#0006: Intro to Dwarf Fortress (AWWOT archived article)
Below is an article I wrote in 2014 for a defunct online magazine that my friend made. It was a general hobbyists/interest e-magazine for people into gaming, films, and tech. It’s name was “A Wonderful Waste of Time”.
This article is about a game called Dwarf Fortress. Describing this game succinctly is rather difficult so I’ll use the developer’s description of their game.
“Dwarf Fortress is a single-player fantasy game. You can control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer in a randomly generated, persistent world.” ~Bay12games.
A very simple summarisation for a very deep game.
image of a randomly generated world map taken from developer’s website
Article:
Starving Dwarfs
Dwarf Fortress, or to give it it’s full title: “Slaves to Armok: God of Blood – Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress”, has three main modes: Dwarf Fortress, Adventurer, and Legends; all of which are affected by the game’s chief mechanic, which is that it can create an entire new randomly generated world on request.
In doing so it doesn’t just create the geography of this new region; the layout of the vast continents, the high reaching mountain ranges, the sprawling deserts, dense jungle, sparse woodland, destitute badlands, and evil tainted realms to name but a few varieties of terrain you can experience; but the game then writes the history of the new region. This can range from the five years after world creation, all the way up to a maximum of 1050 years. This ‘history’ can include the recording of kingdoms which arose then might have fallen, the wanderings of great forgotten beasts, the formations and breakdowns of fraternities; right down to the individual life records of a boot making peasant. It can be as deep as you care to look, and in my opinion, that level of randomly generated lore is quite a feat; more so because the denizens’ histories are consistent and interwoven into each others time lines.
Fortress mode is the main game mode, it usually consists of building a large subterranean dungeon. You don’t have to though, you can stay on the surface if you want; it’s just a good idea to put your dwarfs safely underground, away from the dangers of sunlight. Once/if you have dug out a decent sized place, it’s usually time to turn your mind to industry.
There are numerous things you can do as the player to tailor your experience in fortress mode. Anything from ignoring whole swathes of industry, terrain, resources, to ignoring the pleas of random dwarfs; the last one I did especially in order to maintain sanity. Once my fortress grew to house hundreds of dwarfs (I think around 240 was the most I ever had at any one time), I stopped caring about individuals. Either they’d go insane because I didn’t have the materials for them to craft whatever valuable tat they wanted to, or their spouse or pets die; I didn’t care really. Once they became a problem, it’s time they went into time-out. I created a starvation room to put these troubled individuals into. Then once ready, I unlock the doors and someone hauls their corpses into a stone box coffin, and hey presto problem solved. No one’s unhappy anymore. Just make sure no one important to the bigger picture cares about them. I know it sounds cruel but my forts were built on the principal of efficiency, and inefficiency was paramount to criminality.
I find that I can keep fair relations with most neighbouring races, be it Dwarf, Human, or Elf; as most of them are pretty fair – that said, for goodness sake don’t trade the Elves anything made of wood, it really upsets them. They say killing trees is amoral or something to that effect, then refuse to do business with me. Yet if you look at what they’re selling it’s usually either more cloth than you can shake a tree at, or yes you guess it: a whole plethora of wooden tat. I’m talking eighteen Palm-wood spears here, empty Cidre-wood barrels, or useless musical instruments! Yeah, because that’s what my underground factory society needs, musical instruments.
In Adventurer mode, you play as an adventurer and explore the world. It’s a decent enough RPG experience, but not for me for the most part. I found the experience quite tepid, I mostly just wandered around interacting with little else but animals, which I had to kill. That said, I didn’t probably play enough of it to see what it really had to offer.
Legends mode consists purely for displaying all the worlds history, it’s just a record that you can read if you feel so inclined. What I like about this is it displays how deep the history generation really is, and it can also show you exactly how all of your tampering has affected the world. I found this to be quite interesting because I got to look into the past of all the creatures of note what attacked (and died in my fortress), for example all the forgotten beasts that attack my fort have usually travelled there through other realms and you can see what they did and where. It really is something to know that, that creature that died to my Militia Commander (and current mother of two) by having a palm wood spear (yeah, I bought five!) lodged into its stupid minotaur cranium; had in fact lived a long and good life up until that point; it adds so much character to the game and I enjoy it for one.
For all the positives of this title, it should be noted that this game has a few things that would most likely put a lot of people off of it. The ASCII graphical aesthetic I think would be the most obvious, although there are a fair few graphic mods one can use instead. The real problem I think this game has is it’s user interface. Once you get used to it and learn the hotkeys, it isn’t bad. But the initial plunge, well its a learning curve sharp enough to cut your fingers on.
