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[Rafal99]

Toady's aim is not to finish DF as fast as possible, nor to make as much profit as possible. His aim is to have fun from creating the project. And he stated he doesn't like working with others and that it would make him lose much of the fun he has.


@eataTREE: I disagree it would take so much of an effort for both sides to teach new people DF code. Look at all these guys who are figuring things in DF memory and making utilities. Also some guy on the Bug Tracker fixed at least 2 bugs by PATCHING MACHINE CODE!
I commited a few patches to various open-source projects myself, and basically with some practice you can start fixing simple bugs after like a day or two of figuring the code, even if you never seen it before.

[armandhammer]

Agreed, but this only holds because it is a Hobby. If this was a project that had as goal to progress as fast as possible, these procedures could be set in place, maybe even by the volunteers. Toady could say: here is the code! Document it in a manner so that the next bunch of volunteers can start working.

This is how engineering interns work in many big corporations. They throw them into code without any guidance and tell them to "figure it out" and document.

I have worked with 0 training in many kloc projects with good progress and happy supervisors. (with code that didnt have comments!!!!!!!! I had to comment other peoples code myself!)

[armandhammer]

Toady's aim is not to finish DF as fast as possible, nor to make as much profit as possible. His aim is to have fun from creating the project. And he stated he doesn't like working with others and that it would make him lose much of the fun he has.

Yep my point!

[GreatWyrmGold]

I, like many others am already (very slowly) working on my own interpretation of a DF style game.

Pros: It's multithreading and 64 bit, with a 4 dimensional world model (as in portals to parrellell worlds... "stairs" can go up, down, 'in' and 'out')
Cons: There are no characters (NPC or player), just a hardcoded world model; and time does not pass.

That sounds interesting, once you add something to do and time passing.

[Muz]

I accept only hobby as an answer lol

everything else is, arguably, wrong! Ask any software engineer! Like me :p
I am lazy to go through all of them and explain why...

But hey I respect his choice

The argument about it being hard to split credit and payment applies as well.

Working with code is very easy. It just sits there quietly and is only wrong if you mess up. Working with people can be easy or it can be hard. You may have had a happy experience with it, but as a coder, I can very much say that it's not always smooth sailing working with other people. Toady does everything just fine right now, there's no need to spoil that.

Once you bring in more people, you have to also start training them in your artistic vision. He can just say, "Hey, I want you to implement proper farming in adventure mode." Even if he says it in fine detail, other coders could easily get the wrong idea. It's different than telling coders to optimize code, or implement some kind of secure payment system. Any kind of artistic work requires a lot of communication and coordination, and there's more work involved in bossing people around than actually doing the work yourself.

He could of course pull it off if he were to do some full time supervision. But then it becomes the collective creative work of other people. If I had my own megaproject, I'd probably go this path, and I think Sid Meier uses a similar technique. That's only because my strength is that I deal with people better than things. But it's not really applicable to Toady's style.

So, no, not just "hobby", but because it's easier this way. It's funny that software engineers keep bringing this topic up, when it's more comparable to movie directing, and I suppose professional game design supervisors.

[armandhammer]

Haha fair enough! I did look at it with my engineering eyes. Improving efficiency and getting results at any costs

[eataTREE]

Agreed, but this only holds because it is a Hobby. If this was a project that had as goal to progress as fast as possible, these procedures could be set in place, maybe even by the volunteers. Toady could say: here is the code! Document it in a manner so that the next bunch of volunteers can start working.

This is how engineering interns work in many big corporations. They throw them into code without any guidance and tell them to "figure it out" and document.

I have worked with 0 training in many kloc projects with good progress and happy supervisors. (with code that didnt have comments!!!!!!!! I had to comment other peoples code myself!)

Our interns get easy projects which are easy to conceptualize independently from the main code base. If we tried to get them to work on the critical code, they would spend their entire internship just figuring out what the f--- is going on. At any rate, the projects to which you refer incorporated design methodologies from their inception which made it easy and possible to bring new coders on to the project; DF has not, and transforming it into something which worked as a large-scale software project would be a logistical nightmare. It would also, as others have pointed out, make it into something it's not, and make it stop being what it is. Sacrificing the deliverable in the name of efficiency gains that no one else is asking for is not the mark of a good software engineer.

[dwarf_reform]

I was one of the folks that asked this question too The best response I got against adding more help was basically "too many hands in making a pie just makes a messed up pie".. The reason I asked about him getting assistance, though, was that my own life had just finished schooling me in the good ol "life is too short" lesson, and in a roundabout way I got to thinking about Toady, alone, with the weight of his fans on him.. And also as a DF player, like the rest of us..

Saddened me to think that the person who gave us so much dwarfly joy has less time than us to actually bathe in the dwarfly joy

Ever heard of Brook's law? It's a principle in software development that quite simply states "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".

Also:

Not to mention they've doubled their staff and halved their output (all they've improved lately is porting minecraft to different OS, and the amount of minecraft merchandise :| )

You seem to be contradicting yourself, providing an excellent example of Brook's law.

Furthermore, the game is Toady's lifework, and he does not seem to want anyone else getting their hands into it. Were I in the same position It would be the same.

