Print

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

[FlexibleDogma]

It already is necessary. ad hominem attacks are zipping around like bullets. We might end up locked soon.

Which is sad, I really like the civil part of this topic.

Agreed that increased moderation will become necessary as time goes on, but that happens with the growth of any online community.  I doubt anyone should be banned out of hand unless they start posting links to myreallycoolsite.example.com*, but some folks could use the occasional cooling off period from time to time.  The problem with being a mod is you get a ton of messages along the lines of "SOANDSO said something I disagree with, ban him!" and they get a ton of sycophants who suck up to you all the time while acting like THEY are the boss instead  ("Ooooh, wait till Urist McModerator sees this post!  You should just remove it now!")

However, having an active moderator who pops his head in from time to time going "Hey guys, could you keep this on topic?" can help keep discussions from turning into !!discussions!!. 

*Fun factoid: example.com/org/net are reserved, so nothing can ever live there.  Go ahead and try it out: www.example.com

[isitanos]

Let's try to keep all the flaming out of this, ok? There's a lot of misunderstanding and not ready the context going on.

I may have been wrong in starting the thread on two topics at the same time. It did cause a lot of trolling. But as things are, currently we are discussing two things:

SUMMARY OF THE CURRENT TOPICS (also posted on page 1)

1. Would third-party interfaces hurt or help DF and Toady, and in what aspects?
- Donations
- Fan base/User adoption
- Toady being able to concentrate on what he likes doing
- Better interface in the short and long run

My personal opinion: third-party interfaces will only please (and increase a bit) the hardcore fanbase Toady relies on for a living, and allow him to spend more time on developing all the gameplay features he's planning. On top of that, those interfaces will be a testing ground for what interface suits better DF, and then Toady can implement his own by picking what he likes left and right.

2. What's the best technical way to allow third-party interfaces?
- Let people hack at the game as it is now
- Client-server separations through sockets (seems inefficient and hard to achieve, from some comments)
- Client-server separation through making the client or server a DLL
- If we admit that a client-server-like separation is best, is it better to have a documented public API to the server, or make the client open-source so it's kind of self-documenting.

My personal opinion (after reading many interesting advices on this thread): the best way to go would be a client-server separation through making the client (interface part) or server (game logic part) a DLL. Since Toady fears that maintaining an API for people will be too much work, I think a self-documenting open-source client would be a good solution. Things will break between versions (as they do now), but since Toady will have his own working client as an example, third-party ones will be easily and quickly updated. Lastly I suggest a license similar to the GPL for the client, so that Toady has full access to the third-party interface source code, and can integrate whatever he wants in his reference version without asking permission to anybody.

[Omega2]

FlexibleDogma: I know that full well. I was a moderator in a pretty big wargaming forum, used to get the occasional "HELP! I'm losing an argument!" messages, too.

Anyway, we could use toning down the drama a little. We are throwing ideas around impersonally, whether they'll be implemented or not, and why. I know 99% of what's here will never happen (the skin support idea might end up implemented, I guess), but this thread is more of a knowledge repository for this subject instead of a "modders manifesto".

Well, it would work better as a reference thread if things hadn't warmed up so much. 

[SirPenguin]

That has to be the most tortuous misrepresentation I've read in a while.  Here we have an indie, one-man-band developer who gives away his game for free, making a humble statement that he'd rather not manage or otherwise wrangle modders who don't have the same years-long commitment to the project.  From this you conclude he's selfish?  That clearly his wishes are only explained as an unfeeling tyrant's lust for money?  That's an absolutely backwards conclusion--he's stated the minute he stops enjoying working on the game he'll leave it, and he -doesn't enjoy playing administrator-.  Might he mean just what he says?  Might your psychoanalysis be a truckload of bunk?

Also, would you cease with your unsubstantiated claims that "fix the interface!" is the #1 request?  What are you basing that on other than your own wishful thinking drawn from purely anecdotal evidence?  Your heart's in the right place, but I think your brain refuses to process any evidence or logic other than "allowing us access to create our interfaces is the one and only truth; all opposition must have evil motives."  Might it be that he wants to keep having fun, rather than having to be committed to maintaining a playground for modders at the expense of working on what he wants to?

Again, I believe your hearts are in the right place, but you all are sounding (in my opinion) more selfish and insulting by the minute.  At least admit the possibility that refusing to allow this access isn't necessarily the result of malevolent motivations?  I wouldn't ascribe such evil intent to your dreams for the game, so why do you heap them on Toady's?

I'm not going to respond to every point, because honestly, continuing this silly little flame war when I'm just trying to voice an opinion is silly. I'll say two things.