Dwarf Fortress is a free game, not free-to-play, free. You can pick it up from the developers, “bay12games” website. Although I wouldn’t recommend playing the game as it is, the mods available for this game really do make the game so much more user friendly, especially Dwarf Therapist. The developers manage to fund this game purely via donations. So, if you try it and like me fall in love like with this modern ASCII monstrosity, kicking them a few farthings might not be a bad spend of your hard earned space bucks.
Comments:
Games like DF age like fine wine, they get better with age as either the developer or the community around them continues to add features and refine the experience.
Six years on, I definitely want to write about (and play) this game again. I just hope that I can say more of technical value other than just advertise a game that I enjoyed, like I did above.
#0005: The lost potential of Digimon (AWWOT archived article)
Below is an article I wrote in 2014 for a defunct online magazine that my friend created; called “A Wonderful Waste of Time”. It was a game and film hobbyist e-mag. The issue I wrote for had a theme of ‘evolution’; so I naturally chose to talk about the Digimon franchise. As you do.
Although my opinions have matured since then, and I do actually want to write about this again. I think its still nice to have this up anyway.
image of “hakase” Agumon (アグモン博士) taken from digimon.net
Article:
Digi-volution
I wanted to write a little about the Digimon franchise, and why I believed it could have been so much more than what it amounted to. In hindsight, it failed to do anything other than make a lot of money, which as far as failure states go, that’s pretty dang fantastic.
Now, I’m not really complaining about the video games, or the multiple mediocre anime series, the cards, or even that Tamagochi like “Digivice” thing; you know that one got thrown at the back of my head in maths class, yeah that one. I am complaining about the unfulfilled potential, the idea behind Digimon had.
When I first heard of Digimon my initial thoughts were something to the beat of: “Oh great! Another Pokémon clone”, and at a time when Nintendos rinse and repeat MO for hawking their games had just started to exhaust my patience/wallet. I think few people would argue that Digimon wasn’t always in Pokemon’s shadow. The similar visual styles, target audience, and market space made comparisons almost unavoidable.
However, Digimon unlike Pokémon had it’s core principals rooted in reality (technically Pokémon can be a reality one day; but I doubt we’d go to such unethical/expensive means, just to see giraffe-dogs fight). Digimon (the monsters that is) on the other hand are little more than lines of <insert your favourite programming language here> code. That’s why they can evolve then revert to their original forms, as well as trans-mutate with the additions of certain items (expansion packages, I assume).
So, if you can ignore all the fictional elements of the media (anime series mostly); things like the physical manifestations of digital programs, like when the Digiguys moved into the real world from the digital world, or the digitisation of physical matter bollocks, like when the kids popped into the digital world to have a wee look around; then there is little about Digimon that can’t be effectively replicated in real life. The Digiworld for example is not that different from those in an MMO (massively multiplayer online) game; a (semi)centralised unit with multiple access vectors. Imagine how interesting it would have been if instead of hawking a plethora of franchised tat at us until we got sick of the whole thing and lost interest; the string pullers behind Digimon instead decided to use their money to make an MMO, a real Digiworld, a huge sprawling thing of an island, that you can explore as your Digifellow of choice.
Let’s face it though, if an MMO was indeed made it’ll probably suck. Why such a dim view of MMOs you may ask? Well, it’s because they are one of the most expensive games to create, fiscally as well as in time. And quite a bit can go wrong in a long development cycle. Anything from funding being pulled, game engine falling out of date (it happens), to audiences losing interest after playing the game during a long Alpha or Beta release phase and moving on. However usually because MMOs are so expensive to produce, the people producing them, rather understandably, are less inclined to take risks while doing so, this then leads to a reduction of new ideas and innovations. Instead, producers tend to merely reiterate previously proven formulae of success. Ever wonder why there are so many MMOs that are like World of Warcraft? Unfortunately this has lead many people to misunderstand the term MMO, it is more of a definition of a medium than a specific genre of video game.
I suppose the real reason why I am disappointed in Digimon isn’t so much because they didn’t make a game, that in my opinion would’ve been a real-world manifestation of the concept of Digimon; it is more because like most franchises that primarily target children and young teens, it became a fad that came, had it’s rather brief time in the sun and then went; but in doing so it salted the ground for that concept. The idea of creating a digital world, with it’s own denizens, cultures, beliefs, weather, it’s own set of rules that may not necessarily reflect, either directly or in abstraction, our own worlds. A digital world that didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it really was, a world that is digital. In other words, unlike other MMOs that have come out, Ever Quest, Raiderz, Grand Fantasia, to name but a few that I’ve played in the past, as the player you wouldn’t have to suspend your disbelief to enjoy the fantasy of the worlds existence; because it actually exists.
