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You don't need a math phd to code it either, you just need skill and motivation. That might be correlated with having a phd, but it isn't mandatory. EDIT: I p

• chongli 5y ago
  To code something like Dwarf Fortress takes an uncommon level of dedication. The project has been going for a decade and a half! It's only recently that the project has been paying off via community funding/patronage. A great deal of those early years must have been very difficult for them.
  • _jal 5y ago
    > It's only recently that the project has been paying off via community funding/patronage. Another way it is like a PhD - a ton of up-front work for an uncertain payoff, largely dependent on the whim of others.
    • wiz21c 5y ago
      mostly my professional life too. Lesson learned : a ton of up front work doesn't lead to success. Replace "work" by "delegate, socialize, have lots of luck" and you'll go much further :-)
      • robotresearcher 5y ago
        Also work. Don’t do a PhD if the work is a problem. Do a PhD only if the work is in your bones. And also socialize, and do other luck-maximizing activities. But work is indicated.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • robotresearcher 5y ago
      A PhD spot is an opportunity, not a gravy train.
  • bspammer 5y ago
    I know it’s silly but for me the most impressive part of the whole project is that he doesn’t use version control. I can’t even comprehend how that’s possible.
• hoten 5y ago
  Certainly one of the most important shared attributes between getting a math PhD and working on the same game for 15 years is the stick-to-it-ness required.
• cheesetable 5y ago
  Headlines often aren't meant to be read literally. It's just a teaser to read the article.
  • fridif 5y ago
    But why is it bad to react to a headline? It offered something interesting to consider.
    • mrspeaker 5y ago
      Because the creator himself specifically addressed the headline in the article. So either you think you know better than the creator, or just saw the headline and knee-jerk wrote a comment without reading the article contents. Saying "You don't need a PhD you just need to believe in yourself", or whatever, is fine - but it's not related to the article, so gets down votes.
      • 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
        The headline is part of the article. You could say “so you think you know better than the author” by quoting the body or “so you think you know better than the subject” by quoting the headline. Both are quoting the article to react to other parts of the article. The fact that the single most salient and most read part of the article sucks is plenty worthy of criticism.
      • fridif 5y ago
        When did I ever say any of these things? I specifically said that it is possible for someone to create a game like Dwarf Fortress without being the recepient of a PhD in Math. I never said that I knew better than the author, or that you needed to believe in yourself, or anything like that. I believe you are assuming that I'm reacting to something, but all I am saying is that you do not need a PhD to do what has been done.
  • MaxikCZ 5y ago
    > Headlines often aren't meant to be read literally. Why is this normalized?
• munk-a 5y ago
  I think it's arguable if you even need skill - I believe Toady One has mostly taught himself good project design through having to deal with Toady One's code from three years prior. Changing a fixed 2D legacy game to 3D and completely rewriting fluid dynamics in a shipped title will do that to you. I agree entirely about motivation though - he's stuck with that project for an immense amount of time. Urist Borushdumat[1] and Boatmurdered[2] are both from 2007 - George W Bush was president then and The Colbert Report had barely gotten started - your nephew in high school was still in diapers. However - over the full run of nineteen years dwarf fortress has been in development[3] he has received pretty tremendous community support - well probably since 2005 or so - I don't know if anyone knew it existed in 2002. 1. http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=15572.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=15572.0 2. https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/Introduction/ https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/Introducti... 3. Wait - wtf - it's older than Firefly! (that's the show that made Nathan Fillion famous before Castle or Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long-blog FYI) I can now use the line "I'm getting too old for this sh*"
  • bombcar 5y ago
    And the number of times save compatibility has been broken is surprisingly small for a long-lived one-man project.
    • setr 5y ago
      I think that’s just more a result of the game style/architecture. I don’t think there’s much hidden state that’s not encoded into the map/entities, and even things like AI is I think ultimately preserved as a simple stack of pending tasks. So being a proper simulation, and combined with the lack of replay, you can almost entirely discard the past events. The game is largely modeled as f(world-state, sim-rules) -> world-state, and so you simply take the old save and continue running it under the new simulation rules, and no one has to really care how many rule sets the world has seen. It only matters that they produced a valid world-state, every time.
