Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains its Complexity & Origins | Noclip Interview
/noclip6 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020-2022
2M views · 6 years ago · interview · evergreen
A /noclip interview with Tarn Adams of Bay 12 Games about Dwarf Fortress: where the ASCII simulation came from, how it works, and the plans for its Steam release. It includes his telling of the famous bug in which cats were poisoned by alcohol.
HN points to it whenever Dwarf Fortress comes up, mainly for the alcohol-poisoned cats bug story and a developer's view of the game's depth.
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7 comments from Hacker News
One of the creators (Tarn, specifically) does interviews fairly often, talking about the game and progress. Here's a video telling a very famous story about tracking down a bug that involved alcoholic cats ▶ this video There was also a recent article about Dwarf Fortress published to the Stack Overflow blog link Edit: There's really a decent amount of stuff out there, they've been making the game for almost 20 years now. So here is a talk that tries to explain DF to an audience, and does talk a little about the simulation. link I adore DF and am one of those folks who enjoys playing, not just watching videos on youtube. If you do want to give it a go, make sure you find an "Intro to DF" type video and follow it. It's a big learning curve but I love the game so much, and knowing the story of it's creation over time makes me love it even more. It is truly a labor of love by two brothers who have chosen to make it their life's work.
I'd also recommend watching this interview NOCLIP recently did with Tarn where he talks specifically about the Steam release... ▶ this video
This interview with Tarn Adams (one of the creators of dwarf fortress) is amazing and gives a good idea of the depth and pace of development. It’s pretty bonkers TBH, I’d love to understand the abstractions and data models involved with software engineering this ambitious. ▶ this video
You may find this NoClip interview interesting, though it doesn't delve too much into technical things and is more high level/ game design focused. ▶ this video
The obligatory greatest bug report ever. Dwarf Fortress developer gets in depth about it. So great. The complexity of this game is mind boggling. ▶ this video
The bug was a numerical error that would cause cats to drink something like the equivalent of a pint of beer for every lick, and therefore die prematurely. He talks about it in this video: ▶ this video
When talking about complexity I was fascinated with this interview of one of the dwarf fortress developers explaining how the cats kept dying from alcohol poisoning due to emergent behavior caused by a bug ▶ this video