[andrewclunn]

This. The UI is the final step. Right now it's about experimentation and determining the ideal game mechanics. The obtuseness means that the most obsessive and hard core are your play testers. This is a bad UI as part of good game design for what the current goals for dwarf fortress are.

[civilian]

As far as I understood, the UI is there to stay. The creator wrote his own game engine that is optimized for printing ascii to a screen-- it's not architected in a way that can plug-and-play with a different renderer.

[pck]

Cogmind is an interesting example of pure ASCII holding itself to a very high UI standard.

Here is a quick animated gif with a few examples of interactions:

http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2014/1...

[anchpop]

I would absolutely love if DF looked that good at some point! You're definitely right that just because it's ASCII doesn't mean it can't be visually appealing