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[armandhammer]

I read in many places that Toady is basically coding this whole thing himself. My question is why doesnt he get free labour to help him out?
like interns! They are basically slaves everywhere else, why not for Toady!

[MonkeyHead]

Oh god, not this all over again...

[Gatleos]

• This is Toady's life's work, and he would like to program it all himself.
• It's also his livelihood, as he lives on donations from it. Additional programmers would complicate things, regardless of their intern/slave status.
• He sort of already does have another programmer working on it. Baugn maintains the SDL and truetype support.
• OHMYGOD you're the five billionth person to ask this.

Did I cover everything?

[Totaku]

Let's explain it again:

Toadyh chose to code everything himself because he wants to make the game the way he envisioned it and also it's his "lifetime project". You don't mess with a project that one has commited to work on for his life.

Only on "Extremly rare" conditions does Toady get someone to help him. Like Baughn, he asked for his help since he had more SDL knowledge compared to what he knew. But really otherwise, he doesn't want people messing with the inner frameworks of DF.

/topic

[Loud Whispers]

Because magic.

Kidding.

Would you pay someone to raise your prized cabbage?

WOULD YOUU??!!

[eataTREE]

Let me also add that this is a great idea if you want all progress on DF to stop for six months while Toady explains how this massively complicated piece of software actually works to his new "volunteer" coders (who can afford to work on this for free full-time because why? or are getting paid how?) and develops a workflow system for dividing up among a team that which he has always done himself. You would be looking at a year minimum before you actually saw more progress and not less from a larger team. See The Mythical Man-Month and, well, just about any other book on software engineering or project management ever written.

This is entirely besides the many other good reasons already listed.

[Prologue]

It's his hobby. You want to do it yourself. Imagine that you like building toy cars. You find a thrill on fixing all the little pieces and tweaking it to your personality. You wouldn't hire people to build the toy for you since it would defeat the purpose. And once you're done building it, you look back in awe thinking 'I did this, and I alone'

DF is the same

[kaenneth]

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.

[Putnam]

Oh, yeah, and Toady does NOT want to work with people, due to the complications that working with other people tends to bring up. Baughn's just working on the SDL and TrueType codes, and ThreeToe is his freaking brother.

[Rafal99]

1. Toady likes coding, but does NOT like organizing people to code, talking with people about coding or the like. He has stated it several times.
2. He wants to have the complete control over the project.
3. His livehood depends on this project, he doesn't want to share the code with random people.
4. Getting more people to work on a project always brings tons of problems.

Personally I would love to get my hands on the DF code to fix the things that annoy me the most, but it is not going happen. On the other hand I completely understand why Toady prefers to keep things that way, I would probably behave the same if I was in his position.

[Yolan]

So hey, while we are at it, what is with that game with the dwarfs in it? Such a rip off of DF!

Also, I was wondering what you guys thought about minecraft. Do you think DF is better?

[armandhammer]

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

[eataTREE]

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

Well if you're a software engineer, then I eagerly await your arguments as to why one of the foundational texts of software engineering, Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, is wrong, and programmer time is fungible after all. I also am eager to hear you explain why there are numerous documented real-word cases of organizations (both corporate and open-source) deciding to "throw more programmers at it" and totally failing to achieve meaningful productivity gains. If you can't see why adding "volunteer" coders to a large, well-established software project that has never been organized around such contributions would be less than helpful, then you are probably not a very good software engineer, or at least a terribly inexperienced one.

[armandhammer]

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

Well if you're a software engineer, then I eagerly await your arguments as to why one of the foundational texts of software engineering, Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, is wrong, and programmer time is fungible after all. I also am eager to hear you explain why there are numerous documented real-word cases of organizations (both corporate and open-source) deciding to "throw more programmers at it" and totally failing to achieve meaningful productivity gains. If you can't see why adding "volunteer" coders to a large, well-established software project that has never been organized around such contributions would be less than helpful, then you are probably not a very good software engineer, or at least a terribly inexperienced one.

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

[eataTREE]

But adding coders to a long term project will, in the long run, accelerate development enormously!

In the long run, everyone's dead.

Most large multi-person software projects are set up, from the very beginning to have a workflow involving, y'know, multiple people. They also are developed using methodologies that have been designed to make easily maintainable code. None of these things apply to DF, which also happens to be huge: hundreds of thousands of lines at least. In order to have other coders participate, it would first be necessary to re-organize the code, a monumental undertaking which Toady would have to direct and during which no development could take place.

Then you have to get the other coders up to speed on the project. But wait these are "volunteer" coders who don't work full-time, right, so getting "up to speed" on a project which -- did I mention this already -- is already hundreds of kloc, is going to take forever. Getting Toady to train them to not do everything wrong is going to take another forever. And during all this time Toady is going to be able to do basically no development because he would be doing all this other organizational crap (which he has repeatedly stated he is uninterested in) which would take up all his time.

You would start getting real productivity gains in one to two years, if Toady went all-out to integrate the new coders into the project. To make up for the lost time and make the whole enterprise worthwhile would take several more years. Who wants to wait that long?