      • meheleventyone 5y ago
• swayvil 5y ago
  I'd say it just takes motivation. The skill comes through that. Also, yr talking to a crew of whimsical fairy folk. Don't take the neg personally.
  • fridif 5y ago
    Appreciate this response :) Those who are actually out there building things are a bit too busy to pontificate here anymore
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• danblick 5y ago
  I'd recommend thinking a little about the algorithms involved in efficiently assigning a nearby task to each dwarf and then planning a path for each dwarf to its destination. It gets interesting pretty fast and a PhD would not hurt. :) e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08291 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08291 Would you maintain a roadmap telling you how to get from place to place, or just constantly replan? What happens when you change the available paths by building a wall or locking a door?
  • izend 5y ago
    That's not even the most complex algorithm Tarn has implemented, I believe the ones he created for fluid dynamics are much more complex.
    • hoseja 5y ago
      Does it still do the thing where if you take a bit of water from a full reservoir, the hole just goes crazy, tanking FPS?
  • setr 5y ago
    Pathfinding is largely not that bad — hierarchal A* for long distance pathing, flow field for dense agent areas (eg your fort). With sufficient density, it’s worth recalculating the field repeatedly. Partitions can also be used for resource-lookup, threat caching, etc. Brogue’s djikstra maps[0], and Dave Mark’s modular influence maps[1] are very interesting possibilities as well.. Your paper is dealing with a completely different problem — collision avoidance is hard, and you really shouldn’t care about it in a game like DF anyways. Simply treat existing dwarves as a wall, or allow multiple dwarves to be on the same tile momentarily (with a very strong preference to stand on their own tile). Task assignment is DF/rimworld/etc is also pretty dumb — they’re fairly obviously simple greedy algorithms. you don’t need to be anything close to optimal to be effective. There exists a list of open tasks (place building, move x59 stone, fight baddie. User actions generally corresponds to multiple tasks). When a dwarf is idle, he takes the task-list, merges it with his needs (food, water, self-preservation, etc). Filter this list by permitted activities for the dwarf, prioritize the list (needs first, then by user-defined job priority, then by random roll). Lock any relevant object (eg x59 rocks in a move task) and execute. As far as I know, there’s no attempt at global coordination in DF beyond simple locks — which I’m not sure are actually that strict. In DF I’m pretty sure two dwarves can go for the same pile of x50 rocks, and it’s simply first one wins. In rimworld it’s quite clear only one entity can hold a claim. DF in that case is much simpler and error-free (don’t need to care about dwarves dying while holding a lock) but rimworld’s would be more consistent and make better progress over time (eg a far away entity doesn’t keep getting screwed trying to grab resources from the base). Pathfinding is largely a solved problem. Resource allocation doesn’t need to be smart. I’m fairly positive DF’s biggest hurdles are largely in finding game-sufficient and efficient estimate models for complex processes: planet, fluid, wind (a kind of fluid), plant growth, etc. These models are all fairly well defined (to our gaming needs) by their respective communities, but they’re also far more involved than what we need — we just need to be roughly correct, and ideally have a self-stabilizing sim. The difficulty of gamedev generally is simplifying the problem to find only what actually matters. [0] http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/The_Incredible_Power_of_Dijkstra_Maps http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/The_Incredible_Power_of_... [1] http://www.gameaipro.com/GameAIPro2/GameAIPro2_Chapter30_Modular_Tactical_Influence_Maps.pdf http://www.gameaipro.com/GameAIPro2/GameAIPro2_Chapter30_Mod...
• 3pt14159 5y ago
  Regarding your edit, I do not disagree. DF does not require a PhD. It would help, but it is not necessary and the people downvoting you, in my opinion, are misusing the privilege. That said, talking about downvotes on HN is pretty boring, so I won't be replying to responses to this comment.
• Supermancho 5y ago
  One attribute that people don't often ascribe is luck. This was a labor of love and luck. We hear about projects all the time that have been developed for longer (Linux, Star Citizen, Temple OS, et al) and those are the successes and failures that people have actually heard about. Lots of other people fail along the way (or succeed in not achieving much) with decades of development. I think DF's development need not be elevated to a quasi-religious tale because someone got good enough life RNG, anymore than being born with the money to brute force it is laudable.