Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mel_Vixen]

Nw_Kohaku: When i hear script i think structures forks and loops. The stuff from your Final Fantasy example is more constrained and is indeed nice and dandy in my opinion because i have seen this variation in action in Stardocks elemental:Fallen enchantress.

Anyway i dont think that Dwarf fortress is made by toady for making money, thats just a neat side-effect. Toady has no pressing neat to throw out feature releases every few days.  [edit] As such it does not compete with other games on terms of popularity or whatever, it exists solely to be enjoyed like a piece of art. Toady has not signed any contract, a donation is different from contractual payment. People donate money because they like toadys idea and want to support him. Its not like a Big game company announcing a game that is paid by preorders that is also under the constraints of some PRjunk or release dates etc.. (and seriously the last one i had, "from dust", was a mayor disappointmment) [/edit]

And as far as fanboyism goes: Thats to much honor for me, i merely stated my distrust on complex scripting engines in this type of game. And i say that as Programmer and Softwaretester not as "Fanboy".

[Urist McDepravity]

As long as Toady makes his living off this, it is a job.  And when Toady took money specifically in exchange for providing a service to the people who gave him money, he was creating, and later fulfilling, a contract.

When you do such implications, you should provide some evidence. For example, please, point us to any kind of words from Toady that he provides something besides crayon art to payers or that there is any kind of contract. As far as I know, he never made any binding obligations towards anything besides one-time animal support project.

[NW_Kohaku]

Anyway i dont think that Dwarf fortress is made by toady for making money, thats just a neat side-effect. Toady has no pressing neat to throw out feature releases every few days. 

Toady clearly isn't setting out to get rich, but there is a minimum level of donation that is going to have to be maintained for the project to continue as it has been going. 

The gap in donations before DF2010's release, (and the boom when he did release,) will either get larger or smaller depending on what he has put in the last release.

There's a difference between "selling out" and keeping in mind that you can't cut off your supply to the food money when you make your plans for the day.

When you do such implications, you should provide some evidence. For example, please, point us to any kind of words from Toady that he provides something besides crayon art to payers or that there is any kind of contract. As far as I know, he never made any binding obligations towards anything besides one-time animal support project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract

Contracts are any exchange of goods (including money) or services in exchange for any other form of goods or services, voluntarily agreed upon in advance.  This includes implied contracts and verbal contracts. 

Open contracts include setting a price on an item in a store, declaring, essentially, that you are willing to sell that good for that price, and that exchange is legally binding.

Just because you don't sign on the dotted line does not mean something is not legally a contract.

So yes, saying "I will give you crayon drawings if you give me a certain amount of money" is a contract.

[Urist McDepravity]

Contracts are any exchange of goods (including money) or services in exchange for any other form of goods or services, voluntarily agreed upon in advance.  This includes implied contracts and verbal contracts.

I've highlighted thing you should read carefully. Once again, Toady never stated any obligations to provide any kind of DF-related service to donating players, therefore your original statement is false.
Also, peeking in other people's pockets is unethical. Whatever decision Toady takes in this aspect is completely his own, it is not your business at all.

[Mel_Vixen]

In contrast: The Donation. The donatio is specificly a contract yes but one without return consideration.

Furthermore toady would still work on df even if the donations go down, he would thought have to get a job again to pay his bills.
 
Anyway does this discussion get us anywhere? I think not! So please back on topic?

[hermes]

On scripting, Toady said recently that he had reservations about that because it alienated non-programmers.  You may or may not agree, but it seems quite probable that the number of people modding would decrease, which is probably not a good thing.  The FF12 example is not particularly advanced scripting, it's changing variables in a limited, pre-existing AI script (e.g. if X then Y), which is pretty much what DF modding does now (you can change X but the Y part is hardcoded behaviour).  Opening up the Y part to scripting would mean taking elements of pretty much everything out into the raws... combat, pathfinding, emotional responses etc...  Good idea?  I don't think so, you'd be better off coding a completely new game if that's what you want.

On "excessive" complexity, this is absolutely required for emergent behaviour in a procedurally generated world.  The only reason commercial games do not do this is because 99% of the time they trammel you into a 3D canyon with gameplay choices that amount to movement and shooting.  I could go into a larger philosophical discussion on why the minutiae of the "world" are important in selling the reality of the game environment, or we could look at the amazing stories that emerge from the game because someone accidentally ran across one of those obscure titans or decided to pinch the eyelashes off a kobold.  Where is the line for this level of detail?  That's a tough call but as long as people *keep* finding new stories from the game after so many years, it would seem rather miserly to rain on that parade.

So yes, saying "I will give you crayon drawings if you give me a certain amount of money" is a contract.

Yes, it's a contract to provide a crayon drawing.   

