7 ms·

Dwarf Fortress in 2013

117 points by akg 13y ago

jmduke 13y ago
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982459
baddox 13y ago
> As for [porting to the] PS Vita, he notes that "if someone approached us, we're not giving the code to anybody for any reason, so it would have to be something we could compile ourselves." Just imagine how good this game and community around it would be if it had always been open source. Just imagine how much money they could raise in a Kickstarter to simply open source everything.
- devindotcom 13y ago
  Imagine how good it would be if two guys worked on it for 10 years straight, following their own vision and not compromising, making what they thought was cool and making a decent living the while. That's how good it is!
  - justin66 13y ago
    The interesting thing is that, when they speak, these guys sound like planners who would be happy to delegate some of the work involved in realizing their grand vision. That's obviously not how they're operating.
    - eropple 13y ago
      That's almost exactly the opposite of reality. They're not delegators. They don't want to be delegators. They want to make a game.
      - justin66 13y ago
        I think their attitude is slightly unusual, in the sense that you don't see a lot of people who put that much into design and seem to enjoy it but still demand to handle all the programming themselves. > They don't want to be delegators. They want to make a game. Delegation is part of engineering (or not, since these guys have chosen not to delegate). Or part of "making a game" if you prefer. It would be genuinely weird to take the attitude that the only people who "make" a game are the programmers.
        eropple 13y ago
        > in the sense that you don't see a lot of people who put that much into design and seem to enjoy it but still demand to handle all the programming themselves. Except in indie games all over the place, right? Zeboyd, Spiderweb Software, loads of small developers do exactly this. I do it. I don't want other programmers for something I can do myself because I don't need to share my project with them. It's mine. It's part of me. Bringing more people in lessens its meaning to me. (I wouldn't contract anything at all if I could do music and art to the level I deem required.) > Delegation is part of engineering Whatever gave you the notion that this is engineering? They're not frigging engineers. They're artists.
        justin66 13y ago
        > Bringing more people in lessens its meaning to me. Which is fine, but if bringing in help or not is the difference between realizing the vision or not, and you choose not to bring in help and therefore fail to realize the vision, it makes what you're doing more like masturbation than creation. Which is also fine, I guess. > Whatever gave you the notion that this is engineering? They're not frigging engineers. They're artists. I hope you were wearing a black turtleneck when you said that, but regardless, delegation is also very much a part of art. For example there's a massive amount of work that a Leonardo delegates away while decorating the Sistine Chapel. He might really, really derive a lot of joy from building scaffolding, washing brushes, and the million other things that need to be done but he'd be an idiot to do all that stuff.
  - a3_nm 13y ago
    How exactly is this incompatible with it being open source? Being open source does not mean that you have to accept contributions from others, nor is it incompatible with making a decent living especially when the game is free as in free beer anyways.
    - lobotryas 13y ago
      True, but they would have to deal with increased competition and market diversity due to anyone being able to fork their vision and putting their own spin on it. This is (arguably) great for the consumer, but as a fellow creator I understand their reluctance to open source their baby.
    - dageshi 13y ago
      I don't think it's about making a "great game", I think it's about making "their game", flaws and all.
      - hobs 13y ago
        Yep, they have said this countless times. While I am absolutely an advocate of OSS and I do wish Tarn would go for it, the basic thing is that they dont want to and they love what they do, so deal with it, it's their game.
  - hristov 13y ago
    If they open source it they can still control things and follow their vision for their own main branch. But they can accept patches that have improvements for things that (i) are needed and (ii) do not necessarily go against their vision. There are several great weaknesses of DF that are not the result of the maker's vision but of their limited time and resources. For example, it is not Toady's vision for the game to get very slow even on powerful hardware when you have a big fortress. This is perhaps a negative blowback of Toady's very laudable vision to have each dwarf be independently simulated. However, an expert in parallel programming should be able to improve this a great deal. AFAIK, DF currently runs as a single thread, and many of its processes can be split off. This is, however, not easy and probably not something Toady is able to or wants to do. It is also not Toady's vision for the game to be controlled by a mindblowing number of complex menus and obscure key combinations. It was probably not his vision for about half the game controls to be mouse enabled and half of them not. He has admitted himself that the interface needs a lot of work. But he is obviously not working on it, but adding new features like vampires, and Indiana Jones style careening mine carts (last time I checked). I am not saying he should not add those things -- it is a free game and he should work on what is more fun for him. But if he opensourced it perhaps someone else would fix the interface for him. It is obvious the game needs outside help. People are hacking the game in memory in order to add functionality. Last time I played, you needed to run another program called "dwarf therapist" while playing in order to be able to manage your dwarf's skills and professions. Dwarf therapist would work by directly reading and manipulating dwarf fortress data in memory. Sorry but if the game worked well, nobody would take the time to hack DF just so he can write a helper program. If they opensourced the game, the people that wrote dwarf therapist could just add that functionality directly into the game. I say this as someone who loves DF, but has suffered plenty from its frustrations.