1. Listen to the audio interviews. Toady himself tells us that an interface overhaul is the #1 request.

2. The point of modders if they can change a game without the dev doing anything. Further, they can change a game without even changing the source code. It's win-win for everyone. The only reason Toady is NOT is because of control and money. I'm not making accusations, he's stated as much himself.

And that's just the thing. I'm not making accusations. I'm simply responding to things Toady has already said.

[Anu Necunoscut]

but he's approaching this whole thing with a healthy dose of selfishnesss.

...

Instead, he says he doesn't want to do that because he's afraid of losing control...and losing the moneyflow he currently has.

...

I fear his concern for his pocketbook is going to alienate people from the game we love so much.

No accusations there?  If you say so.

If Toady was a greedy bastard, he'd stripmine the community for a bunch of indifferently talented artists and insert amateurish anime graphics all over everything.  He'd remove the more demanding sandbox aspects of the game to go for the mouth-breather audience, and insert a bunch of scripted encounters and a lame fantasy paint-by-numbers plot.  Next he'd -charge for use of the game- instead of offering it for free.  Next, he'd have his little art-slaves scrawl up vomitous ads to plaster all over the internet, and DF would become another unoriginal crappy indie game that's just like every other.

Instead, he's making the sort of game he wants to make, and is committed to keeping the work enjoyable and personal.  I don't connect the development path of DF with any kind of money-lust, and I'm surprised that anyone can even pretend to do so.  Why make a difficult-to-program, difficult-to-get-into, difficult-to-market game if you're in it for the cash?  Isn't a more reasonable explanation simply that he doesn't want to wrangle modders, and wants to work on more interesting aspects of the game than the interface, unless he's forced to by going broke?

[Jamuk]

Sir Penguin, maybe money isn't his only objective.  It may have an impact on which thing he works on first if he sees that support for the game is dwindling, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it is his sole focus.  If he had the choice between giving up years of work, and a couple thousand dollars a month, I doubt he would choose the money.  People are not one sided no matter how simple things would be if it were true.  Just because he likes having a few thousand dollars a month doesn't mean he relies on it.

Also, noone has come up with any counterargument to my post yet? I had hoped someone would at least pretend I said something useful 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So far it seems as if all 11 pages have presented nothing but modifications of the same argument.
People who support toady's previous statements and his decision that he would rather not risk third party interfaces taking control of the game, and people saying that it won't happen.
I doubt toady wouldn't admit a third party interface COULD work wonders for his game.   But it also COULD cause lots of damage to the community that supports it.  We know that it is possible for third party interfaces to work wonders for dwarf fortress.  But, there is RISK involved in this.

WE DON'T KNOW what exact effect that a third party interface system would have on the df community.
There is no possible way to know... and so by doing so Toady would be gambling on the community that has supported him and his ideas faithfully for years.

Have you ever thought that he just doesn't want to take the risk?  I mean have a heart, you can't possibly believe that there is absolutely no chance of what Toady has fortold to come true.  You may believe that the risks are worth it, but then again you have not spent years on this game.  That would be the equivalent of betting your house on a poker game.  Sure you may be very skilled at poker, but what about that small chance you will lose?  It is still there.  And Toady has the potential to cause damage to the years worth of work he has done.  You may not see the risk, but I doubt you have thought about it as much as Toady has since he started his game.  He just doesn't want to risk it.  Don't force him.  Maybe Toady doesn't want to lose years of work and the community he has built during it.

It is about risk and how much you are willing to bet against that risk.
We have made no large commitments to the project and will lose very little.  Therefore we believe that the risk is worth it for the chance of improving the game rapidly.
However Toady has commited years of his life to this game.  He stands to lose a lot.

Would you take plastic surgery if there was a .01% chance of death?  I wouldn't.  It isn't worth it.
You want Toady to perform that surgery on his game?  He would be gambling with years of his life for a pretty cover, and one that would come eventually if he just took his time.

[isitanos]

I wanted to add this to what I posted above:

People are making worst-case scenarios, such as Toady losing all his work and the project failing and so on.

I personally believe that third-party interface clients would only help, not hurt, Dwarf Fortress.

But what if by some amazing and unlikely bad luck one of those worst-case scenarios comes true and Toady feels he's loosing control of the project?
Well he still has an emergency exit: stop the third-party client business by not supporting them anymore (i.e. stop updating his public API or not publishing the source code for the next version of his client). This would certainly anger a lot of fans who are relying on those clients, but he could still count on faithful hardcore fans who are more interested by the game than by any client. I know that if this situation came true, I would keep playing the game and following it's development, even with a bad interface like the current one.

