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[Marc Remillard]

Oi, I disliked that you made this thread. Not because I don't think its a good idea, but it brings out the bad side of Bay12... something I like to pretend doesn't exist.

If you get any reasonable progress into doing this, count me interested, but I agree that you could probably pick a better forum. Best of luck to you, anyway.

Thankyou, progress for me would be peoplee intersted in the idea, so it helps. The bad side. I'm not sure I want to know, I'm harboring thoughts of sociopaths and that great author from South Australia. Whats the worst that can happen beyond some healthy debate? Runs the risk of attracting total socionuts and basement kids, but geez, it'd be a boring world  if we didn't have to filter them out (had a couple of classics in the thread already I think, very passionate, about a game, must lead interesting liives).

[freeformschooler]

Just out of curiosity, as "Open Source" would this be "open to anyone to commit at any time" or more "open to anyone to view the source but only certain people can change the main branch"?

[Dr. Johbson]

I don't actually see anything that complex - admittedly there's a couple of areas, but that's the idea of an open source effort in any case - it wouldn't be isolated to one person, so in terms of 'man hours', it might take some time, but spread that among many people, or a few very competent people, its not so bad.

This is the silliest thing I've read all day. Have you played dwarf fortress? Have you seen legends mode? I'm sure alot of it is needlessly complex and sometimes pointless, but really?

Well, yes and no. I was hoping to speak to people that had a similar vein of thought, not to convert or persuade. The former would see people in a good discussion, the latter is not what I want.

This is a problem. Why bother asking a question if you only want like-minded people to agree with you? That generates no discussion or ideas. Different view points are valuable, and while I'd be the first to admit that this is a bad place to ask this kind of question, (you can find bickering in EVERY thread) if you don't want to hear anything different from what you believe, I again do not understand why you would bother asking.

If you believe you can truly do what you say, please do! I think such a thing would be wonderful! But I don't think you're realizing what kind of work this would require, if you did want an "open sourced dwarf fortress." If you simply wanted to make an open source game in this genre, that would be much more simple, realistic, and would also be very cool. If you have the passion and ability to do either of these, good luck, more games like dwarf fortress that aren't dwarf fortress would be pretty awesome. But if you do, please don't make fantasy dwarves in a forest/underground, we've seen enough of those. Try something new, like managing an airship or an asteroid, perhaps even a western setting. Those would all be really, really, fantastic.

[Yoink]

Runs the risk of attracting total socionuts and basement kids, but geez, it'd be a boring world  if we didn't have to filter them out (had a couple of classics in the thread already I think, very passionate, about a game, must lead interesting liives).

Quite apart from the apparent arrogance on display in this thread, your passive-aggressive posts aren't winning you any friends.
Go ahead and discuss, but jeez. 

[Bulwersator]

It is a poor idea to start project aiming to remove only source of income from Toady on forums created, administrated and funded by Toady.

A lot of interesting coding challenges involved, the A* pathing I guess, multithreading for modern CPU's, mod support and hooks from the outset etc.

(...)

Most of it strikes me as fairly easy

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahaha.

[freeformschooler]

It is a poor idea to start project aiming to remove only source of income from Toady on forums created, administrated and funded by Toady.

To be fair, he stated that to be not his intention at all.

[Dr. Johbson]

It is a poor idea to start project aiming to remove only source of income from Toady on forums created, administrated and funded by Toady.

To be fair, he stated that to be not his intention at all.

Yes, he specifically stated this was not his goal, and that he could never achieve it anyway.

[NotAQuisling]

I have a few questions. Can you actually program and do you have any work done yet? Also I feel like we're being a bit needlessly hostile towards this. An open source remake wouldn't make Toadys work obsolete and I'm certain both can co-exist peacefully.

[Matz05]

Wow, some people get hostile. Obviously a lot of people only read a topic heading and a sentence or two before attacking.

I for one think we DO need a FOSS 3D tilebased settlement management sim with a focus on emergence and detail. It would be interesting to watch grow, that's for sure.