    - glomph 13y ago
      People mod every popular closed source game. That isn't a reason to open source it in itself.
      - TeMPOraL 13y ago
        Mods, and even total conversions are completely different from taking source code and building a derived game (which then becomes a direct competition to the original).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- eropple 13y ago
  And in open-sourcing it, they dilute their vision for their game. No thanks. (And I am a donor. I don't care about being given their code.)
- IgorPartola 13y ago
  Open source games are rarely very good. There are exceptions (looking at you NetHack), but this is the one area where "give away software, sell support" does not seem to work. Then again, I wish more games were open sourced a la Quake after their sales start declining.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    > I wish more games were open sourced a la Quake after their sales start declining. That is where open source in games seems to excel: keeping old games alive and running on modern systems.
  - LanceH 13y ago
    Closed source games are rarely very good.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      Closed source games are the only ones that matter. Name one AAA production that's open source.
      - mixedbit 13y ago
        chess
  - jmduke 13y ago
    Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is an open source game (and not open source in the sense of "you can look at our code but don't expect us to value your input", open source in the sense of "make pull requests!") and it's probably the best game I've ever played. I don't think I disagree with you, though: the reason it works so well for Stone Soup is because the game lends itself to personal extension (it's a roguelike, so you're dealing almost exclusively with game logic).
    - bhickey 13y ago
      Thanks for the praise. crawl is the only major project I'm involved with, but I'm really pleased with how well development works. The team is totally open to external contributions. For example, some friends and I added a god back in 2009. Late last year we started getting high quality patches from a contributor who then became the most prolific member of the team. One thing that holds crawl together is an overarching philosophy, particularly the Berlin Interpretation (http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretation http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=B...). Someone even made fan art for us: http://i.imgur.com/cGO39.png http://i.imgur.com/cGO39.png
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Minecraft would be an obvious counterexample I think. It and its community are doing just fine.
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  I've being mostly uninterested in playing dwarf fortress until fortress mode sees improvement. However I've being watching its progress with gusto. Toady is focused on the simulation aspect of the game. The generated story. Right now, that has no value, presumably it will later. If DF were to be open sourced, the first thing I would do is attempt to contribute to cleaning up fortress mode. I suspect many developers would do this as well. So as a long long long time observer of this game, I can understand the lament that it's not open source and I sympathize. These sore spots likely won't see improvement. But... All the reasons I normally advocate for freely open source software just arn't here! Toady is clearly not doing anything malicious with his program. He also has no intention of restricting his program in the future, anyone can use it. He's trying to make the best software he can, for the user. Dwarf fortress isn't doing dirty things behind the scenes, and Toady has more than earned my trust. Versions have being ported to multiple OS's, and it's clear he's going to work on it for a long time. Open source isn't needed here, it would only get in the way of what he's trying to achieve. I'm willing to wait until I'm a much older person to see the masterpiece he creates.
- shazow 13y ago
  Once upon a time, Tarn Adams did an AMA on Reddit. I asked him [0]: Have you considered open sourcing more pieces of Dwarf Fortress so that the community can try to help with the nitty gritty engine bits while you can continue having sole ownership of the underlying direction? The pathfinding and multithreading optimization is a good example of something I'd love to help with given the opportunity. (Related to this question.) Is there any other way that the more technically-inclined can help? Tarn's response: I'm just not a project manager. I tried sharing the pathfinding code with some people, and some progress was made, but unless my involvement is more hands-on, I don't think it'll work, and I didn't want to be involved in that kind of arrangement. On the other hand, the porting and graphics work with Baughn went pretty well, although now I can't work with the graphics code myself because I don't understand it. I'd hate to have that happen to more core pieces of the game. Baughn also had to suffer a lot of annoyances because I have no inclination toward things like version control. "I'm just not a project manager." As someone who has several active open source projects, I can very much relate. I can easily see Tarn and his brother be completely overwhelmed by open source activity, paralyzed to make any kind of internally directed progress on it. Also, not everyone is good at maintaining this kind of thing, so it could cause more harm than benefit to the project. I too wish the code was open source, but I can understand the reluctance and speculate that it may even be the correct decision until the project is completed or abandoned. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_of_bay_12_games_cocreator_of_dwarf/c917nze http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_o...