The reason why I think Digimon is ultimately something of a bastion of unfulfilled potential is twofold; one, it had excellent ground work (all them cute monsters and that, as well as the island) for creating an interesting game world where the fantasy was more akin to an extension of our own reality than anything; and two, in being as popular as it was, it has somewhat claimed dominion over the idea of digital beings and worlds to the point that if a new company with considerable resources decided to create something along those lines, i.e. a digital game world, they would undoubtedly be compared to Digimon, likely thought as little more than a reiteration of Digimon and its ideas, thus making the creation of such a world less likely in the foreseeable future.
But you never know, I could be wrong, I really hope I am. Such a thing if done right (and I wouldn’t presume to know what that is), could be a very interesting prospect. Especially, in my opinion: if they created more of an interactive world, than a video game. By that I mean a platform, with tools for the creation of user generated content; in order to build the sort of world where people can genuinely build a home for their avatar, fight for territory, produce resources to sell, steal irreplaceable items, kill characters with real history. The sort of world that can develop it’s own social hierarchy, economy, and justice system; in a fluid and natural way. The sort of digital world that can just as easily be enjoyed by players, as it can be studied for insight into how such societal systems can come to be and develop as they mature.
image of Ogremon (オーガモン) taken from digimon.net
Comments:
As of 2020 it seems largely that the Digimon franchise has entered a time of relative dormancy (at least in the west). As far as I can tell, they still follow their multimedia strategy. Producing: anime, manga, games; and they even still produce and sell their digital pets: the Digivices. This actually surprised me somewhat, since in the western markets they are considerably rarer. Mostly present in the form of over-priced imports. Oddly however, Tamagochi seems to have more relevance (and decent prices) here as far as the market for virtual pets goes.
extract from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/digimon
The real interesting part I have noticed while looking through their various iterations of the Digivice (digital pet) product: is that I found more than 20 iterations of the toy over the 23 years (from 1997 to 2020 – basically serialised with yearly releases). Yet, there really doesn’t seem to be any leap in technology between them. It is really interesting when you compare their earliest products to their current line-up. Other than a few features like battling the Digimon with each other, there really doesn’t seem to be much of a development in the products in the last 20 years. At least not at a cursory inspection.
example advert from digimon.net for a 2020 digivice
I should note that I do not own a digital pet and I never encountered one as a child beyond watching my school mates play with them. So I am aware that they may be (probably is) a lot that doesn’t meet the eye that is going over my head when it comes to this. I’m just looking at 20 years of Bandai selling a little key-chain game with 3 buttons and a mono-colour LCD. Initially I perceived this to be a failure of some sort. But once I thought about it a little more. I actually think this is a success state. Like the crocodile: it seems to have found it’s niche and has encountered little reason to evolve over the years. They still seem to sell enough to warrant making them in 2020.
example advert from digimon.net for a 2020 digivice
To wrap this up, I will be needing to consume more Digimon media. Especially by playing the games that they have released over the years; this includes purchasing a few digital pets to tinker with as-well, for when I do decide to do a write up on this subject again. I am predominantly interested in what the franchise has done with tech to realise their creators’ ambitions, and consequently – years on because of this I still find the idea behind Digimon compelling. The fact that they are ‘real’. Real in so much as they pretend to be, exactly what they are. Digital creations.
In other words the realisation of a Digimon is a very real prospect. Especially when you consider modern strides with artificial intelligence, learning algorithms, and virtual as well as augmented reality technology as a medium to experience the creations. It doesn’t seem so far fetched to imagine a VR game with an online world, populated with other players and basic AI Digimon to that will remember your interactions and adjust their behaviours accordingly to you.
I find myself sitting here at a loss as to what topic I should go with for my first article on this site. It needs to be something interesting, and more importantly this first post will set the standard for those to come; so it needs to be good.
If you read the title, you probably can guess what topic I chose. Yeah, after spinning it in my head for a while; I decided just to go with how this site came into existence. This is after all supposed to be a technical blog (of sorts), so it seems fitting that we start with the basic technology of this website itself.
So what is it that you actually need to create a website? Well, like most questions in life, the answer is: it depends. In this case I needed three things to get up and running: 1) a domain name, an official registered name for my website; 2) a site-builder, software to help me make the thing; and finally 3) a host, some always-online servers to hold the code and contents of the site, these are the computer(s) that users will connect to when they visit the website.
Initially I thought that creating a website would be no sweat. Just get a domain name, get a host, and hash out something in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (the holy trinity!). No builders necessary. No worries. It should take me exactly “one weekend” to do this. Right?
