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[acetech09]

I sigh and paste this in to any discussions that derail to this topic of open source/bug fixing.

Open source? Why not? Toady doesn't want to.
100% Bug free? Why not? Toady doesn't want to.

Not getting the spirit of DF? Toady dedicates his whole life to making a game that he likes to make. It just happens that it is fun enough that he can live off of donations every month. Toady doesn't make games to sell and make money off of. He says DF will always be free. As far as I know (I'll admit I haven't talked with him myself, but this is the picture I get), is that Toady doesn't care much about appealing to a popular audience, expanding Dwarf Fortress's popularity, and racking in major donations.

1) I am not blaming Toady for the problems but they have always been massive since the day I began, all of these things once worked in one version or another - it just keeps being broken and fixed because there's a pile of code to go through. 2) I really don't like how emotional people are getting, 3) what's the problem with discussing this openly ? There shouldn't be any restricted topics in a western nation.

1) Yeah. There are lots of bugs. If those bothers you, you know you can just not play the game.
2) See the spirit of DF above. If you bothered to look up any of the 100+ threads on this topic before, you would've known about toady's view on the matter. I get a bit agitated when people bring up this issue because if they bring up this topic, they should know what they're talking about, and if they do, it's quite inconsiderate to still bring it up after knowing toady's stance.
3) We're not restricting you. Feeling that you don't want to talk doesn't mean you can't talk.

[psychologicalshock]

If people are happy with how it is then that's coo.l This game is feature rich and honestly feels complete as it is, it's great  that toady wants to add new stuff but I personally just want to play the game in a stable state where I can have all the features as intended.  Does no one really feel this way? What if the game had been open sourced back during the 2d -> 3d conversion? Its unlikely that anyone else would have independently made the 2d-> 3d step and we would have probably waited on Toady for it, but it would have meant , at the time, a very, very stable version for all to enjoy. Similarly , if it was open-sourced today we'd still wait on him to finish the next big arc but it would mean that the current version (which is really good) would be complete. This seems like an issue of his fears of the possible ways through which this project could be run into the ground if more people were allowed to tweak it, but in the past I have seen nothing but good come from community-backed projects. One of the ones that I got to bug test was the 1.13 patch for JA2, the experience was fantastic - I had people adding suggested content and fixing bugs within days of me reporting them. To go from that to this is a bit depressing to be honest , it's sad to see projects fail to reach their potential.

[Naryar]

DF's still in alpha. Expect bugs.

[helf]

Why do people think open source is a magic bullet?
The code is probably really messy and really complex/intricate. Not to mention that I highly doubt he has commented it to any large degree. It would take years for anyone else to get competent with the code.

always with the "the community can fix it" line, as well.

[KainInt]

In what ways is DF not reaching potential?

A solo developer working constantly for years, essentially creating two complete games (Adv. and Fort) and continuing to add content, generating a following large enough to dedicate hours of their time describing the physics behind made up materials?

Most games could only hope to get that by the time they were fully released.

Toady doesn't want it to be open source for some reason, and most of the community respects that. We have come to trust Toady in his decision making. We know that most bugs aren't game destroying (the only bug I've EVER needed to avoid is the water in lye buckets one), and that the ones that are, are usually fixed pretty quickly.

[Necromunger]

I can see what your saying but you haven't seen what i have seen.

I have been apart of to many projects,mods and games that have been destroyed to agree with open source, RIGHT NOW.

Much much much later on it might be ok but what you are suggesting has the capacity to DESTROY the game.

people will make copies and sell them and all this crap and toady will not be the centre of attention which he needs to be.

Trust me, something as special as what we are all getting now takes a very long time, Toady has realised that and has married the project. No joke he actually said its his life goal.

[Jingles]

So you're upset that the scope of the project is huge,even though this has always been clear, and you are also upset that you can't play the latest release without any bugs... in an alpha. 

Well it seems there are plenty of alternatives for you to try out that are past alpha, Minecraft for example or Dwarves! for instance.

[AWdeV]

OP, I think you're getting way too upset over trivial things.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

If people are happy with how it is then that's coo.l This game is feature rich and honestly feels complete as it is, it's great  that toady wants to add new stuff but I personally just want to play the game in a stable state where I can have all the features as intended.  Does no one really feel this way?

Of course we all want that.  We want it all, and we want it now.  But, as they say, you can't always get what you want.

What if the game had been open sourced back during the 2d -> 3d conversion?

It's really hard to say.  I have no doubt that it would be more stable-- people have been making fixes via hacks that still haven't been implemented officially, and that's without code access.

But I think it's important to realize that open source programming means losing a single, creative authority.  This is especially true with something intended to be as procedurally generated as Dwarf Fortress; there's little real division between code and content.  If it was open source, whips almost certainly wouldn't behave the way they do-- and we'd still have a philosopher and guild nobles-- and iron would probably be much more effective than bronze, more so than it is now.  It's hard to imagine all of the creative changes that would come with open sourcing DF, and yeah, some of them might be for the better.  But I believe that single visions lead to more distinctive, unique works than crowdsourced efforts.  Yeah, Wikipedia is great.  But so is The Devil's Dictionary.  They're great in different ways.

Any group that wants to is free to make an open-sourced DF-a-like.  The source material is not so distinctive that you'd ever be vulnerable to a lawsuit.  If you strongly believe that an open source DF-like game would be superior, then get it started.  If you don't want to get it started-- because christ it's a lot of work, right?-- then maybe you can understand the immense amount of effort Toady has put into DF, and maybe begin to understand why he might be loathe to relinquish control of it.

EDIT: A few more things I think would be different if DF was OS: No forgotten beasts.  Different methods of figuring temperature and vegetation, for good or ill.  Vampires as civ leaders, never as infiltrators.  Wider variety of vegetation.  No evil weather.

[Kogut]

OS/API discusssion are useless as Toady REFUSED to release code of DF or make API. Amen.

[kaijyuu]

It should be obvious but I guess not...

The reason it's closed source is the same reason it's copyrighted: Toady lives off donations. Putting the game in someone else's hands will destroy his donation model.

There's more reasons than that, but that's the big one.

[arphen]

I'm generally a gnu/linux freetard but df is the only non-free (as in freedom) program i currently use.
And somehow i'm even ok with it.
I mean i'd really really like to see the game go OS, just to check the code.
I'd never consider playing a df version by anyone other than toady himself, i really like his visions and ideas, so i don't even mod.
I'd rather have 1 dedicated enthusiastic visionary than 100 high school c# gurus

[RabblerouserGT]

There's a reason the game says it's in alpha.

[melomel]

Uhh...

Non-programmer here, but isn't it assuming a lot that, if Toady was infected by an alien brainworm and uploaded the source code tomorrow, that "the community" would instantly be able to understand the whole thing and fix it all?

I mean, just getting a handle on the code as it is now would take a while.  Right?

TL;DR = it's his baby, stop whining because he doesn't want you paddling your paws in its innards; you probably couldn't fix it anyway.

[omg_scout]

There is a dfhack with a clean tool for that bug. fixed in 10th secs.