  - baddox 13y ago
    The thing is, they literally would not have to change a single thing after releasing the source code. They could refrain from looking at a single pull request. But perhaps their fear is that community additions may lead to a variously forked ecosystem which could dilute the "Dwarf Fortress" name thus dilute their grand vision.
    - shazow 13y ago
      Indeed. They have a captive audience right now which donates on average more than $4,000/mo for the work of Tarn and Zach. Take the +12 month release cycles, there will surely be more active open source forks than what the Adams' can compete with, resulting not only in loss of their revenue stream but also loss of control of their vision. Perhaps this would be an altruistic benefit to the community, but probably a solid loss for the creators unless they're willing and succeed in diving in and leading the community of contributors as a whole. Very risky. Also from another interview, Tarn spoke about how he sees Dwarf Fortress as his life's work. This is the masterpiece that he would spend the rest of his life perfecting. Imagine a master painter like Picasso working on a piece for nearly a decade, being asked to let the community contribute to it so that it will be completed sooner.
- KVFinn 13y ago
  >Just imagine how good this game and community around it would be if it had always been open source. Just imagine how much money they could raise in a Kickstarter to simply open source everything. I don't think he'd even need to even open source it, in terms of allowing anyone else to release it. If it was just possible to hook into it and make custom UI or Renderers, I think people would run with it. Some have tried but they are extreme hacks at this point.
zyxley 13y ago
I will continue to have no interest in Dwarf Fortress until it has an actual UI instead of whatever insane random combinations of controls the developer felt like adding on any particular day.
- rorrr2 13y ago
  That's one of the reasons why Minecraft is so much bigger than DF. These guys just don't get it. DF can be SOOOOO much better, yet they are working on adding features instead making the game better.
  - MereInterest 13y ago
    Here's the difference: DF is Toady's baby, his life work. Toady has the idea for it, and he does not want anyone else working on the code. Minecraft started out very rough around the edges, and only started polishing it once it had already hit it big and he could hire other people. With a one-developer game, you don't spend time polishing things. You bounce around different areas, adding things as you wish. Letting yourself get bogged down in polishing details that aren't exciting makes you start looking for other things to do, losing interest in the project altogether.
    - rorrr2 13y ago
      Minecraft was developed by one person - Markus Persson (aka Notch), at least till 2011 when it already got insanely popular.
    - gnarbarian 13y ago
      A perfect analogy! Toady's baby is legally blind, is very dumb, is very slow, speaks 4 languages in different contexts but none fluently, is very ugly, and is not fun for 99% of people who play with it. There are cures for all of these problems, but he refuses to treat or allow anyone else to treat his baby.
      - eropple 13y ago
erichurkman 13y ago
I have not played in quite some time, but if you are looking at playing: after you get the rough hang of things, make sure you look for mods. Specifically bug-fixes. There's a (small) community around the `dfhack` tool that fix a lot of game-breaking bugs. Masterwork [1] is a comprehensive mod that lets you turn off some of the "flavor" in exchange for a more performant game (about 25% or so). For example, the default game has dozens of types of leather. Do you really care if your dwarf's mitten is made of cow leather or bull leather? [1] http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=125633.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=125633.0
ghotli 13y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. One of the central philosophical questions of our day will become whether or not it is ethical to even turn off dwarf fortress.
- InAnEmergency 13y ago
  That was one of the taglines for SimCity 2000: "If this game were any more realistic, it'd be illegal to turn it off." (http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/198648-simcity-2000/images/box-116830 http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/198648-simcity-2000/images/box-11...)
  - sb057 13y ago
    So that's why they dumbed down Simcity 5! Sorry, couldn't help myself.
- StevenRayOrr 13y ago
  I am dangerously close to writing an MA thesis on just that question...
drewhk 13y ago
They should not focus on interface at all, but provide a socket and a protocol to communicate with the engine. Then the community can build fancy clients, mods, whatever.
d23 13y ago
Okay, new idea. What if he did a Kickstarter for $500k for additional high-quality devs to come on the project for a year and focus on 1) improving the UI and 2) improving performance. That's it. No promises of additional functionality, no open-sourcing to make Toady feel like he's given up his baby. Given the cult following of the game and the people who would like to play it but are otherwise frustrated, I doubt they'd have trouble reaching the limit. The press they'd get just from announcing would give them a boost as well.
- eropple 13y ago
  He doesn't want more developers. He is happy with the project as it is. It is his life's work, so to speak, and he is content with progress happening over the span of years. I don't understand why this is such a hard concept for some people.
kornork 13y ago
Every time I see threads like this, the comments are all about telling the developers what they should do. The developers make enough money to survive, seem perfectly happy, and are working on exactly what they want. They aren't in a situation where they owe the community something more than what they are already doing. Why are we trying to solve their problems?

