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[fanatic]

The reverse engineering fiasco was hilarious. Trying to replicate what Toady One has spent years making, and do it all in only a few months?

Sure, the thing they made looks pretty. But thats all it does. There's no playable game, just pretty pictures.

Gameplay trumps graphics every time. I'll take ASCII (actually the Mayday graphics version in its 8 bit glory) over fancy 3D graphics any day so long as the gameplay is awesome. 

I dont find it hilarous at all. Not sure Toady found it hilarous either. In fact it is a spot of luck it was a fiasco. Just think about it. That guy set up this whole idea of rewriting DF in secret, at least since end of febuary (proof here). Luckily, he could not keep his mouth shut long enough to actually put together anything beyond segfaults. And if you hope to pull people over with promises and segfaults, you um... missed a couple lessons in life. Or you are Bill gates. But i guess there can only be one, so you are late.

But still,

A. Some people love the game so much and are sick enough with the UI to envision REWRITING YEARS OF WORK FROM SCRATCH. Not just leave. Rewrite. Just think about it!
B. If someone ever comes up with something that "looks like something" and is above DF in "certain aspects of playability", DF is going to lose people and Toady will likely lose donations.

Had impaler been smarter this could have been a bad blow, possibly fragmenting the community, and I sincerely hope this issue is not taken lightly. I can very well envision the same happening again, with UI or perfs or any other issue that comes up on the forum over and over again.

[Hyndis]

It was the idea that the guy thought he was so amazingly awesome that he could do in a few months what it took Toady to do in years, and do it better, and then started bragging about his amazing skills.

That got him the boot, for obvious reasons, and it turns out the amazing skills were basically in photoshoping fancy mockups of UI's. Yeah, great non-game you've got going there.

Still, it was a dick move, but backfired completely on that guy. I do enjoy it when people like that get what they deserve. In his case, failure and mockery.


As far as easy of playability, yes, that is huge. Why do you think Farmville has such a massive following? Farmville even sort of replicates DF, assuming DF is done on a single flat surface, with crops that are not automatically planted or harvested by an army of drunken, bearded dwarves. Its basically just the farming section of DF combined with selling the farmed goods at a trade depot with a very approachable UI.

I'm pretty sure DF players are not leaving DF and picking up Farmville because of its very easy to use UI.





After all, Farmville has no magma. 

[armrha]

Apparently he also reverse-engineered some of DF code that was accidentally released with debug symbols. It is arguably less glorious, but in my humble opinion, so is refusing access to source code.

I don't think that's a very humble opinion at all... Refusing access to your own private work is now frowned upon? Even authors get to pick and choose what they send in for publishing -- they don't have to publish their secret outlines explaining the entire plotline after the fact to their popular book series, so why should programmers have to reveal every last bit and piece to their compiled binaries?

If it's a matter of trust, no one is forcing you to run it...

I don't get the entitlement advocates of open-source seem to have in saying they deserve to see the code. Open source has some great benefits -- motivation enough for many people to switch to an open license -- but if you don't want to do it, why is it so frowned upon? Why do all these people want to interject and tell you what to do with *your* code? There is no reason anybody is required to release what they code for others to look at, they do so only because they feel like it...

It reminds me of that awful slogan 'Information wants to be free'. That makes no sense. Information isn't a conscious, sentient entity with anything like a 'want'. My private and public information exists because it benefits me or people associated with me; All our information is centered around the way it affects our lives, not some idealized Socratic form of information floating separate from what people do with it. Open source people seem to think that all programmers can make their rent checks and buy groceries in a world where nobody is ever paid for code, but that's just not the real world. Not all of us are independently wealthy...

[Footkerchief]

^^^ All he said was "less glorious."

[LordNagash]

^^^ All he said was "less glorious."

And who knows what that means.

[Pacho]

Copyright infringment anyone? =v

[Toady One]

I removed the last three posts.  Please try to keep it clean and friendly.

[Desdichado]

It reminds me of that awful slogan 'Information wants to be free'. That makes no sense.

Ever try telling a good secret to more than two people? I'm telling you, information does want to be free. Heheh.

Open-source would spur the game to new heights of awesome: little long-ignored tweaks like just separating the terrain tileset from the font tileset would spur quite some amazing development from the pixel-wizards like Ironhand around here. But you could say that about many games that never went open-source.

[MaDeR Levap]

It reminds me of that awful slogan 'Information wants to be free'. That makes no sense.

If you take this slogan literally, then sure. Ever heard about metaphores?

Open-source would spur the game to new heights of awesome:

I doubt it. After initial rush, it would died down, and development halted. Toady is only power that sunstain DF and keep it going.

Search net for open source games: there is reason why these never are anything more than niche productions. Well, DF is niche anyway so maybe it would not be that bad, but ah well. So opensourcing it after death or complete loss of interest from Toady is best solution.

