I can see one use to consulting some outside help: materials and materials failure mechanics, which is still a bit loopy. Consulting a materials and/or structural engineer for advice on how to handle breaking things halfway sanely, as well as getting some good data on materials properties, would go a long way to improve realism. Another forum I frequent is run by a guy who is a materials engineer. I could pick his brain for some ideas.
I think consulting expert opinions and advice would be a pretty good idea.
After all, Dwarf Fortress has never been about a complete simulation of reality, but Toady has expressed desires to stay as close to realism as he can as long as the implementations are reasonable within the sense of a game.
Toady’s remarked before that he certainly doesn’t have a degree in a lot of the fields he’s setting up in-game simulations of, and going over online sources and textbooks is only going to get you so far unless you go back to university.
He's also stated that he's had help for more technical coding, so what if, when it came to working out a balance between game mechanics and realistic simulations of physical phenomenon fit to be worked in, he got some professional advice?
That’s of course not even touching on who he’d ask or how he’d pay for it (or if he doesn’t get this sort advice from people he has contact with already), but if it were possible, I don’t see why a little bit of help in certain more obscure or complex fields couldn’t help make the game more realistic, with Toady working to make sure those realistic mechanics stayed grounded in a functional game world.
It would also seem like something you'd want to get people on board for sooner rather than later, so that you wouldn't feel compelled to rewrite entire sections of the game when you have people throwing ideas at you that you might have gone through with had you known about the facts they were bringing up back when you were working on it.
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Topic: Maybe it's time to bring in additional people. (Read 1711 times)