117 points by akg 13y ago

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982459

> As for [porting to the] PS Vita, he notes that "if someone approached us, we're not giving the code to anybody for any reason, so it would have to be something we could compile ourselves." Just imagine how good this game and community around it would be if it had always been open source. Just imagine how much money they could raise in a Kickstarter to simply open source everything.

devindotcom 13y ago
Imagine how good it would be if two guys worked on it for 10 years straight, following their own vision and not compromising, making what they thought was cool and making a decent living the while. That's how good it is!
- justin66 13y ago
  The interesting thing is that, when they speak, these guys sound like planners who would be happy to delegate some of the work involved in realizing their grand vision. That's obviously not how they're operating.
  - eropple 13y ago
    That's almost exactly the opposite of reality. They're not delegators. They don't want to be delegators. They want to make a game.
    - justin66 13y ago
      I think their attitude is slightly unusual, in the sense that you don't see a lot of people who put that much into design and seem to enjoy it but still demand to handle all the programming themselves. > They don't want to be delegators. They want to make a game. Delegation is part of engineering (or not, since these guys have chosen not to delegate). Or part of "making a game" if you prefer. It would be genuinely weird to take the attitude that the only people who "make" a game are the programmers.
      - eropple 13y ago
        > in the sense that you don't see a lot of people who put that much into design and seem to enjoy it but still demand to handle all the programming themselves. Except in indie games all over the place, right? Zeboyd, Spiderweb Software, loads of small developers do exactly this. I do it. I don't want other programmers for something I can do myself because I don't need to share my project with them. It's mine. It's part of me. Bringing more people in lessens its meaning to me. (I wouldn't contract anything at all if I could do music and art to the level I deem required.) > Delegation is part of engineering Whatever gave you the notion that this is engineering? They're not frigging engineers. They're artists.
        justin66 13y ago
        > Bringing more people in lessens its meaning to me. Which is fine, but if bringing in help or not is the difference between realizing the vision or not, and you choose not to bring in help and therefore fail to realize the vision, it makes what you're doing more like masturbation than creation. Which is also fine, I guess. > Whatever gave you the notion that this is engineering? They're not frigging engineers. They're artists. I hope you were wearing a black turtleneck when you said that, but regardless, delegation is also very much a part of art. For example there's a massive amount of work that a Leonardo delegates away while decorating the Sistine Chapel. He might really, really derive a lot of joy from building scaffolding, washing brushes, and the million other things that need to be done but he'd be an idiot to do all that stuff.
- a3_nm 13y ago
  How exactly is this incompatible with it being open source? Being open source does not mean that you have to accept contributions from others, nor is it incompatible with making a decent living especially when the game is free as in free beer anyways.
  - lobotryas 13y ago
    True, but they would have to deal with increased competition and market diversity due to anyone being able to fork their vision and putting their own spin on it. This is (arguably) great for the consumer, but as a fellow creator I understand their reluctance to open source their baby.
  - dageshi 13y ago
    I don't think it's about making a "great game", I think it's about making "their game", flaws and all.
    - hobs 13y ago
      Yep, they have said this countless times. While I am absolutely an advocate of OSS and I do wish Tarn would go for it, the basic thing is that they dont want to and they love what they do, so deal with it, it's their game.
- hristov 13y ago
