The thing is, it's really not. Granted, I always used the Lazy Newbie Pack which gave you basic tiles, but once you get used to ASCII, things tend to be a lot easier. Also, this is a detailed simulation, so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics.
Remember, each creature has a bunch of parts with individual health, each tile can get stained by various materials (that can spread disease) and everything is made of various materials with all sorts of mostly-realistic properties. I mean, DF is the sole reason you can find the solid density of Saguaro rib wood on the internet and the value came from an empirical test of a small cube of Saguaro rib wood. It's in the DF raws.
So yeah, you might enjoy DF with a tile set like the LNP if you like the mechanics. But it's a super-complicated game so it takes a while to learn to control things, to learn the requirements to make various items, etc. It's not a game for everyone, you do have to sink quite a lot of time into learning it to enjoy it.
"this is a detailed simulation, so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics"
Consider Battlefield or COD Warzone, which simulate the effects of actions by multiple players (including projectile travel) in real time and still manage upwards of 100FPS of near photorealistic graphics.
Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.
Dwarf fortress is a very interesting game and a very deep simulation, but the idea that it's such a detailed simulation that graphics would not be possible is just untrue.
Honestly the UX in dwarf fortress is generally just insanely user-hostile and graphics are only a tiny symptom of that. And I say this as someone who plays and enjoys the game - I've had forts with upwards of 100 idiots^Wdwarfs in them, magma moats, breaching multiple cavern layers, surviving necromancer seiges etc. But every time I play I have to go through that thing over again where I try to figure out how to assign a pet to a person, when I set up a military squad getting them to wear the right equipment is a total chore, minecart UX is completely baffling. Also the simulation is very detailed but kind of broken in lots of annoying ways, like female dwarfs randomly dropping their babies while working, forgetting where they put them and then freaking out, random tantrum spirals because someone went out in the rain and so just decides to murder their colleagues etc.
>Consider Battlefield or COD Warzone, which simulate the effects of actions by multiple players (including projectile travel) in real time and still manage upwards of 100FPS of near photorealistic graphics.
>Or factorio, where people build insane megafactories with millions of machines in them and yet performance is great and the graphics will still show you the shadows of clouds passing overhead.
Compared to DF, both of those are an incredibly simple simulation that doesn't lend itself to emergent game play. If you're trying to make the argument that they're just as complicated and still have fancy graphics, that's not the case. DF is far, far, beyond anything in those "simulations" in terms of the back end.
I lament the lack of graphics in DF not because the UI is awful... I've played worse, and in fact Fallout 4's builder interface comes to mind... but because it's incomplete. Certain things that have shown up in third party utilities like Dwarf Therapist are nearly impossible to do without, making the base game more or less unplayable after a release until the third party stuff catches up.
A lot of what you mention regarding tantrum spirals has been fixed in the new release... the issues with dwarf emotions are much more balanced now. It's still the same game, though, so I haven't gotten decades into a fort yet, but I'm hopeful it'll be worth playing beyond the point it was in the past where things spiraled into angsty dwarf death.
>Certain things that have shown up in third party utilities like Dwarf Therapist are nearly impossible to do without, making the base game more or less unplayable after a release until the third party stuff catches up.
I called this Kerbal or Skyrim Syndrome amongs friends.
Games that are no longer playable vanilla after you've had the luxuries of some of the simple convenience addons.
"so things move a lot faster if you're not spending CPU on graphics."
Thats why most have a GPU and that is why there are graphic engines, who do the rendering only of what is needed and produced by the simulation. So no, unless DF uses the gpu for simulating which I doubt, better graphics will not really affect simulation speed, if done right.
DF employs OpenGL for rendering, see file df_linux/g_src/renderer_opengl.hpp, so the GPU will be used if appropriate drivers are installed. "Text" tiles and graphics tiles are equally fast – they are always bitmaps under the hood, see df_linux/data/art/*.png.
There is also an ncurses renderer with plain Unicode text output for use in a terminal emulator which may be GPU accelerated, but most term software is not.
It may be trivial to you, but it is abundantly clear by circumstantial evidence that ToadyOne is not a good programmer. This is beyond his means, otherwise it would have already been added.
This was not written by the game's author, ToadyOne, but someone else. ToadyOne complains that he cannot understand the code anymore. For this reason, he will not open the source code again until he is dead.
I can get the same thing with Rimworld. The dude devs the thing for free and he can do what he wants. But I'm not going to pick troll husbandry or dwarven venereal disease over a usable user interface when it comes to what I spend time gaming on.
Remember, each creature has a bunch of parts with individual health, each tile can get stained by various materials (that can spread disease) and everything is made of various materials with all sorts of mostly-realistic properties. I mean, DF is the sole reason you can find the solid density of Saguaro rib wood on the internet and the value came from an empirical test of a small cube of Saguaro rib wood. It's in the DF raws.
So yeah, you might enjoy DF with a tile set like the LNP if you like the mechanics. But it's a super-complicated game so it takes a while to learn to control things, to learn the requirements to make various items, etc. It's not a game for everyone, you do have to sink quite a lot of time into learning it to enjoy it.