[NW_Kohaku]

Contracts are any exchange of goods (including money) or services in exchange for any other form of goods or services, voluntarily agreed upon in advance.  This includes implied contracts and verbal contracts.

I've highlighted thing you should read carefully. Once again, Toady never stated any obligations to provide any kind of DF-related service to donating players, therefore your original statement is false.
Also, peeking in other people's pockets is unethical. Whatever decision Toady takes in this aspect is completely his own, it is not your business at all.

I am aware of what I wrote, and you don't have the point you think you do.  He did, in fact, say that he would add donation drive animals in exchange.

I have no idea what you even mean by "peeking in other people's pockets", at that - Toady publicly posts what he gets in income, so it's not as if he's trying to keep that private.

In contrast: The Donation. The donatio is specificly a contract yes but one without return consideration.

To quote the page you linked:

Donations are given without return consideration. This lack of return consideration means that, in common law, an agreement to make a donation is an "imperfect contract void for want of consideration."

That means it's only void as a contract if you get nothing in return.  If you get a drawing in return, it's a contract.

[Sunday]

@ NW_Kohaku:

So I get that you're passionate, and I think you say some interesting things (I thought your suggestion thread about alchemy was really quite neat, even if I don't agree with everything you suggested). And, furthermore, it's nice to see you back in the community!

That said, I do tend to get somewhat tired of people talking about what they think Toady absolutely must work on immediately and how when he isn't doing what they want, he is destroying Dwarf Fortress.

But it isn't because I'm a "fanboy" (though I am a fan of DF) or because I think the project shouldn't be criticized.

It's because:
a) most of these critiques have been voiced several times before, but while the same things generally get said, people nonetheless get really angry and hurt during the discussion, which is too bad and doesn't really add much, IMO

b) despite the repeated predictions of Dwarf Fortress's doom if he doesn't work on making the UI more intuitive/reworking the graphics/whatever other suggestion people have, Toady seems to be doing pretty well for himself (DF has been D/Led, IIRC, hundreds of thousands of times by now and the community seems to still be growing—it certainly isn't in any danger of going extinct anytime soon), and

c) I, personally, have found that my enjoyment of DF increases as new versions are released—I do actually notice the family webs in the new version, for example, to say nothing of neat haunted areas and necromancers and such. And the emergent features (someone described the ghosts of necromancers raising the dead) are my favorite part. So I think you're just wrong about him only working on invisible stuff. And much of the supposed invisible stuff (e.g. economy, though it is actually not invisible) he was working on for this release is the groundwork for things that one will notice even more in the coming versions.

Indeed, riffing off that last point, I kind of think that many of the critiques of Toady—at least for me and for many DF players—are a bit off base.

E.g., you make a point of comparing DF to Minecraft. Well, I (without saying it's a bad game, and totally understanding that many other people enjoy it) am completely bored by that game. It may have a "coherent" design philosophy, according to your criteria, but Dwarf Fortress's kitchen sink philosophy, with a bunch of insanely complex, interlocking systems, is pretty much the reason I play the game.

In other words, a wholesale reimagining of DF might turn me off it entirely—and I've been playing for 4-odd years. And I am basically not someone who otherwise plays video games. I dunno.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't say what you want. And I'm not even saying that you're wrong (though I do kind of hope Toady doesn't take your philosophy to heart, since I'm worried it would eliminate the unique flavor that makes DF the only computer game I play). But people can disagree with you and like what Toady is doing without being blind "fanboys."

Finally, you're wrong about there being a contract. A contract=offer+acceptance+consideration+"meeting of the minds." It is a legal construct, not just "I expected X when I gave money to T, but he isn't giving it to me."

For example, if you tried to sue Toady in any jurisdiction in the world for breach of contract, you would lose, and lose fast. Because a contract has not been formed. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing how you would win that lawsuit if Toady keeps on doing what he's doing.

The ASCII art reward argument doesn't work: PBS does fundraisers where they give out mugs if someone donates more than $25 or whatever, but it still isn't a contract, it's a donation.

[Urist McDepravity]

The problem with scripting is that it makes modding inaccessible for the vast majority of the community i guess. The raws as they are right now are nice and (moderatly) simple so everybody can make and maintain a mod.

On a sidenote - with COPY_TAGS_FROM, APPLY_CREATURE_VARIATION, REMOVE_*, CHANGE_*, GO_TO_END, GO_TO_TAG etc commands/operators its already scripting language. And I'd personally prefer some more well-planned and capable DDL, as stuff like GO_TO_TAG is plain unreliable and will cause problems whenever you change tags in parent creature.

