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[Skuggen]

Proper programmers don't like people touching their coffee cups.

[nasobema]

Proper programmers don't like people touching their coffee cups.

As a part-time-programmer (sort of...) I totally agree on that. Even if you eventually give your code away to other people, it can often give you hard feelings seeing what they do to "your baby".

Let Toady raise his (dwarf) kid as he pleases. It's a lovely one though often stubborn. So, quite normal, I'd say...


Ah, but back to the original post: this wasn't really meant to be another "Toady could make so much better, if he would just ..."-thread, was it?
So we should keep aside those fruitless discussions.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Toady is like batman: He works (mostly) alone.

Toady however doesn't seem to have an Alfred as of yet. I'm sure there are really people around here crazy enough to volunteer to be his personal butler, heck I possibly would for a while if I lived a bit closer ;P

Also related, if Toady is Batman, does that make Threetoe Robin? Or is there a better suited Batman character analogy? Can't say I know much about Batman apart from the movies

[superbob]

Since it's this kinda thread again, I'll just make the obligatory mention of UI abstraction/API that modders could build their own UI on top of. Kinda like what we have going with dfhack and its improvements, but without the need to read directly from DF's memory and possibly with DF running completely headless, fan-made UI handling all of display and user input.

The obvious advantage being that eventually we'd have a more friendly UI, made and maintained by some team of brave coders and artists, which would be nice.

The less obvious disadvantage being that it wouldn't help toady at all, rather just burden him with even more work. He'd still need to maintain some form of UI in DF, for development and new releases, and on top of it maintain the API for fan-made UI.

On one hand, we'd get more streamlined ways of controlling our dwarves, which would likely be nicer than anything Toady will produce in the next decade, on the other the original UI might fall into disuse and through less input and testing would end up being a bug ridden mess we'd all be forced to use whenever an update comes out and the nice UI needs to be updated. Oh, and if that fan project died for whatever reason, everyone would be a lot worse off.

Still, I think it would be worth the risk, and maybe if we ask Toady often enough he will eventually give in. While he'd have to do the extra work to maintain and document the API, he wouldn't have to do a whole lot more work that fans would put into making a better UI.

[Manveru Taurënér]

-snip-
Still, I think it would be worth the risk, and maybe if we ask Toady often enough he will eventually give in.
-snip-

Well I for one would support the counter movement asking Toady not to give in if it ever looked like it'd come to that.

It's a bit sad the whole opensourcing/API/etc'ing has to come up and drag down threads like this all the time, when the OP wasn't directly connected to it and it was obviously meant as a fun thread rather than another serious back and forth argument :<

[Trickman]

No, seriously. I'm sure there's part of the stuff where he could use the help.

If I were him, I'd pick up someone to split the splittable parts of DF into independent threads, to make it more multithread and improve how well the game runs, while Toady continues to develop the next arc. DF2016 would not only have more stuff, but it would run better.

Wow. You solved every DF's issue in just 3 lines. I think we should fire Toady and put you in his place.

Haters gonna hate.

[DG]

maybe if we ask Toady often enough he will eventually give in.

Maybe, but please don't 

[Mullet Master]

Here's my serious opinions to "help", although I fully well realize they will be ignored.

Toady should not be moderating the forums, period. They are too huge and the constant distraction of dealing with spambots/trolls could be a full time job for one person. He should add about two dozen community members as mods, or drop the forum entirely and give it to someone with the time,money, and desire to run it. Either way he should completely give up moderator access so he wouldn't even be tempted by day-to-day forum affairs. Of course, he could still leave threetoe as one and have indirect control.  Yes, I realize there are a few other mods, but any other forum this size would have many more. Not to mention the bandwidth costs are probably significant...

Future of the Fortress/Talks should stop until the next version is released. These things probably take a lot more time than anyone cares to admit. The time would be better spent by almost anything, even a vacation day to rest and get away from it.

 

[Scruffy]

I was going to give my opinnion but it seems like everything I would have said has already been said. Toady works in mysterious ways and meddle not in the affairs of coders for they are territorial and quick to anger do as they please.

...if Tarn manages to subcontract defecation to CSoftheP as kindly offered I estimate that's maybe 13 extra days a year in total.

I am feeling really ambivalent about this comment. It is the single most sig-worthy quote I have heard in months but it is also something that I think I should not sig.

[Trickman]

Here's my serious opinions to "help", although I fully well realize they will be ignored.

Toady should not be moderating the forums, period. They are too huge and the constant distraction of dealing with spambots/trolls could be a full time job for one person. He should add about two dozen community members as mods, or drop the forum entirely and give it to someone with the time,money, and desire to run it. Either way he should completely give up moderator access so he wouldn't even be tempted by day-to-day forum affairs. Of course, he could still leave threetoe as one and have indirect control.  Yes, I realize there are a few other mods, but any other forum this size would have many more. Not to mention the bandwidth costs are probably significant...

Future of the Fortress/Talks should stop until the next version is released. These things probably take a lot more time than anyone cares to admit. The time would be better spent by almost anything, even a vacation day to rest and get away from it.