[Biag]

I think we can mostly agree that an open-source colony management sim would be neat, judging by the general reception to games like Towns and Goblin Camp and how much we all like open-source stuff. The thing that seems to be so incendiary is Marc's presentation- "I have an idea, want to make a new Dwarf Fortress? It's not that complicated, so it should be easy to catch up to where it is now!" is not really the way to portray this.

@Marc, you said earlier that you didn't care about presentation because you were only gauging interest, but keep in mind that it's a public forum and so your posts should generally be targeted for public reading. If only a few supportive and interested people could see the thread this would have gone a lot differently.

Anyway, I would contribute to an open-source DFlike if it was a language I knew and there was some leadership. I haven't seen a ton of open-source projects that got by very far without someone in charge of the "official" build. My advice for anyone who is passionate about a project like this is to go and start coding in Java, C# or Python and come back in a month with something substantial. This community is sort of harsh to proposed ideas with no prototype to back them up, but usually if a member (or even a non-member) posts about how their personal project is going we are incredibly supportive. Just look at Cataclysm.

[Microcline]

I'm going to say that before you start trying to recruit people, ask yourself whether this is something you really want to pursue.

First, open source development isn't going to give you anywhere near the time benefits you expect.  Software engineering should never fall victim to the fallacy of the man-month.  Open source development can be very efficient in games like Stone Soup or Nethack where the majority of functions are present and the bulk of the work is in adding new levels, creatures, items and races, bugtesting, and balancing (this is already present to an extent in DF via text file modding).  In a game like DF where the majority of development is due to feature creep, multiple developers would inevitably lose some efficiency due to stepping on each other's toes.

Second, developer teams aren't easy to assemble if you aren't willing to pay.  Unless you've got some big titles under your name, don't expect experienced programmers to flock to your cause.

Even if you are able to assemble a crack team able to work together for a number of years and it results in a massive reduction in development time (i.e. creating the game in five years instead of ten), you've now spent every waking hour for five years of your life to re-create a game that already existed five years ago.  If you are willing to pour that much of yourself into a project, why not go with an original idea?  Successful game development is rarely born from "I like game X, but game X doesn't have blackjack and hookerbots.  I'm going to completely re-create game X but with blackjack and hookerbots."  You might try to argue that the strategy is "like a more polished version of game X", but that really only works for companies like Valve that have overwhelming resources at their disposal, and you probably don't have that.  For an independent developer, the best bet is to find a gameplay concept that you like and to construct a game around that.

edit: If you are Gabe Newell, get back to work on Episode 3 you gluttonous haberdasher

[Flying Dice]

Wow, some people get hostile. Obviously a lot of people only read a topic heading and a sentence or two before attacking.

I think that stemmed more from the passive-aggressive posts and that the thread was more of a "Hey, this seems like a cool idea, I wonder if I could do it--yeah, I probably could, nothing too difficult here" thing than "Hey, I've already got a framework for development set up, I can do a lot of the work, and I'm working towards assembling a team to do it, etc.".

[Sensei]

Runs the risk of attracting total socionuts and basement kids, but geez, it'd be a boring world  if we didn't have to filter them out (had a couple of classics in the thread already I think, very passionate, about a game, must lead interesting liives).

You know, you have to be pretty damn passionate yourself to replicate a large body of code like Dwarf Fortress. What computer science experience do you have, and how long do you imagine the project taking?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

There is absolutely no way a DF clone could be created by an open source community. DF is a game that was created by over a decade of intense dedication by a mathematics PhD and veteran programer, who is practically speaking the sole coder. Open source development is like the exact opposite of that. Trying to get a large number of less skilled people to replicate the work of one absurdly skilled individual is like trying to put a hectogon peg in a triangular hole. It just will not function. DF barely stays together every time Toady makes even a moderate change to it because of how complicated and huge it already is, and he's no novice at programming.

I am also displeased by this thread.

[Darkmere]

Open source works fine... LINUX exists. What it needs is leadership and passionate people working as the proper directed group to accomplish a clearly defined and delineated goal.