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[rrroach]

I understand the joy of working on a solo project, but the scope and complexity of the game has gone beyond the efforts of one man. Already, people have spontaneously created graphics (Mayday), UI (Dwarf Therapist), and a imaging program (I forget the name). And I just read there is an independent path-finding program being created.

With all of this goodwill and energy floating about, wouldn't it behoove Toady and the game if some of the technical aspects were farmed out? We live in the age of cloud-sourcing and crowd-sourcing, each of them the twin children of the Internet?

Wouldn't a game thatis  in essence about building a self-sustaining community benefit from accepting help from it's own community?

Dwarf Fortress is a work of love. That's clear to merest kobold to the most forgotten of the forgotten beasts. Maybe it's time to share that love?

[thijser]

I think it might be a good idea if some system was made where really good project would be added to the offical version of dwarf fortress I think having mayday added to the basic dwarf fortress (with option to turn it back to origenal) I think many of the new users might be sligtly less scared when they see dwarf fortress for the first time.

[WormSlayer]

My two cents: Some sort of middle ground where DF "just" has a basic API for communicating with external programs, then Toady can concentrate on DF and people can make whatever addons take their fancy?

[timmeh]

It might, but Toady has already expressed discomfort with the idea of releasing any of the source code.  You have to remember, it may be a hobby project, but it's also his means of income.  If the entire project were opened up to the community there'd be no incentive for new players to donate at all, since it would become entirely irrelevant weather he worked on it or not, since someone else would be either way.  I haven't personally donated, but that's only really because I haven't even had the money to order a pizza for months (18+no job=suck), but regardless, as much as I and many others would continue to support him, it might not be enough to keep him from needing another job.

In short, it would probably help the game, but it wouldn't help Toady, which kind-of removes the majority of the incentive for him to release the code.

[Mir]

I'm not suggesting that opening things up more is a bad idea, or would necessarily kill the game or anything... but it involves a lot of complications.

One solution is open sourcing, which has the problems timmeh mentions. And I suspect, ultimately, if donations drop and Toady is forced out of the picture, development will die even if it's open source. I've seen tons of projects do this kind of thing, and the code and community ends up getting fractured, and the whole thing eventually just falls apart. It's no guarantee, but a very real risk.


The other solution is to maintain closed source, and just outsource certain modules, and whatever... but Toady would have to make a ton of code modifications, making and exposing API's and things, to allow other programmers to work with the base code without having to give them the source. This requires a lot of work, and a lot of overhead. Think about how the Graphics stuff worked out. Further, he'd have to carefully write requirements documents for the work he was crowd-sourcing to maintain creative control, and carefully review the code he gets back since it might be buggy, inefficient, or both. Ultimately there's an absolute ton of really tedious, uninteresting bookkeeping and managerial work involved with this approach that I'm certain he doesn't want to have to deal with. Especially since it's uncertain what kind of work he'll get back when it's a free thing. (I'm sure he'd get some good stuff... but he'd also get a ton of crap...)

[Rowanas]

The way it works now
with Toady One doing source
works well as it is

Let other people
keep on making other things
If good, they get in

Like some of Baughn's work
It's helping but it's not source
Keep it like that, please.

[Footkerchief]

With all of this goodwill and energy floating about, wouldn't it behoove Toady and the game if some of the technical aspects were farmed out? We live in the age of cloud-sourcing and crowd-sourcing, each of them the twin children of the Internet?

Wouldn't a game thatis  in essence about building a self-sustaining community benefit from accepting help from it's own community?

It's not going to happen.

RV: You as the developer and your brother as the co-designer make up the development team for Dwarf Fortress. In what ways has the small team affected development?
 
TA: I don't have any experience in a large team, so it's hard for me to contrast.  It's certainly easier to maintain control over the project, since the code for each of the game's mechanics is designed and written by us.  I can't imagine creating the game I wanted if there were more people working on the project, and just as a practical point I wouldn't be any good at managing more programmers.
 
I've had help with some of the technical programming, since it would be difficult to set aside time to learn that stuff myself at this point. But the overall experience clarified to me that the game probably wouldn't survive having its core elements opened up to more programmers, at least with me at the helm.
 
Working with my brother in particular has been great though. We are in sync on the broad design issues, but we have somewhat different interests overall, so we can keep each other from wandering a bit, especially when I start getting over-focused on some particular game mechanic.
 