  If they open source it they can still control things and follow their vision for their own main branch. But they can accept patches that have improvements for things that (i) are needed and (ii) do not necessarily go against their vision. There are several great weaknesses of DF that are not the result of the maker's vision but of their limited time and resources. For example, it is not Toady's vision for the game to get very slow even on powerful hardware when you have a big fortress. This is perhaps a negative blowback of Toady's very laudable vision to have each dwarf be independently simulated. However, an expert in parallel programming should be able to improve this a great deal. AFAIK, DF currently runs as a single thread, and many of its processes can be split off. This is, however, not easy and probably not something Toady is able to or wants to do. It is also not Toady's vision for the game to be controlled by a mindblowing number of complex menus and obscure key combinations. It was probably not his vision for about half the game controls to be mouse enabled and half of them not. He has admitted himself that the interface needs a lot of work. But he is obviously not working on it, but adding new features like vampires, and Indiana Jones style careening mine carts (last time I checked). I am not saying he should not add those things -- it is a free game and he should work on what is more fun for him. But if he opensourced it perhaps someone else would fix the interface for him. It is obvious the game needs outside help. People are hacking the game in memory in order to add functionality. Last time I played, you needed to run another program called "dwarf therapist" while playing in order to be able to manage your dwarf's skills and professions. Dwarf therapist would work by directly reading and manipulating dwarf fortress data in memory. Sorry but if the game worked well, nobody would take the time to hack DF just so he can write a helper program. If they opensourced the game, the people that wrote dwarf therapist could just add that functionality directly into the game. I say this as someone who loves DF, but has suffered plenty from its frustrations.
  - glomph 13y ago
    People mod every popular closed source game. That isn't a reason to open source it in itself.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      Mods, and even total conversions are completely different from taking source code and building a derived game (which then becomes a direct competition to the original).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
eropple 13y ago
And in open-sourcing it, they dilute their vision for their game. No thanks. (And I am a donor. I don't care about being given their code.)
IgorPartola 13y ago
Open source games are rarely very good. There are exceptions (looking at you NetHack), but this is the one area where "give away software, sell support" does not seem to work. Then again, I wish more games were open sourced a la Quake after their sales start declining.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > I wish more games were open sourced a la Quake after their sales start declining. That is where open source in games seems to excel: keeping old games alive and running on modern systems.
- LanceH 13y ago
  Closed source games are rarely very good.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Closed source games are the only ones that matter. Name one AAA production that's open source.
    - mixedbit 13y ago
      chess
- jmduke 13y ago
  Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is an open source game (and not open source in the sense of "you can look at our code but don't expect us to value your input", open source in the sense of "make pull requests!") and it's probably the best game I've ever played. I don't think I disagree with you, though: the reason it works so well for Stone Soup is because the game lends itself to personal extension (it's a roguelike, so you're dealing almost exclusively with game logic).
  - bhickey 13y ago
    Thanks for the praise. crawl is the only major project I'm involved with, but I'm really pleased with how well development works. The team is totally open to external contributions. For example, some friends and I added a god back in 2009. Late last year we started getting high quality patches from a contributor who then became the most prolific member of the team. One thing that holds crawl together is an overarching philosophy, particularly the Berlin Interpretation (http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Berlin_Interpretation http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=B...). Someone even made fan art for us: http://i.imgur.com/cGO39.png http://i.imgur.com/cGO39.png
jlgreco 13y ago
Minecraft would be an obvious counterexample I think. It and its community are doing just fine.
GhotiFish 13y ago
