There are some other radical changes that you should be aware of before you download the beta client. One of the first suggestions Tarn came up with when I asked him what he wanted in Dwarf Fortress 2 was 'More dwarves', so you now start the game with 9 dwarves instead of seven. That's been the basis of the viral marketing ARG that we've been running, so if you see 7+2 =9 anywhere, you should strip search anyone nearby who is unusually short of stature or has a beard so you can find the next clue. My next few posts will also have sequences of letters randomly underlined, which should be used to send morse signals across an old Atlantic telephone cable we found to unlock a stenographic photograph of Scamps. And Microsoft have kindly reprogrammed Windows to randomly include a blue screen of death featuring an ASCII rendition of Gabe Newell which will haunt your dreams.
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part five)
We were confident enough at this point to open up DF2 to a select group of beta testers and put feelers out to those we knew would take an interest in a multiplayer procedurally generated kick ass fantasy world. It was one of these, Randy Pitchford who was ultimately responsible for the radical change in direction of the visuals for DF2. Randy was concerned that the look of DF2 was 'too shit brown': mostly because he kept locking the doors to the washroom in the fortresses he built, so his dwarves would work overtime. We brainstormed this over Skype - and during the chat, it was almost like a light bulb went off above both our heads at the same time. There was a power cut in my house, and Randy was turning off the lights to save on power bill costs since the light from the monitors was enough to keep his developers awake while they worked overtime. When we reconnected, we were both babbling 'how about red and blue'. I made Randy promise that we'd get to use the look we discussed for our game, not his, and started revising the engine.
What you see in the open beta of DF2 is the original engine ultra-realistic graphics, which are then rotoscoped and painted using another algorithm Chris came up with. Overall, the look was well received by our beta testers, except Eskil Steenberg, who suffers from a rare visual condition that means everything he sees looks like an impressionist painting and who found the new appearance 'derivative'. I'm telling you this story now, ahead of you playing the game, so you don't blame Chris for cartoon like appearance.
Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part four)
With Chris on board, the pace of development improved considerably, and we were able to include version 2 of the procedural animation system that Spore used, translating the Dwarf Fortress raws that Tarn was building into life like models complete with advanced moves like floppy legs and crab walking that hadn't been possible with the original engine.
Prior to Chris joining, we had done some experimentation with mo cap through a contact of mine at Weta Works. While this didn't pan out, we did use the Battle of Dagorlad from the first Lord of the Rings movie as a reference for DF2 fortress invasions:
Apparently the reason there are no dwarves in this battle is that Peter Jackson wasn't happy with the CGI animation at the time: he felt it couldn't capture their natural grace and athleticism.
Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part three)
Chris had spent half of 2008 personally replying to every abusive email he had been sent by disappointed purchasers of Spore - including the ones I was procedurally generating using the DF2 Markov chain code. I've not included my original email because removing the more extreme expletives renders it unintelligible, but here's the remaining correspondence, for your edification:
It's clear that you have a passionate love of games. It's just you don't understand the pressure we were under, and you have to admit the final result is still impressive.I would like to apologise now unconditionally for anything mean I've said about Chris, or anyone else who worked on Spore. He is an incredibly hard working and talented individual, and I've learned over the intervening years that in any large software project, compromises have to be made. It turns out that Will was right, and was ultimately responsible for the decisions that led to Spore being a less than completely hard core reinvention of every game genre that ever existed. It's just a shame he wasn't involved in DF2, like Chris was.
-- Chris
[text removed]you, you piece of [text removed]. I could do better. In fact I have: [link removed]
Regards,
Andrew Doull
Wow. I don't know what to say except: how can I get involved?
-- Chris
Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part two)
Sam had an agreement with Intel to allow him to license the Offset engine as open source, much as John Carmack had made available earlier iterations of the Doom and Quake engines, and he was willing to make the engine available as an alternative front end for Dwarf Fortress, provided Tarn opened up the DF code.