Word up. He probably wastes entire days every now and then in the FOTF threads.

[DG]

Engaging with fans is not necessarily waste. With such a long interval between releases it's important, though I do think there are many gratuitous questions in FOTF. Many of them are people gently prodding Toady to work on something convergent to a devlog but couched as a question "Toady, you mentioned adding leaves to trees. Will photosynthesis make it into the next release, you think?". But there are loads of players who step up to answer the questions which lightens the load.

As for the forums, Tarn can't be expected to code the game 24/7, even if it were a paid job. He needs a break and the forums could be one way he can refresh his mind, or maybe doing a DF talk once in a while. What we are tempted to judge as waste or a drain on Toady may not be so. We need to resist selfishness and have some empathy. He's already mentioned a few times that policing the forums doesn't use up a lot of his time.

Of course even the things that Toady explicitly says won't satisfy everyone. I think he's intelligent enough, mature enough and honest enough to have good reasons for doing things the way he does. He's explained himself many times already. But there are people who will never agree as long as they suspect that there are faster ways to do things, never mind how exactly it would affect or benefit Toady (and thus themselves in the long run).

There's no law stopping anyone from lobbying Tarn either directly or via appeals to the players via the forum (the worst being suggestions that people stop donating until x happens), but there's also nothing stopping others from attempting to preempt it:

maybe if we ask Toady often enough he will eventually give in.

Maybe, but please don't 

[Knight Otu]

Here's my serious opinions to "help", although I fully well realize they will be ignored.

Toady should not be moderating the forums, period. They are too huge and the constant distraction of dealing with spambots/trolls could be a full time job for one person. He should add about two dozen community members as mods, or drop the forum entirely and give it to someone with the time,money, and desire to run it. Either way he should completely give up moderator access so he wouldn't even be tempted by day-to-day forum affairs. Of course, he could still leave threetoe as one and have indirect control.  Yes, I realize there are a few other mods, but any other forum this size would have many more. Not to mention the bandwidth costs are probably significant...

Future of the Fortress/Talks should stop until the next version is released. These things probably take a lot more time than anyone cares to admit. The time would be better spent by almost anything, even a vacation day to rest and get away from it.

Two dozen mods? I think you're overestimating either the size of this community or the amount of trouble that's actually occurring. Or both. A quick skim suggests that ENWorld might approach that number of mods, if I'm assuming that there have to be more "real" mods than the twelve or so  I've found listed at the roots of each category and in the forum games section, and that site has four times the number of members, twice the number of topics, and I guess 1.2 times the number of posts. Seems comparable? But it also has blogs, articles, a wiki, more forums, and a business focus, and several tools that bay12 will never need, and I know personally that at least once it lost a sizable number of posts. Toady has also said that dealing with spammers is not a large drain on his time, and with reasonable forum software, it shouldn't be. The 20 seconds he cites may be a bit low, but it's definitely not much. Trolls may take a bit longer, but you'll often see Toady say that he won't read back too far through threads with fights in them.

And yes, Toady can't code 24/7. He doesn't code seven days a week, either. He has other obligations. Family. Interviews. Scamps. He takes vacations on occasion. He has downtimes from coding. Why shouldn't he have interactions with his fans during some of them? I would even argue that these interactions contribute a lot to DFs popularity. As for the DF Talks - Toady has recently said there likely won't be a new one until after the release... and the first parts in the last few ones have been clearly recording at least a month or more before the posting date.

[Silleh Boy]

Interacting with the community and taking a moment away from the game here and there may ultimately be a beneficial thing. It's a little moment to step back, take a breather and engage in something else while you let the problems you're working on simmer away in the back of your mind - instead of stressing over them actively.

Toady's dedicated though, in a way few people ever manage to sustain - a lot of what we offer with good intentions, in a way encroaches upon that dedication. Taking something that another works on out of their hands when it's their pride and joy, when it's something they never had intent to collaborate on, takes away from the sense of dedication and accomplishment that they have.

This said, a clear avenue that we have to support his efforts are donations - while a clear avenue that we do not have is to assist with the coding. There have been a few side projects that used aspects of the DF code that others were able to work upon to aide the development - One involving Kobolds setting traps in their cave for adventurers springs to mind - but outside of what we're ultimately allowed to assist with, we're limited option wise.

Who knows though, perhaps one day one of the offers that one of us makes for assistance outside of the direct realm of the game will be accepted. I'm certain he appreciates the sentiment and willingness to assist him with these things, but ultimately, as with any other individual, we need to be mindful of encroaching upon their personal space, stepping over bounds so to speak.

[Sutremaine]

I don't really read the FOTF threads, but I'd say they're pretty useful even though they're not direct work on DF's code. Being asked questions about something is a very good way of having a spotlight shone on concepts or details you've glossed over or overlooked entirely.

[Skuggen]

This can of course vary, but in general never taking breaks from coding will not make a programmer more efficient. Over time it will have the opposite effect.