In the case of an open-source client, the license could specify that Toady can use any code from derivative works without publishing his changes. Basically, people using the client source code would have to share copyrights with Toady. This would allow Tarn to use any source code from third-party clients he sees fit, but revert the license to closed-source for any future version at any time. Not that I think it will be necessary, but you can't be too safe in a case like this.

@Jamuk:

I think this addresses in part what you were saying. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a higher than .01% of dying from plastic surgery. And we do everyday activities that are in fact rather dangerous, like driving. Sorry, I don't have the exact danger statistics. The question is more: we know that there's a risk, but is the risk small enough and the reward big enough to undertake this project? Toady has admitted taking pretty big risks when he made the switch to 3D and also in his recent work on World Gen: those were two long spells of development without many updates, and the second one didn't carry many rewards for fortress mode players. So he's not afraid of risk per se. If he was, he wouldn't have dropped his job even before receiving a single donation for DF.

[Davion]

But what if by some amazing and unlikely bad luck one of those worst-case scenarios comes true and Toady feels he's loosing control of the project?
Well he still has an emergency exit: stop the third-party client business by not supporting them anymore (i.e. stop updating his public API or not publishing the source code for the next version of his client). This would certainly anger a lot of fans who are relying on those clients, but he could still count on faithful hardcore fans who are more interested by the game than by any client. I know that if this situation came true, I would keep playing the game and following it's development, even with a bad interface like the current one.

But couldn't they just hack the memory of his new versions and basically stay up to date?

[Omega2]

But what if by some amazing and unlikely bad luck one of those worst-case scenarios comes true and Toady feels he's loosing control of the project?
Well he still has an emergency exit: stop the third-party client business by not supporting them anymore (i.e. stop updating his public API or not publishing the source code for the next version of his client). This would certainly anger a lot of fans who are relying on those clients, but he could still count on faithful hardcore fans who are more interested by the game than by any client. I know that if this situation came true, I would keep playing the game and following it's development, even with a bad interface like the current one.

But couldn't they just hack the memory of his new versions and basically stay up to date?

Isn't that what they already do?

Instead, he's making the sort of game he wants to make, and is committed to keeping the work enjoyable and personal.  I don't connect the development path of DF with any kind of money-lust, and I'm surprised that anyone can even pretend to do so.  Why make a difficult-to-program, difficult-to-get-into, difficult-to-market game if you're in it for the cash?  Isn't a more reasonable explanation simply that he doesn't want to wrangle modders, and wants to work on more interesting aspects of the game than the interface, unless he's forced to by going broke?

However, this game is also his source of income, which means he'll have to get around doing the parts he's not that hot about, eventually.

I don't think the way he's taking things is very sound business. Of course, he has a very flexible plan and schedule, but relying on donations while more or less ignoring requests from a considerable part of the userbase (lots of people got at least a small beef with the interface) just doesn't sound right. As the game gets more and more complex, the basic interface becomes more and more inappropriate (like searching stuff in the stocks or reassigning jobs when you're at 150+ dwarves), so the interface can't lag too much behind the content.

I don't want to boss Toady around, but I suggest he tackles at least some of the interface problems and requests as he develops the Army and Caravan Arcs. The option to mass-build walls and floors was a stroke of genius and much welcomed by the userbase, more fixes/additions to the interface like that, such as unifying and simplifying controls by default, would make waiting for the Presentation Arc (where everything changes, I guess?) much more enjoyable, as the game, although graphically simplistic as usual, wouldn't be so awkward to play. Plus it would help keeping new players interested long enough to become habitual players and possible donators.

Of course, he might not be interested in doing interface at all. In which case the modders, using whatever tools at hand, would most likely take over that front. And that's not 100% good either. Figure this: as soon as the Presentation Arc comes around, the comparisons of functionality between vanilla DF and the third-party tools like Companion and Foreman will immediatelly start popping up. So the lack of good interface right now might cause acceptance problems later ("DwarfSuperTool does this much better! Why don't you do it like they do?!").

[Nikov]

While I don't doubt your good intentions, I don't think "interface improvements" is more interesting than "caravans, persistent trade resources and army deployment" to Toady right now (at the risk of appearing as if I can magically read Toady's mind).

I believe Toady works on what is most interesting to him at the moment, and this belief is based on what I have read in his dev notes (far clearer than most other software authors I've seen). No matter what you think is "best for Dwarf Fortress", one thing is certain - Toady will work on what Toady wants.

Oh, absolutely. I agree that he does what most interests him, and thats all fair and good. Having only donated $0.02 USD to this project thus far, I don't presume any personal entitlement. And don't get the wrong idea, I really want to send my army of thirty dwarves on a loot and pillage run to finally end these goblin ambushes.

