Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains its Complexity & Origins | Noclip Interview
/noclip6 HN recommenders · 2020–2022
2M views · interview · evergreen · Uploaded 2020-06-09
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.
1:00:43Jim Simons (full length interview) - Numberphile
Numberphile2
14:34Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005
JoshuaG
15:38Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho
grapefrukt
44:10Jan Willem Nijman - Vlambeer - "The art of screenshake" at INDIGO Classes 2013
Dutch Game Garden
1:02:42Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)
DevGAMM
1:07:26Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful
powerfuloutlet
53:31Growing a Language, by Guy Steele
Bill Pugh
1:01:40A Philosophy of Software Design | John Ousterhout | Talks at Google
Talks at Google
7 comments from Hacker News
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 [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: [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. [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. [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. [VIDEO]
I'd also recommend watching this interview NOCLIP recently did with Tarn where he talks specifically about the Steam release... [VIDEO]
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 [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.