered on top and leave the underlying version of the game barely touched from the player's side. It was even touted as an excuse at the time to fix some of the keyboard shortcuts that were inconsistent among different submenus, and certainly not to eliminate or supersede keyboard interfaces.
- bananaboy 16d ago
  The art was outsourced to pretty much one artist. Zach and Tarn implemented it.
- db48x 16d ago
  Programmers and artists at Kitfox helped, but no, 95% of the work on the UI was not outsourced. Perhaps if you add in all of the countless time spent drawing sprites for all of the creatures in the game. And your understanding of “layering” is simply wrong. The _game_ is the same underneath the UI, aside from the new features that have been added and the bugs that have been fixed, but the UI was ripped out and rewritten. It could not be any other way. You are correct that the goal was not to eliminate keyboard–driven interfaces, but the rewrite did completely replace the entire UI with something new. And that new UI does not have the same structure as the old UI. For example, in the old UI you used to have to first enter the “designations” menu and then choose “dig”. So digging had the keyboard shortcut ‘d d’. To place buildings you typed ‘d b’ to “designate buildings”, and to “designate stockpiles” was ‘d p’. But now these three things are all at the top level of the menu, so simply typing ‘m’ for digging, ‘b’ for buildings, or ‘p’ for stockpiles is all you need to do. (Digging cannot be on ‘d’ because the view is now moved using the WASD keys.) There is no designate menu any more. The old keyboard shortcuts are simply meaningless. If you prefer different keyboard shortcuts then you can customize them. One of the features of the rewritten UI is that there is also a new UI for customizing the key bindings.

AngryData 16d ago

Is it really that bad? I haven't played since the GUI update but was thinking about getting into it again because I still have years of muscle memory from it. But if I am forced to use the mouse im not sure I even want to bother. There is absolutely no way I could play the game at the same speed I use to if I have to resort to mouse-only features.

oortoo 16d ago
IMO, the steam release is not very good. Especially if you had been used to using the top mods that existed before the steam release for ease of control.

sandworm101 16d ago

You dont want to know your hours. Perhaps my greatest shame is the number of hours i have spent on factorio. I was afk for much of that (letting the factory run) but ... i would not want other people to see the number.

Agentlien 16d ago

[dead]

EinigeKreise 16d ago

I have to agree. Sure, the new GUI is a some kind of accessibility improvement over the old, but is seriously underpowered for e.g. any kind of repetitive tasks (which are not atypical in DF). Most annoying is the fact that even though a fair number of keyboard shortcuts exist, a full pipeline often does not. It's barely more efficient to use the keyboard since you'll still have to switch over to the mouse every second action. I know that the keyboard features are coming at some point, but I doubt it's a very high priority. My hopes rest on the modding improvements; once the UI becomes moddable, the old one is recreated in an instant. Until that, I'll stick to the trusty 0.47. (I have bought the "new" game to show support and thank for all the earlier work, of course.)

klrefg 16d ago

It wasn’t “tens of thousands a month” outside of some exceptional months. IIRC usually it was in the single digits which is not fantastic for a two people in the US

fph 16d ago
("single digits" here means 1000-9999 USD, not 1-9 USD.)

well_ackshually 16d ago

Dwarf Fortress used ASCII graphics & KB controls because that's what was cheap and fast to implement. Tarn & Zach always wanted proper graphics & mouse support, and has always been the vision from day one. >Long-term supporters, in this case, means people paying, and not insubstantial amounts either - You clicked on a button that said "support", where it was explicitly pretty much a tip jar, and now you feel entitled to keyboard controls ? You're full of shit.

polytely 16d ago

well the old versions are still available, i think they handled the transition to steam pretty well.

dfbettermice 16d ago

[dead]

oortoo 16d ago

Steam release was absolutely botched. I didn't want to say it at around the time it came out, because I wanted it to succeed... but they dropped the ball in a big, big way. Lazy Newb Pack and other fan mods are still the best way to play.

babelfish 16d ago

Adding a G to the UI is 'giving the finger' to their old players? When they include support for ASCII-like tilesets so you can play the exact same way? "Gamers" are the most entitled people on earth, I swear