TL;DR: Open source works for some things, but games are not one of them.

[huhu]

I remember reading in the recent drama fiasco discussion from Toady that he doesn't want to open source the code because he doesn't want to work with more people.

I took it as: Coding standards, organizing, motivating people, and so on would fall on Toady because everyone would expect that he does all that. I imagine he maybe doesn't have the sort of style of coding that would be accepted to the Linux kernel without any revising. Maybe the DF source reads worse than Perl (shudder). And if Toady doesn't want to be the one who enforces these guidelines, it would be an amazing hassle and a serious risk to the whole project to get people accept anyone else as the project leader. The problem with opening parts of the code (the UI) for other developers would stretch the release progress for every update that could break things. With Baughn maintaining the OpenGL stuff this is already evident: It took until 31.04 to get the SDL version out. If some part of the code was just opened and a veritable forest of suitable add-ons appeared overnight, all the maintainers would need to get the code first and make appropriate changes before the new DF-core got released. Imagine the flood of forum tears if an update broke someone's favourite UI mod, and even more so if someone abandoned the development of one.

Although with Dwarf Therapist and other popular add-ons, we've more or less arrived at the exact situation that Toady wanted to avoid by keeping the code closed. A lot of people said they don't want to play the game before DT works for the new version, which is an extremely counter-productive piece of luggage for Dwarf Fortress and Toady to carry around at this stage of development. If he merged DT into the core DF, we would arrive at the earlier point about taking donations from code written by other people. I'd think if writing GUIs was Toady's thing, DF would have quite different visual output by now. If there is some obvious solution to all of this, apart from buying a GUI for DF from some professional coder/shop, I'm not seeing it.

[Desdichado]

Imagine the flood of forum tears if an update broke someone's favourite UI mod, and even more so if someone abandoned the development of one.

It's better to have them waiting for their preferred flavor than to have them completely turned off from the start. Graphic tilesets and the SDL/OpenGL refinements have created tons of players where none would otherwise have been. A few tears in comparison to that is a tolerable situation, and a common one in gaming circles. Most of us, if we've been gaming a few years, have negotiated our way through a tangle of user mods in various games already--with the potential troubles mentioned above and others besides. I mean, it's not as if Toady has stumbled onto a phenomenon that didn't play out in thousands of other game development cycles without armageddon descending upon the world, heh. DF is original, but not that original.

Search net for open source games: there is reason why these never are anything more than niche productions. Well, DF is niche anyway so maybe it would not be that bad, but ah well. So opensourcing it after death or complete loss of interest from Toady is best solution.

TL;DR: Open source works for some things, but games are not one of them.

I don't really have to search. I can name Angband with its many forks, Dungeon Crawl, and Wesnoth as good examples. If you want me to name blockbluster titles with stunning graphics and slick lowest-common-denominator gameplay, then you're setting the bar pretty high. Obviously, such soulless productions need paid talent. I really don't think DF has a chance in hell of going open-source, and there's obviously nothing wrong with that decision, but I'm just sayin' is all...

[Hyndis]

DT does make up for a very severe shortcoming in DF's built in UI. As much as I absolutely adore the game, DF's UI is atrocious particularly when it comes to a large fortress with 100+ dwarves. You do need some sort of utility like DT to manage them all.

[Kazang]

I am a huge open source supporter but I respect Toady's decision to not make the code open source, he is making efforts to allow the game to modifiable without having source access and that's really the best way to do it in this case.  I hope he will expand this to include a UI API to allow players to control the games ergonomics and aesthetics more but this will be some time down the line.
He doesn't charge for his game, all he seems to want is to be not ripped off by someone, maintain creative control over his project and reap some rewards of his labour.  Which entirely reasonable.

The game may well progress faster if it was open source but that's just not the way it works with DF and it's his right to chose that.  Since the internet is a free market there is nothing to stop you making a parallel project with similar gameplay to DF, as long as you don't directly copy or reverse engineer DF code. Learning and evolving from other ideas is how humanity progresses.
The first man to make fire couldn't have gone around stomping out other's fires afterwards because he did it first, but neither would he be expected to go light fires for everyone else and not be rewarded for it.   

[Jiri Petru]

I hate the open-source zealotry.

That being said, Goblin Camp is going to be open source, apparently, so you'll eventually have what you hoped for.

[Hyndis]

I would definitely love to see more games in the genre. This doesn't mean copying DF outright, but rather more developers willing to go down this path. Currently there are basically only 3 games that make up this entire genre:

Dungeon Keeper
Evil Genius
Dwarf Fortress


Toady has done amazing stuff considering its basically just him making the game by himself. He has some help of course, but he's doing almost all the work on his own.