While Sam's suggestion was appealing, Tarn and I had both moved on considerably from the original Dwarf Fortress concept, and we decided instead to branch the DF code base, and split the work three ways. Tarn would continue to maintain the DF1 code, while I would work on the DF2 code with Sam consulting after hours as time was made available.
Why did I end up being lead developer? Real Life had thrown me a curve ball, in the form of the global financial crisis, and I had lost my job and had to move into my parents basement with my wife. The situation was highly embarrassing - why is why I've not mentioned anything about my personal life on my blog - but it meat I was able to spend a considerable amount of time integrating the code, and building a front end using the Offset engine. The visuals were so impressive that it made the only other 3d Dwarf Fortress viewer available at the time, 3Dwarf look like Populous.
I want to show you this segment from Sam McGrath's demo of Project Offset on Attack of the Show - mostly because I spent about 18 months with the dwarf render Sam shows off to start with. We ended up calling the model Frender because we used him so often as a place holder. He used to get pretty messed up by some of the AI bugs we encountered - if you've read the Dwarf Fortress development logs you'll have an idea of the kind of situations he found himself in.
With the procedural character generation algorithms we use in the beta, you'll have a 1 in 63,000,000,000 chance of running into an exact copy of Frender in the final game:
You don't see it on camera, but a friend of Sam's who was at the filming of the show says that he did an incredible double-take when the host mentions another game with the word Fortress in the title. He recovers by the time they cut back to him, but I wonder if this is where the seed of the idea was first planted.
We knew even from early game play testing, that we had something special, and Tarn started devoting his special project days at the end of the month checking in his 'downstream' Dwarf Fortress changes into upstream DF2 improvements.
It was about this time that Chris Hecker became involved.
Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part one)
After Dwarf Fortress won the Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2007, Tarn Adams and I started corresponding by email, discussing our shared love of the roguelike genre and where we thought the genre was going in the next few years. I believed then, and still firmly believe, that I saw procedural content generation replacing the need for level designers, which meant that we could throw aside the shackles of tunnel like level design and replace it with roaming open worlds, generated on the fly as you explore the landscape. Tarn aka the Toady One was drawn to the idea of having a 3d graphics engine based fantasy world and that he'd made significant architectural mistakes in going with a tile based design and would need to start again from scratch to met this goal. For a while, that is all that Dwarf Fortress 2 consisted of: a long email chain brainstorming ideas and filled with blue sky thinking.
The release of Spore was like a body blow. That so much impressive developer talent that ultimately been wasted creating a universe filled with curate's egg worlds left us both feeling devastated and at a loose end. I particularly had high hopes for the game, and felt Will Wright had betrayed both himself and his team by deciding to go with cute, instead of (r)evolutionary.
It was about this time that Tarn was contacted by Sam McGrath, of Project Offset fame. Offset Software, as it is now known, had been acquired by Intel, and Sam was concerned that much of the original concepts for the project would be delayed or diluted by the corporate culture that Intel was imposing. Project Offset, for you not familiar with the concept, was an engine designed to allow rapid prototyping and development of 3d art assets using procedural techniques - which Sam had turned into an impressive set of technology demos with the intention of building an open fantasy world. I've included one demo below, just so you can see where we were starting from with DF2:
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Monday, 29 March 2010
Friday, 26 March 2010
Thursday, 25 March 2010
A tragic turn of events...
My heart goes out to Robert Culp's family and friends.
(I hope I wasn't tempting fate with my previous meditation on Valve and death).
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
In memorium
The flags are flying at half mast today at Valve as they commiserate the resignation of South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson. Luckily for some, they are also flying the Attorney-General's greatest legacy at half-price: the gore free, censored Australian edition of Left4Dead 2. Even this cheap, I'm not tempted by the artistically dismembered version Valve have been forced to sell down under.
Momento mori, Mr Atkinson, momento mori.
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