Besides the wasted time teaching a new programmer you must also consider the financial situation. Anyone truly committed to working on the game with Toady would most likely be given a significant portion of its income.

Speaking of financial issues, you also argued for the commercialization of DF. I can tell you with certainty that this is a horrible idea. Not only would it be damaging to the community and probably cause some legal problems, but it would also be severely detrimental to Toady's income. Sales would most likely be next to nothing, especially if we were made to pay for each release (speaking of which it would probably slow down development as well) and any profit made would not come close to what donations are bringing in now.

I appreciate your concern but really it is Toady One's game and he is the one to make these decisions. If somewhere down the line he thinks he needs an assistant or  wants to start commercializing the game that is his decision, but right now as far as I know he is against it and you should respect his choice.

Theres the quote from the guy who schooled me though the project is less late, more endless in my mind And I didn't want to commercialize DF, I had just bought minecraft (without reading reviews!) and was disgusted that I paid that much for a game with the word "mine" in the title that only has 4 craftable ores :| In comparison I'd glady pay a required fee for a shined up gem like DF

And I definately did contradict myself and prove Brooks law into my own face

Besides Toady's majesty, the reason DF is so deep and varied is that more time has been sunk into it than any 3D or commercial game will ever recieve.. Also highly stable, compared to lots of other freeware of its relative magnitude..

[MasterMorality]

Would it even be possible for another person to come and help code this monstrosity without a six month course in 'Dwarf Fortress Engine layout'? I figure that the code looks like a bomb to anybody who doesn't know it, Toady is the only person who can decipher what affects what and goes where. To the rest of humanity:
"I changed one line. Suddenly the Dwarves are growing plump helmets from their elbows, Goblins are stuck in a permanent seizure, and the local major river became sentient and destroyed every megabeast in year 1 of world Gen. What the fuck did I do?"

[612DwarfAvenue]

why soo angry lol

"Throwing more coders at it" is going to make a late project later, Yes. But adding coders to a long term project will, in the long run, accelerate development enormously! By your logic everything should only be coded by one guy.... Does that make sense?

BaZinga :p

I'd just like to go a little off-topic here, and point out you came across as a bit of an asshole in this post. Sarcasm does not help arguments.

Toady is a highly intelligent individual, he's been working on this for years, i'm pretty confident he'd already had the thought of hiring more coders before any of us first suggested it. Clearly, he's decided it's not for him right now. If and when he does decide to bring on more coders, that'll be his choice, and he'll let us know what's going on.

I'd hope that this would be the last time anyone makes one of these threads, but i'm not holding my breath.

[Lord Dullard]

It's unlikely he'll ever hire more coders. For one thing it would just be a giant mess. For another... if you've been coding something by yourself that you do not intend others to view for years and you are not meticulous about keeping everything standardized in case anybody else needs to peruse it, it's probably so indecipherable and weird that expecting anybody else to glean anything other than outright confusion from it would be ridiculous.

[Funk]

there are some things in life that you have to do your self,not couse you cant get some to do ,not couse thay cant do the job, not couse you dont trust them but because it is your task to do it couse it matters to you.
 
go ask a car nut that does there own work why thay still does the routine maintenance them selfs.

[eataTREE]

@eataTREE: I disagree it would take so much of an effort for both sides to teach new people DF code. Look at all these guys who are figuring things in DF memory and making utilities. Also some guy on the Bug Tracker fixed at least 2 bugs by PATCHING MACHINE CODE!
I commited a few patches to various open-source projects myself, and basically with some practice you can start fixing simple bugs after like a day or two of figuring the code, even if you never seen it before.

Open-source projects are designed to work that way from the get-go, and some very smart people have spent a lot of years figuring out the proper logistics and methodology to make it work. No disrespect to your skills but I would bet any amount of money that if you got a magic CD-ROM of the DF source code, organized as it is to make sense to Toady and only Toady, that it would take months before you understood how much of any of it worked, much less well enough to actually add features and fix non-shallow bugs.

The best way to contribute to the progress of DF at this point in its development is to send Toady a check. For all intents and purposes, the deliverable exists only in Toady's head and the best we can do is to facilitate the continued 'download' of DF from Toady's brain into real code.

[peskyninja]

More one thread whining about toady... I'm tired of these kind of threads like "Can I haz multiplayar?''  or "3D graphics! WoW has 3D why dwarf fortress doesn't?".

[Rafal99]

(...) No disrespect to your skills but I would bet any amount of money that if you got a magic CD-ROM of the DF source code, organized as it is to make sense to Toady and only Toady, that it would take months before you understood how much of any of it worked, much less well enough to actually add features and fix non-shallow bugs.

It is not about my skills and I didn't want it to sound like that.
It wouldn't take months of learning code for someone to fix simple bugs. And this is the area where some help would be most needed, as there is TONS of bugs and only one Toad to squash them all.
But yeah I agree it would probably take months to understand most of DF code. But understanding the whole DF code is not needed unless somone wanted to do major rewrite. And I don't see any point to do a major rewrite of DF code by some third person, as there isn't any better specialist at programming a game with procedurally generated stuff than Toady is.
Anyway Toady works the way he want, and it works well enough so far. No point in messing with something that works.