Well, unfortunately no. I think I fell victim to my own hubris, or more accurately the Dunning-Kruger effect. There was and is so much more to the process that I was unaware of, that I actually thought it’d be straight forwards and easy. Having said that however I should outright state; that yes, creating a web site has never been simpler or easier for the uninitiated. With site builders and turn-key solutions (like wordpress.com or squarespace.com for example); that largely abstract out all the mechanical technicalities, into simple graphic interfaces that a non-technical person can intuitively operate. A good real-world example customer for these would be an artist creating an online portfolio of their works.
These solutions however did not particularly interest me much, as I am interested in the technicalities of the actual infrastructure of the website itself. This I found to be something that is largely abstracted out of relevance by these public facing and user friendly interfaces. Another concern I’d like to voice is that, although these company services do make it very straight forward to get an online presence. They do however charge you for every step on the way, and at the end of it you may end up with something that you don’t exactly want and have spent money on it to boot.
Examples include: purchasing a packaged feature-set that after gaining some experience you realise that you have no use for; or in a bid to save money: purchasing the cheapest packages available then realising after the fact, that your use-case requirements are in excess of the service package’s limitations.
This was one of my primary concerns, and as a result caused me to be very cautious when selecting something out of the numerous and quite frankly somewhat overwhelming options. So many companies, site-builders, hosts, and all the packages and deals that they use and offer. So, after some time being put off from pulling the trigger on anything in particular; then procrastinating (naturally). I finally decided to write up a clear criteria of exactly what I wanted.
I always find that when venturing into the unknown (a bit melodramatic granted), it pays to have a plan, a goal, a list of objectives, a criteria, whatever you want to call it. I have also found it most effective for that plan to be concise in nature and hierarchal in structure. Id est: a numbered list.
So here’s mine:
I wanted a basic website for blogging and a light hosting of files. It will consist predominantly of written articles, image rich guides, as well as to host small to medium files and programs of my own creation (<100MB each). This means the storage size needs to be in excess of 50GB. All those files and HD pictures add up quickly.
I wanted my own unaffiliated domain name. It looks more professional in my opinion. For example: mywebsitename.net instead of something like: mywebsitename.wordpress.com or mywebsitename.googlesites.com.
I wanted the site to be adequately secure against malware, spam, and intrusion with minimal intervention on my part. In other words I wanted to be hands off when it came to securing my contents. I need good ready on-hand security without having to divert my time and efforts into a rabbit-hole of research, at least for now.
And finally, and most importantly. I wanted to be able to have this whilst maintaining a degree of privacy. I want an online presence without freely advertising my personal information to the world at large.
So that’s it: basic small bloggers site, with it’s own name, adequate hosting, some protection, some privacy, and with a comfortable storage limit. Obvious right, well not so in my experience. There is merit in writing down the obvious and enumerating it. It brings it to the front and centre and adds it to an objective hierarchy that one can work from.
In the end, after a frustrating period of paralysis via analysis, and exploring a multitude of different options on the market; I decided to just take the shortest route to my goal. Perhaps not the best route for my personal use-case, but that is the kind of thing one sees with experience and hindsight. So I decided to pick a reasonable option and just jump in and see how it goes.
And that is exactly what I did; I ended up going with wordpress.org as my choice of website builder. Three main reasons: one, it’s ubiquity – it is well known, well used, and well documented. So any issues I may come across, chances are good that someone else has, and probably documented a solution to boot. The second reason I liked WordPress, was because of it’s open-source and community driven nature. This makes it versatile meaning if there is a particular feature I wished for, chances are that someone else has, and has a documented implementation of it somewhere. Lastly, the third reason is simple, it is free. This allowed me to tinker with it without any financial investments.
As to why I didn’t just build the website out from source myself. Well beyond making a basic website consisting of static webpages linked together, this was beyond my skill-set and interest level at this time if I am honest. I wasn’t willing to spend the time and effort to learn to implement every little feature that I wanted for it. This could include anything from animated drop-down menus, to allowing user comments, or embedding videos within articles. It would have required more of a personal investment than I was willing to put in at the time; especially since I just wanted something useable and customisable to be up and running in a timely fashion. That, and I couldn’t justify taking time from other projects and responsibilities, the reward to work ratio wasn’t sufficient.
Please note, there is a distinct difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com. WordPress.org is just the open source website builder software. Whereas wordpress.com is a company that bundles in the website builder with their own hosting and support services. They are not the same entity.