[eux0r]

-what sunday said- (that ninja! ;] )
anyways, i find those discussions amusing
toady, do you even _read_ those long colorfree discussion/rant-parts?
(yes, i am aware that i just used green instead of limegreen, its intentional)

[NW_Kohaku]

c) I, personally, have found that my enjoyment of DF increases as new versions are released—I do actually notice the family webs in the new version, for example, to say nothing of neat haunted areas and necromancers and such. And the emergent features (someone described the ghosts of necromancers raising the dead) are my favorite part. So I think you're just wrong about him only working on invisible stuff. And much of the supposed invisible stuff (e.g. economy, though it is actually not invisible) he was working on for this release is the groundwork for things that one will notice even more in the coming versions.

There is a difference between the sort of coding that creates an emergent feature that creates things like necromancer ghosts by simply not preventing such things from happening, and the sort of thing that occurs when the code appears to just collapse from its own weight.

The way that necks just sort of hang off to the side of heads that are attached directly to torsos, for example.  Also, the fact that alligators and cows have almost exactly the same code, and as such, cows have more powerful bites than alligators because they are simply larger creatures overall.  It's because most of these creatures are copy-pastes of one another because the raws aren't making good enough use of templates or scripting to make them wieldable. 

E.g., you make a point of comparing DF to Minecraft. Well, I (without saying it's a bad game, and totally understanding that many other people enjoy it) am completely bored by that game. It may have a "coherent" design philosophy, according to your criteria, but Dwarf Fortress's kitchen sink philosophy, with a bunch of insanely complex, interlocking systems, is pretty much the reason I play the game.

In other words, a wholesale reimagining of DF might turn me off it entirely—and I've been playing for 4-odd years. And I am basically not someone who otherwise plays video games. I dunno.

I don't make a point of comparing it to Minecraft, (which I don't even play, myself,) I said that a game emerging without having to copy DF directly, the way Minecraft didn't, is the main competition. 

When I talk about a lack of direction, I mean the schizophrenic way the game doesn't know whether it's being realistic or high fantasy or sometimes leading people to think it's going towards steampunk.  Animals are mostly real animals (excepting the "real-but giant" and "-man" version), and trees are mostly real trees, but crops are fantasy crops.  I mean the astounding degree of detail on individual dwarves that you will probably not care about on your 200th dwarf that walks in during your second migration wave.  I mean basing Fortress Mode around resource management, and then having such an absolute overabundance of resources that it's more a management of the excesses than a prioritization of the resources to the things you actually need.

I didn't even say Toady change what he intends to create, but to create it with more of an eye to priorities, and how the game actually gets played. 

A game feature is only as important as its impact on the player.

The ASCII art reward argument doesn't work: PBS does fundraisers where they give out mugs if someone donates more than $25 or whatever, but it still isn't a contract, it's a donation.

Technically, a pledge to make a donation is a special type of contract.  Charities can, in fact, sue to compel a pledger to give the money they have pledged, as the act of making a pledge is a special form of contract.  (And a Simpsons episode brushed along the side of this: if you say you are giving PBS money, they have the right to collect.)

Throwing in a mug for it, legally, means you are giving money for a good.  It's a very, very informal contract, but a legal contract of the same form of a purchase from a shop being an open contract.

[monk12]

The last time this thread had a big multi-page argument about issues that have been beaten to death, somebody got banned. Can we not have that happen again please?

Re: Devlog, yay fewer starvations!

[orius]

Yeah it is a nice bugfix. I won't have to build all my workshops from blocks just to prevent accidental forbid.

I started doing that myself after learning about those forbids the hard way.  That is I forbade all granite stones so my mason wouldn't make granite blocks while I was working on a magma pumpstack, only to find out all the workshops (quite a few) that had been build with granite had been shut down.  That caused more than a little bit of idling in the fort.  Hell, I got into the habit of bringing along a pair of gabbro blocks with me on embark to quickly get a carpenter's and mason's workshops up and running ASAP (gabbro because it is magma safe as another failsafe, and it's usually available unlike, say bauxite).

[bombzero]

hey guys, suggestion forums.

anyways, I realize that the 'future plans' means 1-2 years in the futures, so im fine with it.

also, i find it AMAZING how DF bugs tend to be fun (sometimes Fun), instead of annoying most of the time.
that said, i do kinda wish toady would work on some ESV stuff and major bug crunching, but as of right now, the game works, the game is fun, and has about 300x as much replay value and moddability as even other "open" games such as minecraft and terraria.


now i just need to get some damn money so i can donate to toady.

[Anatoli]

Does the devlog mean rulers will stop dying at the same rate as their subjects of starvations, or is it just a fix of historical figures in general?

EDIT: Nevermind Toady, I already read that historical figure starving has been disabled. Not an ideal solution, but I can live with it, so question disabled.