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I am not so sure - I sometimes wonder if the problem with a "platform" that many people love and use, but very few can contribute to well, is that when complete

I am not so sure - I sometimes wonder if the problem with a "platform" that many people love and use, but very few can contribute to well, is that when completely open sourced it inevitably comes bogged down in politics and overcome by "deletionists" or similar - people who don't or can't contribute to the project but see themselves as guardians of it and hamper the efforts of others. Of course there's wikipedia as an example, but in open source gaming I feel that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup went the same way, with new releases tending to remove features in the aim of some ideological balancing "purity" regardless of it being actually fun or not. Therefore perhaps Dwarf Fortress will fare better with only very few passionate people working on it with impressive productivity. If it went fully open, I bet before long there's be a mission statement, a "DF way", statement of principles to which nobody can ever live up to, and then before you know it nobody can be bothered to fight to get a patch accepted (and forking brings its own maintenance hassles).

detaro 10y ago
I didn't read the wish for open-sourcing it as a wish for it to become a community project, or even just a project that accepts any outside contributions.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  What do you want from the source code then?
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Hit-by-a-bus insurance, basically.
  - detaro 10y ago
    I haven't played much DF, but from what I remember there are quite a few tools around it, which already hook relatively deep into the game, either by simulating keypresses (I think) or reading/writing game memory. Development of those probably would profit from easier access to game internals. There is "academic" interest in "how was this built". Even a project not normally accepting contributions can do this on special occasions if it wants (If I'm not mistaken, several features in Minecraft build upon mods made by fans. Of course, Minecraft is also closed-source, but it is relatively easy to get good decompilations since it is written in Java. You might argue that the existence of tools around DF proves that source access is not necessary for improvements to it?) For other games, I've often had a question along the lines of "I wonder how gameplay would change if ...". Sometimes that's solvable with a debugger and/or disassembler, but code would make it a lot easier. (With commercial games there is also the aspect of "can I share hacks/experiments like this", which admittedly isn't directly related to source access or a game being fully Open Source, and likely not an issue in the case of DF) Other posters mention the long term issue of game development surviving its creator, but of course that doesn't require source publication now. In general, I'd say it would be wrong to pressure a game creator in any way to open source their work, but I understand why people like games being open.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    I know DF is a hobby for Toady, and he's not interested in contributors to the core game because he likes doing everything himself, which is fine. But I'd like to see a situation like Minecraft (also closed-source, but even obfuscated Java is easy to reverse-engineer) where the creator(s) work on the core game and modders can add stuff if they like, without official support. That's sort of already happening with DF, but modding anything more substantial than data and font files is a huge bitch, because the code is fully compiled.

detaro 10y ago

I didn't read the wish for open-sourcing it as a wish for it to become a community project, or even just a project that accepts any outside contributions.

wolfgke 10y ago
What do you want from the source code then?
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Hit-by-a-bus insurance, basically.
- detaro 10y ago
  I haven't played much DF, but from what I remember there are quite a few tools around it, which already hook relatively deep into the game, either by simulating keypresses (I think) or reading/writing game memory. Development of those probably would profit from easier access to game internals. There is "academic" interest in "how was this built". Even a project not normally accepting contributions can do this on special occasions if it wants (If I'm not mistaken, several features in Minecraft build upon mods made by fans. Of course, Minecraft is also closed-source, but it is relatively easy to get good decompilations since it is written in Java. You might argue that the existence of tools around DF proves that source access is not necessary for improvements to it?) For other games, I've often had a question along the lines of "I wonder how gameplay would change if ...". Sometimes that's solvable with a debugger and/or disassembler, but code would make it a lot easier. (With commercial games there is also the aspect of "can I share hacks/experiments like this", which admittedly isn't directly related to source access or a game being fully Open Source, and likely not an issue in the case of DF) Other posters mention the long term issue of game development surviving its creator, but of course that doesn't require source publication now. In general, I'd say it would be wrong to pressure a game creator in any way to open source their work, but I understand why people like games being open.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  I know DF is a hobby for Toady, and he's not interested in contributors to the core game because he likes doing everything himself, which is fine. But I'd like to see a situation like Minecraft (also closed-source, but even obfuscated Java is easy to reverse-engineer) where the creator(s) work on the core game and modders can add stuff if they like, without official support. That's sort of already happening with DF, but modding anything more substantial than data and font files is a huge bitch, because the code is fully compiled.