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[Baughn]

Not really. Your old stuff is likely to handle a dozen corner cases garnered from bug reports that you'd never think of while rewriting it, and so slowly rewriting it is better at maintaining quality than throwing away your old code.

Of course, that depends on the old code working.

[Corona688]

writing new code to work correctly is (somewhat) easier than rewriting old stuff.

Only for trivial problems that you can get right the first time.

[Granite26]

I think that the placeholders aren't so odd as the fact that the placeholders are all designed to merge together into a playable game, rather than a testable stub.  When a programmer adds a placeholder in an alpha, it's going to be more like AND THIS IS WHERE YOU FIGHT, BUT WE'RE GOING TO DETERMINE THE OUTCOME
RANDOMLY BASED ON STATS

whereas DF is a little more organic than that.

I find the DF business model to be fascinating, and would rather see more commercial development of it's like (subscription based micro-improvements rather than an 8-12 month business cycle followed by dumping the product for the sequel).  I find the claims that DF is in alpha to be a useful lie, forced on it by the fact that the DF development model doesn't follow the traditional game development cycle.  It correctly sets expectations for the game, while inaccurately describing it's status.

[aklyatne]

the DF development model doesn't follow the traditional game development cycle.

...and even though this development cycle is a lot better*, it'll probably never get adopted by the general public.  People like to say, "Yeah, I'm awesome at Call of Duty 4."  With Dwarf Fortress, when the next update comes out, I'll be able to say, "I'm still learning how to play," even though I'm awesome at the current version.  'Normal' people don't like to do that; they want to be perfect, or not do it at all.

*I HATE what's happened to games like Left 4 Dead.  That was a great game, and I expected it to only get better.  When I bought it, I was thinking,  "4 weapons and 4 short campaigns?  Oh well, it'll get better, right?"  Instead of releasing updates, however, they're making an ENTIRELY NEW GAME.  I paid $50 for a beta when I expected a full product.  A soon-to-be-finished full product, but a full product none the less.  What I got was nothing of the sort.  Soon, the original official servers will be entirely empty because everybody else will rush to buy L4D2.  It won't even be fun to play after the second is released.

That should not happen.  Games should be more like Dwarf Fortress and Team Fortress 2.  (Hmm, could have to do with having 'fortress' in the name?)  Gradual free updates to make the game better, eventually coming as close to perfect as possible before development stops. 

</rant>

[Granite26]

I agree with you, but the solution is in the business model, not the development cycle...  Membership in the 'L4D development club' at 20$ to buy-in and 5$ a month thereafter (with the re-buy-in if there's a gap) would fix the problem better than 50$ up front and HOPING they'll improve the game.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Iterative design is the ONLY way to make a good game, and as much as one might argue that he is using an iterative design in DF he's clearly got it in his head that the UI is not part of the game and he can do that 'water-fall' style at some far distant point in the future.  This is simply insane from my point of view, the interface is the MOST important part of a game.  I can only conclude that Toady hates writing UI, most programmers hate writing UI's because they are fundamentally ugly at a code level and not 'creative'.  Toady just codes the 'fun' parts and ignores the rest, it's his project of course and he can do what ever he wants.  But I don't see why people donate to a project ware the development priorities aren't for the audiences benefit.

[Ergzay]

I think you vastly underestimate Toady, Impaler[WrG]. I myself never write any UI for my programs till near the last thing. I do all input via command prompt till I have it all complete and then just translate it into a gui (with the exception of java where it is kind of linked in). People donate (IMO) because while it is not a complete product and is missing lots of features and has several buggy features (like pathing) in a whole the game beats down many other games in the world today in terms of depth of features and it is even effectively free.

[Deon]

It's a bit strange to ask why people donate... Probably they do it because they like Toady and his work and they want to make him a bit more happier because he made them happier. Some people may have their own reasons. It has nothing to do with UI (and I am so used to the current one that I don't want a mouse-clicking interface I like to play on keyboard again like in old good Doom times).

[Kazindir]

Iterative design is the ONLY way to make a good game, and as much as one might argue that he is using an iterative design in DF he's clearly got it in his head that the UI is not part of the game and he can do that 'water-fall' style at some far distant point in the future.  This is simply insane from my point of view, the interface is the MOST important part of a game.  I can only conclude that Toady hates writing UI, most programmers hate writing UI's because they are fundamentally ugly at a code level and not 'creative'.  Toady just codes the 'fun' parts and ignores the rest, it's his project of course and he can do what ever he wants.  But I don't see why people donate to a project ware the development priorities aren't for the audiences benefit.