We can also change course fairly easily if something comes up, without having to inform/restructure an organisation, as with the month-end project we were working on for a bit before we put it on hiatus for the big DF release.

[Hyndis]

Death by committee? No thanks. 

[thijser]

I think that if a mod is working for dwarf fortress it might really be a good idea to add it dirrectly to dwarf fortress. Maybe grafics could become more of a comunity opensource thing while keeping the core/gameplay elements seperated. Another passiblity would be getting thing like the tutorial ext. done by comunity

sorry if it makes little sense I haven't slept in some 20 hours that was only for 5 hours so it's beginning to effect me.

[Hyndis]

Graphics packs already are community opensource projects. You can pick and choose which graphics pack you prefer.

Same thing with mods. You can pick and choose which mod project you prefer, or you can just write your own.

[darius]

I think that if a mod is working for dwarf fortress it might really be a good idea to add it dirrectly to dwarf fortress. Maybe grafics could become more of a comunity opensource thing while keeping the core/gameplay elements seperated. Another passiblity would be getting thing like the tutorial ext. done by comunity

sorry if it makes little sense I haven't slept in some 20 hours that was only for 5 hours so it's beginning to effect me.

Help text is actually editable. With links and topics and all... Someone could embark on an epic quest to make help more helpfull.

PS search forums for ways to edit it. AFAIK it was zipped and then you can edit as plain-text.

[Wyrm]

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.

[BubbaBrown]

I have to second Footkerchief's answer.

From what I've observed personally:

What it boils down to is control.  Right now, things are simple and easy to understand:  Closed source, one person, and money goes one place.  At this point in the project, which has never had any stage of development opened up, open sourcing or even bringing on additional people opens up a huge can of worms.  And what really makes it exceptionally complicated is the implied aspect of money from the donations.  If the donation statistics are accurate... there's a ridiculous amount of money moving in the direction of this project.  Before money enters into the mix, the project could be open sourced without much issue apart from the original developer getting used to other hands on the project.  With money comes problems of all kinds.  Namely, who owns the source and the rights to donations?

Open sourcing with a community as ravenous as this (people are mapping out memory regions and data types to use applications with integrated external process memory editors...  to add features to the game...  that's borderline psychotic in many aspects), it wouldn't be long before the code would practically get overhauled.  Then, whatever implied ownership had by the original developer is lost.  With that, donations become a touchy subject as to whom people are paying? Even with restrictive licenses, the processes and internal structure of the game would be reversed and re-engineered to an open license codebase.  The copyright applicable components (storyline, unique names, and such) would be changed over to open licensed versions.  So effectively, the game would leave the fortress and never come back.

With limited outside contracting, there's a HUGE mess of legal paperwork to go through to protect the project.  Non-disclosure, copyrights, and other things...  It gets REAL messy, REAL quick.  NDA's are time-limited and hard to enforce if it prevents a developer from getting work and copyrights only protect from direct duplication and derivatives.  Without a savage legal team, things would get out of control quick.

So...  if control wants to be maintained and the income attached to it...  This is it folks.

[aepurniet]

No additional people for gameplay. toady has an image (that is probably constantly evolving) for this game, and i would like to see where it goes.  he is the promised one and i have a religious faith that the game will be truly righteous (its already pretty awesome).  even triple A titles have a lead designer whose decision is final about the direction, for good reason. (they usually have lots of feedback, but so does toady from these forums).  with open source no one has a final voice on anything, clearly not an option, even if money was not a concern. community gets fragmented between forks, arguments over patches erupt, politics rears its ugly head, and the overall progress of the project wanes. nobody wants to see that.

arguably UI is a concern, but this game isnt close to done, and the addition of more people working on that (UI), might actually stall the main project between releases.  still im a sucker for nice interfaces, and df could really use one EVENTUALLY.

to help it get there, feedback through the forums is probably the way to go. and writing your own third party madness for those truly motivated and zealous.

really it could use a nicer UI now, but maybe it would be just time wasted at this stage of the project for toady.  in one way there is a parallel development going on with the 3rd party tools.  people are trying different ideas as far as interaction and data presentation goes, and some make life considerably easier, no doubt the best ideas will eventually make their way into the game.

[rex mortis]

The problem with open source projects is that when people talk about the features they want in the software they are often along the lines of:

"We should implement A."

When they really should say:

"I will implement A."