I've being mostly uninterested in playing dwarf fortress until fortress mode sees improvement. However I've being watching its progress with gusto. Toady is focused on the simulation aspect of the game. The generated story. Right now, that has no value, presumably it will later. If DF were to be open sourced, the first thing I would do is attempt to contribute to cleaning up fortress mode. I suspect many developers would do this as well. So as a long long long time observer of this game, I can understand the lament that it's not open source and I sympathize. These sore spots likely won't see improvement. But... All the reasons I normally advocate for freely open source software just arn't here! Toady is clearly not doing anything malicious with his program. He also has no intention of restricting his program in the future, anyone can use it. He's trying to make the best software he can, for the user. Dwarf fortress isn't doing dirty things behind the scenes, and Toady has more than earned my trust. Versions have being ported to multiple OS's, and it's clear he's going to work on it for a long time. Open source isn't needed here, it would only get in the way of what he's trying to achieve. I'm willing to wait until I'm a much older person to see the masterpiece he creates.
shazow 13y ago
Once upon a time, Tarn Adams did an AMA on Reddit. I asked him [0]: Have you considered open sourcing more pieces of Dwarf Fortress so that the community can try to help with the nitty gritty engine bits while you can continue having sole ownership of the underlying direction? The pathfinding and multithreading optimization is a good example of something I'd love to help with given the opportunity. (Related to this question.) Is there any other way that the more technically-inclined can help? Tarn's response: I'm just not a project manager. I tried sharing the pathfinding code with some people, and some progress was made, but unless my involvement is more hands-on, I don't think it'll work, and I didn't want to be involved in that kind of arrangement. On the other hand, the porting and graphics work with Baughn went pretty well, although now I can't work with the graphics code myself because I don't understand it. I'd hate to have that happen to more core pieces of the game. Baughn also had to suffer a lot of annoyances because I have no inclination toward things like version control. "I'm just not a project manager." As someone who has several active open source projects, I can very much relate. I can easily see Tarn and his brother be completely overwhelmed by open source activity, paralyzed to make any kind of internally directed progress on it. Also, not everyone is good at maintaining this kind of thing, so it could cause more harm than benefit to the project. I too wish the code was open source, but I can understand the reluctance and speculate that it may even be the correct decision until the project is completed or abandoned. [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_of_bay_12_games_cocreator_of_dwarf/c917nze http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_o...
- baddox 13y ago
  The thing is, they literally would not have to change a single thing after releasing the source code. They could refrain from looking at a single pull request. But perhaps their fear is that community additions may lead to a variously forked ecosystem which could dilute the "Dwarf Fortress" name thus dilute their grand vision.
  - shazow 13y ago
    Indeed. They have a captive audience right now which donates on average more than $4,000/mo for the work of Tarn and Zach. Take the +12 month release cycles, there will surely be more active open source forks than what the Adams' can compete with, resulting not only in loss of their revenue stream but also loss of control of their vision. Perhaps this would be an altruistic benefit to the community, but probably a solid loss for the creators unless they're willing and succeed in diving in and leading the community of contributors as a whole. Very risky. Also from another interview, Tarn spoke about how he sees Dwarf Fortress as his life's work. This is the masterpiece that he would spend the rest of his life perfecting. Imagine a master painter like Picasso working on a piece for nearly a decade, being asked to let the community contribute to it so that it will be completed sooner.
KVFinn 13y ago
>Just imagine how good this game and community around it would be if it had always been open source. Just imagine how much money they could raise in a Kickstarter to simply open source everything. I don't think he'd even need to even open source it, in terms of allowing anyone else to release it. If it was just possible to hook into it and make custom UI or Renderers, I think people would run with it. Some have tried but they are extreme hacks at this point.