Except that it's not possible to design a worthwhile UI if you don't know what the UI has to handle in the first place. Toady *could* make a nice UI for the game as it is now but all that would achieve is add a lot of overhead to future expansions. If you read the development notes, vast swathes of the game are still short notes and "this would be nice" items - it is not physically possible to make a nice UI to cope with, to go back in time 6 months for an example, Burrows, if you don't know how Burrows will work in practice. Further, no one has any idea how they will work in conjunction with future additions yet either, so if there was a focus on making a UI you'd have to make it, remake it when Burrows were introduced then remake it AGAIN every time something was introduced that interacted with Burrows which needed UI support.

That's just one item  - there are dozens, hundreds of outstanding items and more will almost certainly be made along the way.

No, spending significant amounts of time on making a shiny UI at this point is an exercise in madness. All it would achieve is crippling the development speed by adding a nice big overhead to every change and even slower updates is hardly "to the audiences benefit". I think you'll find however that a lot of that audience feel that actual game features are a benefit though.

UI designers plan their UI and ideally are involved in the development process from the beginning - I agree that shoehorning a UI on at the end is generally a bad plan but trying to shoehorn an incomplete one in at every build is just as bad, if not worse.

[Veroule]

Regarding the UI, take a few hours and play some of the older versions of DF.  What you will see is that as pieces of the game develop and demands for UI abilities become clear they start appearing in places.  In many senses Toady has the correct model for the UI devlopment.  He has created a simple place holder for it, that allows new features to be made available easily.  When the needs of the users are clear then better interface portions are added.  Each addition creates reusable sections of code, and new/replacement display for an aspect of play.

[Granite26]

Iterative design is the ONLY way to make a good game, and as much as one might argue that he is using an iterative design in DF he's clearly got it in his head that the UI is not part of the game and he can do that 'water-fall' style at some far distant point in the future.  This is simply insane from my point of view, the interface is the MOST important part of a game.  I can only conclude that Toady hates writing UI, most programmers hate writing UI's because they are fundamentally ugly at a code level and not 'creative'.  Toady just codes the 'fun' parts and ignores the rest, it's his project of course and he can do what ever he wants.  But I don't see why people donate to a project ware the development priorities aren't for the audiences benefit.

Every good programming effort I've been involved in separates UI from the intelligence of the program through a functional interface layer. 

The bad ones involve throwing in buttons that twiddle bits in unsustainable ways.

I know from a lot of GUI work, that once you get the functions in (buttons on screen), it's usually a waste of time to start moving things around or optimizing if you plan on adding a button in the next segment.  It's not fun, and more important, you're likely to have to do it all over again in a few days.

Most programs that involve their UI from the start know what buttons they need from the start.  DF doesn't.  WE are the people who are deciding what kind of interface the player needs with the engine. 

[G-Flex]

Iterative design is the ONLY way to make a good game

Whenever you start with a statement as absolutist as this, something is very, very wrong.


You also have a weird idea of what Toady's development priorities are. He isn't saving the UI for later because it's "not fun"; he's doing it because game content takes priority over a UI, and you can't design a UI for game content that doesn't exist yet/might change dramatically in the future.

[Corona688]

Iterative design is the ONLY way to make a good game, and as much as one might argue that he is using an iterative design in DF he's clearly got it in his head that the UI is not part of the game and he can do that 'water-fall' style at some far distant point in the future.

Um, no.  Just because you don't like a game doesn't mean its halfassed, just because you don't like an interface doesn't mean there's no interface at all.  We donate because we like the game already, not because we think it might become something we like if we pay him enough.  You're just projecting your likes and dislikes onto reality here.

It makes complete sense to design a complete UI later.  For one thing, making the UI and the game separate is a well-known way to save yourself headaches in the future.  For another, if he designed the full-out UI now, he'd only have to rip it down and build a new one every time the core game changed.  "armok died that way", quoth he.  Its either a minimalistic UI, or wait 5 years for v1.0.  I'd rather have the game as is.

[Granite26]

You also have a weird idea of what Toady's development priorities are. He isn't saving the UI for later because it's "not fun"; he's doing it because game content takes priority over a UI, and you can't design a UI for game content that doesn't exist yet/might change dramatically in the future.

I don't think I agree with you...

[Corona688]

I don't think I agree with you...

The complete and total lack of any reason whatsoever on your part kind of stifles argument here.