A hotkey can be assigned to a DFHack script that reports the current cursor coordinates when the player wants to get his bearings.Īll Dwarf Fortress input consists of keypresses, so it should be trivial to configure any input device to control Dwarf Fortress. If one can interpret sonar pings out to N radius, have the game render out 2N by 2N tiles centered on the cursor. If we go with the sonar idea, there is no reason to limit the map to what appears on a monitor screen.
DWARF FORTRESS TEXT ENCODING HOW TO
If you want to go all out, folks have figured out how to make the game render multiple z levels, and it's theoretically possible to make that sonar ping three-dimensional. I'm not sure what the current norm is in representing two-dimensional structures in sound, but I'm imaging a sonar ping from the cursor with some type of multi-channel sound system. This map would be difficult for a sighted person to interpret, but easier to convert into sound. The background color can encode a third level of detail, which should probably be reserved for state information like "injured creature" or "wet stone" or "designated for digging."Ī keypress can be used to interrogate a tile for additional detail, such as the game's current look command. Among unmined tiles, one color for all soils, one color for normal sedimentary stones, one color for all gemstones, etc. The foreground color can encode a second level of detail. A simple sound-based representation of that can be the first level of detail. Maybe have three or four glyphs for creatures, depending on how much clutter one is willing to endure. There is no reason one could not set all unmined tiles to one specific glyph, all furniture to a different specific glyph, and so on. The people who make graphics packs for DF routinely alter the tiles and colors used to represent things in the game. I don't see any way of encoding 65536 possible tile images times hundreds of onscreen tiles, but some simplification seems possible without losing the underlying simulation. The player can use hotkeys to get detailed information about a tile, but the combination of glyph and colors is supposed to tell the player what is going on. The tile can also be flashing, meaning it alternates with another glyph with its own colors. Each tile has one of 256 glyphs, one of sixteen foreground colors and one of sixteen background colors. The problem is the map part of the main screen. The main screen is quite cluttered, but I am confident that DFHack could scrape all of the textual data from the game engine and report it in a friendlier format. This would be more challenging to fix with DFHack, but perhaps not insurmountable. Some even have "tabs" along the top, that bring up different sub-screens. Some of the status screens are divided into vertical columns which might give a screen reader trouble. This should be easy to reformat with DFHack. Some additional bits of information are located around the edges of the screen including the number of idle dwarves, the current frames-per-second performance, the current z-level, and the phase of the moon.Īdditional screens are all-text, though some have a vertical scroll-bar along the edge. You can turn off that overview map without losing anything important. The leftmost is the map, the center one is the menu, and the rightmost is an overview map that is pretty much useless. To start, I can tell you is what a sighted player sees, to give you an idea of what combination of solutions is needed.īy default, the primary screen in fortress mode has three vertical sections. I think a set of simple sounds getting more complex with the detail level is a good start of an idea. The ironic thing is that Civ is much less likely to become accessible. We use similar techniques to play turn-based games like Civilization. It really depends on the skill of the person describing, and their familiarity with the game. This is kind of a tangent to the main point, but still at least interesting.Īs for playing with other people, I haven't done it in a while, and they largely described things in broad detail and took general orders from me… "Let's dig a tunnel into that rock face," or "Construct workshops at this level," and so on. That helps a lot with conceptualization, because I can imagine, say, a hill or a tree or whatever as being X z-levels high.
![dwarf fortress text encoding dwarf fortress text encoding](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16680/120728.png)
DWARF FORTRESS TEXT ENCODING SERIES
One thing I think works in this game's favor is that it represents 3D space with a series of 2D plains. I think 80 to 90% of the work is probably getting around the SDL interface issue, and the rest is gravy. They might lessen the cognitive load, so to speak, or at least speed up my ability to process information.
![dwarf fortress text encoding dwarf fortress text encoding](https://bay12games.com/dwarves/imgs/may_7_world_map.png)
Tones and other audio cues are definitely something else to consider. I think that's largely a Fortress mode thing. It doesn't have to be Fortress mode, I suppose, but I would hate to feel like I was missing a lot of what makes DF unique.