However I have worked in a mod before, the Project Reality mod of Battlefield 2. They had robust gameplay changes in mind when they started out. Simple things, like changing accuracy levels for weapons and removing kill messages, created a totally new feel for the game. But we still had ridiculous crap left over from the original Battlefield 2. Maps had to be re-balanced for the new casualty rates. Capture points had to be shifted. And mappers like myself didn't want to go back into old product to fix it up, we wanted to make new product we could proudly give to the community with our signatures written in the pavement somewhere. But if we didn't practically draft developers to fix maps, we'd continue with good gameplay hampered by a bad game enviroment for much, much longer.

That's how I feel about an interface. It takes precedence not because its fun or interesting to work on, but because all of this amazing stuff is hidden under an old coat of varnish that makes other gamers, with donation money burning their pockets, walk by and say "So what?". I'm not here to cry and get my way. I don't need a 3D or 2D sprite interface. I just think its in Dwarf Fortress' best interest, even if its not interesting to Toady, to improve the interface through whatever means he prefers. And its my opinion a good way to do that would be through a 3rd party interface.

P.S.  Do you see what I did in my post? I wrote an entire post without using the word "you". Its a very polite way to write in an argument a debate because then you won't put words into people's mouths.

P.S.S. A reader may notice my previous post scriptum utilized the word "you", and thus created the impression I was accusing all other readers of appearing to put words into other's mouths. This action was deliberate in order to drive home a rhetorical point.

P.P.S. Is it Post Post Scriptum or Post Scriptum Something?

Appendix: I know I could wiki that but I've wasted enough time already.

Appendix B: Now I'm just pushing the joke*.

*: Get it?

[Davion]

Isn't that what they already do?

Yes, and that would basically mean that he'd still be losing control of the project, even though he severed ties with it, wouldn't it?

[Omega2]

Isn't that what they already do?

Yes, and that would basically mean that he'd still be losing control of the project, even though he severed ties with it, wouldn't it?

Isn't that a Catch-22? If he does it, he risks losing control of the project due to actions he sanctioned. If he doesn't do it, he risks losing control of the project due to actions he didn't sanction but also didn't declare as ilegitimate.

[isitanos]

Isn't that what they already do?

Yes, and that would basically mean that he'd still be losing control of the project, even though he severed ties with it, wouldn't it?

I think Toady could revert to the current third-party hacking difficulty by reverting to closed source and changing the source code quite a bit. He could reintegrate everything in a monolithic EXE. Hell, he could even obfuscate his binary (though I don't know much about those techniques). Of course he can't completely prevent people to make third-party clients like the ones that currently exists. Even though, if he officially (and therefore legally) forbade doing this, I doubt many people would disobey. True (read: donating) fans would be unlikely to use tools that don't have Toady's "benediction".

Remember, this is a worst-case scenario.

[Davion]

Isn't that what they already do?

Yes, and that would basically mean that he'd still be losing control of the project, even though he severed ties with it, wouldn't it?

Isn't that a Catch-22? If he does it, he risks losing control of the project due to actions he sanctioned. If he doesn't do it, he risks losing control of the project due to actions he didn't sanction but also didn't declare as ilegitimate.

Which is why I think the community is probably going to destroy his soul from the inside out.

It's like Frankenstein or something.

[dreiche2]

You're turning things upside down. If Toady cared about the money, he would work on the interface... What he says is that as long as he can survive on the current donations, he works on what he likes most instead, so it's exactly the other way around from what you describe.

Also, you're the first one in this thread to actually attack, if mildly, Toady, and that's not what this thread was about. This only provokes further flaming, and we have enough of that already

I disagree. I'm not attacking Toady. I'd be willing to say the fact you THINK I'm attacking Toady is the very reason topics like this turn into flame wars. People are ALLOWED to simultaneously respect, like, AND be critical of someone's actions. That's all I'm doing. I am not flaming or attacking Toady, DF, or you, or anyone. I am saying, though, that I disagree with Toady's actions in this instance.

Well, maybe attacking was the wrong word. I just wanted to point out that the topic of this thread wasn't about whether to criticize Toady for his actions, because I feared that bringing this issue into this thread would derail it further, independent of whether it is an legitimate issue.

As for your actual point, I and I think most others simply disagree. You say he is egoistic because he wants full control of the project, and that he cares too much about the money.

About the first issue, well this might actually be true in a sense. He's not mother Teresa, it's his work, and if he has a choice he probably wants to make a (basic) living from it. Although I have to say, DF is so much a single man's creation, that you could say that what is best for Toady is in the end best for DF and everyone who plays it anyway.

But that he is in for the money, this I just don't understand. He is in for it in so far that he wants to live from making the game, but apart from that? Or is that already too much greed in your opinion?