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"Dwarf Fortress may be the most complex video game ever made, but all that detail makes for fascinating game play, as various elements collide in interesting and challenging ways. The trick is getting started. In this guide, Fortress geek Peter Tyson takes you through the basics of this menacing realm, and helps you overcome the formidable learning curve." Excellent idea, O'Reilly, and lovely cover, too!
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Paul Ford is always a joy, but this is a particular joy. To be savoured, and to let filter through you. There are lots of pithy quotations, but what sticks is what lies between the lines.
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You know, it's thing like this that make me really wish I had the time to devote to properly grokking Dwarf Fortress, because sod the pictures, it's just a brilliant _story_.
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"Smells like Dwarf Fortress". An illustrated account of a the nightmares of one particular fortress of dwarfs. Pretty, funny, and I still can't quite get my head around that game.
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"Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled." (Lots of other good stuff here, but I wanted to note this one down).
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"Oddly, it feels a bit weird to watch the videos from inside MAST. There’s something about the combination of these being taken in the visible light spectrum inside a reactor, at super high speeds, with a CCTV-like aesthetic, makes me feel like I shouldn’t be able to observe what’s going on. Somehow reams of sensor data is fine, but watching the actual reaction feels… wrong. Like you’re looking into the soul of something amazing."
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"High time resolution video of a MAST plasma showing the L-H transition (transition from low to high quality confinement) and ELMs (a form of instability in the plasma)." Wow. And: this is visible-light spectrum. Double-wow.
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"I have plenty of great uses for bacon in a barbecue pit, but the longer I thought about it, the more I wanted to step it up a notch and clog a few arteries for those guys. Behold, BACON EXPLOSION!!!" Oh sweet jesus.
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"Porsche’s move took three years of careful maneuvering. It was darkly brilliant, a wealth transfer ingeniously conceived like few we’ve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a fortune. Betting the wrong way, Adolf Merckle took his life." A powerful example of how much you can lose when shorting goes wrong.
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"Instead of encouraging you to join a group, find new friends, or spread the word, Burger King’s new Whopper Sacrifice Application is offering you a free Whopper if you DE-FRIEND 10 people from your friend list." Um.
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Two hours of HD Dwarf Fortress tutorials. Will they make it any easier? No idea, but it's got to be a start.
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"We spend a lot of time talking about games and films, but a much more useful corollary is music. The processes are spookily similar. Creators devise an experience, and commit it to code. The code then sits there, lifeless, until a performer picks it up. Then, through a complex tool which requires substantial manual dexterity to master, the performer interprets the experience the creator devised. No two people will play the code the same way. Some players will perform better than others. Some will get stuck and give up before the end."