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> No need. Plenty of 3rd party tools. Take a look at the Lazy Newbs Pack .... A lot of trouble has been put into making tools such as Dwarf Therapist in the La

by exDM69 11y ago

> No need. Plenty of 3rd party tools. Take a look at the Lazy Newbs Pack .... A lot of trouble has been put into making tools such as Dwarf Therapist in the Lazy Newb Pack. They're basically made by snooping the memory of the DF process (unless I'm mistaken here). If DF source code was available (even if it would be immutable), a tremendous amount of effort could have been into better use than practically reverse engineering parts of the core game. In my opinion, Dwarf Fortress could be much better if the source code was open or at least available.

orf 11y ago
Or there was some formal API or at least some convention for communicating without hacks
ximeng 11y ago
He does talk in the interview about why he doesn't do that, and the reasons aren't completely unreasonable (basically he wants to avoid professionalising the dev process)
- clarry 11y ago
  That sounds unreasonable to me. To put a different license and dump the source somewhere, you don't need to change your personal process at all.
  - VonGuard 11y ago
    You absolutely do. Open sourcing code is not just throwing a tarball over the wall. It's comments, it's documentation, it's changelogs that go a lot deeper than "fewer children are spawned." When people are reading the code, they want to make changes. They want to help. Tarn has no interest in changing his job from one of programmer/designer to one of gatekeeper/manager. I can completely understand why he doesn't want to do this. It'd make a lot more work for him, and people would come to him with complaints, demands, questions about it.
    - clarry 11y ago
      No, you don't need to change anything about comments, documentation, changelogs, anything. You can totally just throw a tarball over the wall. No, you don't need to accept contributions. When it's your project, you do whatever you like, regardless of the license. Whether you occassionally upload a binary or a source snapshot.
imdsm 11y ago
I'm all for OSS but that would be a privilege, not a right. They're keeping it close to their hearts, where it belongs. Call me a purist but I'm more than happy with the way it's progressing.
Solarsail 11y ago
Not really contradicting you here, but DFHack for the last couple of years has worked as a shim between DF and the SDL library. Substantially simplified the process of changing the game's behaviour, and mostly eliminated the need to poke around memory addresses. DFHack is also essentially the third party modding library for everyone else, with only Dwarf Therapist still poking around memory last I heard. Kind of uninteresting for most players, but hey; this IS hacker news.

by exDM69 11y ago

orf 11y ago

Or there was some formal API or at least some convention for communicating without hacks

ximeng 11y ago

He does talk in the interview about why he doesn't do that, and the reasons aren't completely unreasonable (basically he wants to avoid professionalising the dev process)

clarry 11y ago
That sounds unreasonable to me. To put a different license and dump the source somewhere, you don't need to change your personal process at all.
- VonGuard 11y ago
  You absolutely do. Open sourcing code is not just throwing a tarball over the wall. It's comments, it's documentation, it's changelogs that go a lot deeper than "fewer children are spawned." When people are reading the code, they want to make changes. They want to help. Tarn has no interest in changing his job from one of programmer/designer to one of gatekeeper/manager. I can completely understand why he doesn't want to do this. It'd make a lot more work for him, and people would come to him with complaints, demands, questions about it.
  - clarry 11y ago
    No, you don't need to change anything about comments, documentation, changelogs, anything. You can totally just throw a tarball over the wall. No, you don't need to accept contributions. When it's your project, you do whatever you like, regardless of the license. Whether you occassionally upload a binary or a source snapshot.

imdsm 11y ago

I'm all for OSS but that would be a privilege, not a right. They're keeping it close to their hearts, where it belongs. Call me a purist but I'm more than happy with the way it's progressing.

Solarsail 11y ago

Not really contradicting you here, but DFHack for the last couple of years has worked as a shim between DF and the SDL library. Substantially simplified the process of changing the game's behaviour, and mostly eliminated the need to poke around memory addresses. DFHack is also essentially the third party modding library for everyone else, with only Dwarf Therapist still poking around memory last I heard. Kind of uninteresting for most players, but hey; this IS hacker news.