zyxley 13y ago

I will continue to have no interest in Dwarf Fortress until it has an actual UI instead of whatever insane random combinations of controls the developer felt like adding on any particular day.

rorrr2 13y ago
That's one of the reasons why Minecraft is so much bigger than DF. These guys just don't get it. DF can be SOOOOO much better, yet they are working on adding features instead making the game better.
- MereInterest 13y ago
  Here's the difference: DF is Toady's baby, his life work. Toady has the idea for it, and he does not want anyone else working on the code. Minecraft started out very rough around the edges, and only started polishing it once it had already hit it big and he could hire other people. With a one-developer game, you don't spend time polishing things. You bounce around different areas, adding things as you wish. Letting yourself get bogged down in polishing details that aren't exciting makes you start looking for other things to do, losing interest in the project altogether.
  - rorrr2 13y ago
    Minecraft was developed by one person - Markus Persson (aka Notch), at least till 2011 when it already got insanely popular.
  - gnarbarian 13y ago
    A perfect analogy! Toady's baby is legally blind, is very dumb, is very slow, speaks 4 languages in different contexts but none fluently, is very ugly, and is not fun for 99% of people who play with it. There are cures for all of these problems, but he refuses to treat or allow anyone else to treat his baby.
    - eropple 13y ago

erichurkman 13y ago

I have not played in quite some time, but if you are looking at playing: after you get the rough hang of things, make sure you look for mods. Specifically bug-fixes. There's a (small) community around the `dfhack` tool that fix a lot of game-breaking bugs. Masterwork [1] is a comprehensive mod that lets you turn off some of the "flavor" in exchange for a more performant game (about 25% or so). For example, the default game has dozens of types of leather. Do you really care if your dwarf's mitten is made of cow leather or bull leather? [1] http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=125633.0 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=125633.0

ghotli 13y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again. One of the central philosophical questions of our day will become whether or not it is ethical to even turn off dwarf fortress.

InAnEmergency 13y ago
That was one of the taglines for SimCity 2000: "If this game were any more realistic, it'd be illegal to turn it off." (http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/198648-simcity-2000/images/box-116830 http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/198648-simcity-2000/images/box-11...)
- sb057 13y ago
  So that's why they dumbed down Simcity 5! Sorry, couldn't help myself.
StevenRayOrr 13y ago
I am dangerously close to writing an MA thesis on just that question...

drewhk 13y ago

They should not focus on interface at all, but provide a socket and a protocol to communicate with the engine. Then the community can build fancy clients, mods, whatever.

d23 13y ago

Okay, new idea. What if he did a Kickstarter for $500k for additional high-quality devs to come on the project for a year and focus on 1) improving the UI and 2) improving performance. That's it. No promises of additional functionality, no open-sourcing to make Toady feel like he's given up his baby. Given the cult following of the game and the people who would like to play it but are otherwise frustrated, I doubt they'd have trouble reaching the limit. The press they'd get just from announcing would give them a boost as well.

eropple 13y ago
He doesn't want more developers. He is happy with the project as it is. It is his life's work, so to speak, and he is content with progress happening over the span of years. I don't understand why this is such a hard concept for some people.

kornork 13y ago

Every time I see threads like this, the comments are all about telling the developers what they should do. The developers make enough money to survive, seem perfectly happy, and are working on exactly what they want. They aren't in a situation where they owe the community something more than what they are already doing. Why are we trying to solve their problems?