Dwarf Fortress just got an amazing update that changes some portraits up to make them look much better, although I will admit that the older ones are quite funny to look at and they almost feel quite intentional in a way. The team states that Gen “AI” or any other sort of trickery would never be used in any part of the process, especially when you already have powerful tools like procedural generation in your hands to help with things. People who utter things such as generative “AI” being useful just show that they don’t really know how tech works if I have to be honest and I’m being kind.
Dwarf Fortress gets fixed up
Along with the portraits of animals being made with a more serious tone, there has been some fixes for bugs that have been happening in the game. If you know about it, Dwarf Fortress is an hyper complex game with tons of interactions and things to do, the world almost feels as if it were alive and living inside your computer even when you don’t look. What the team behind it did has been something truly amazing, and the community stories behind it are a rabbit hole to dig deep into if you want to have some fun.
Procedural generation has always been with us for a long while, and the idea behind it is something amazing, by using very few resources and the assets you yourself made, you can make thousands of variations that can help speed up the development process. All of this is done in an ethical way because things need to be similar between each other, no stolen data is used during the process like generative “AI” does, and it most certainly doesn’t burn out entire lakes and contaminate the populace using that water. Dwarf Fortress shows us that we don’t really need generative “AI” to do anything, we were already doing it perfectly fine for decades.