Next up, hosting. This one is quite simple since as far as I know, one competent host is as good as another. I went with bluehost.com since they were recommended from wordpress.org via affiliate links. Their prices for what I wanted were also reasonable. Funnily enough, I got my domain name via bluehost’s partners. So it was a case of choosing WordPress and being funnelled to affiliates and partner’s services for the rest. It made things simple and since I actually have little experience in setting up websites; I was more concerned with not using the “wrong” company (dodgy or otherwise) or “wrong” tools (wasting time learning inferior tool sets – been there done that…), than I was concerned with choosing the best deal. As long as what I got was what was advertised, and what was advertised was good enough to get started.
With the WordPress optimised setup, I ended up with a “shared webhost service”. Essentially my website would be sharing the server with many others like it. This is because a simple WordPress website doesn’t really need anything that requires dedicated hardware. For example: large processing capabilities for online gaming. This website wasn’t going to be folding proteins or using their server for automated stock trading or anything like that. It also didn’t need a large reservoir of storage space available, since it wasn’t an archival or file hosting website.
The “shared webhost service” is the one of the cheaper options available. Others include a “virtual private server”, this is a mid-tier option allowing the subscriber to have a virtual server with it’s own allotted RAM and CPU usage. Additionally, and probably the most expensive option available is renting a dedicated server. Its exactly what it sounds like, the subscriber just rents a box dedicated to just them; and consequently they can have complete control over it. The latter two mentioned here are overkill for this humble hobbyist’s blog. They are more appropriate for the other examples I mentioned above.
While I was going through the processing of setting up the host; and looking through their various options; two features/services that they offered popped out to me, and I would like to highlight them for you. The first is “domain privacy” and the second is that of “SSL Certificate”.
Domain Privacy. This basically allows you to own the website without having your personal information plastered all over whois.com (or who.is, or whois.net, or what have you). Websites that comb website registrars for ownership information. As the newly minted website owner, your contact information would be listed there. Alarmingly, this includes: your full name, address! and any contact numbers or email addresses you provided whilst registering the site. It should also be noted that lying on the registration is apparently punishable by law (I read that somewhere during the signing process, but I can’t find a direct reference or link stating that. Apologies). Unfortunately I can’t actually speak to exactly where it applies, and what kind of punishment.
This is not really a problem for a business, with its own legal identity and premises; however it most certainly a problem for the private individual. If you then purchase “domain privacy” from the hosting or registering company, this will result in them acting as a mediator and using their information as a substitute for yours on these public listing.
I believe different countries have different laws regarding public displays of website owner’s personal information, via sites like who.is. Some permit it by default, others favour the owner’s privacy and don’t allow the display by default. My concern here is, although I live in a country that [with regards strictly to this] favours the individual’s privacy, the company that I’m doing business with is in another country, one that does not. Whose countries laws takes priority? Is seemed like the more prudent thing for me to do was to just purchase this service, rather than leave it to chance.
The second feature of note I encountered, is that of a “SSL certificate”. Put simply this gives the website a certificate of authenticity. This is issued from some association charged with verifying that the websites users connect to are who they say they are. In addition this allows secure connections to site servers using the HTTPS protocol. This is important to me as I know I am rather reticent to visit many non-https websites, especially since many modern browsers such as Firefox (circa 2020), warn users who connect to non-https or unsecured websites. Its just another layer of security to take advantage of. One that grants a level of authenticity.
Moving on. It should be noted that when I purchased the hosting I also got the ability to setup my own emails system using cPanel. cPanel is a general control panel for web hosts that enables you to control all the various programs for your website. In this case an email client. I decided to go with one central email address (mail@tinkerersblog.net) using the webmail service and the roundcube mail client. There are other options of email client available, including: Horde and squirrelmail.
That’s basically the process from start to finish. At this point I have a basic WordPress template site and email. All that was left was to customise it to my liking and create content. In retrospect, the biggest hurdle for me was the over-abundance of choice on the market. It required an exhaustive process of researching and vetting the various services, and options available there-in. Other than that, once you have chosen a particular company, host, or web-builder you like; they tend to do a good job of keeping you in their ecosystem for the rest of the things you need to get set up. They do this predominantly via affiliate links and discounts.
The funny thing is now that I am committed and have paid approximately £180 for a 3 year deal for this site; I still think that maybe I could have found something better. A particular tool-set, or cheaper deal that would suit me more, maybe I invested into a bad company or technology, or perhaps I made a mistake when buying optional add-ons? Who knows? I guess I will, later. Still though, it is a nagging feeling that lingers on after the decision has been made.
Besides, the primary objective was to get started and that has been done. It’s only really with hindsight that I can make better decisions for my particular use-case; and that comes later. I guess that Steven Wright quote holds water here: “Experience is the thing you get just after you needed it” … I am paraphrasing. Anyway, That’s all for my musings.
