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[MrWiggles]

Thank you for the speedy and informative replies + info guys ^^

On the topic of development speed, given his donations and how active this community still is (as I see, again), why won't he hire staff to assist? Notch of Minecraft got a few people in way later than he should of, why won't Toady? He can afford a single hired hand, surely? Over $30k in the last 4 years, each year. Can't he hire a guy? Yes it's a jump and if he is risk-adverse then he may not want others interfering until he REALLY CAN throw away money.. but $40k+ in each of the last 2 years.

Dwarf Fortress doesn't APPEAR to have the same SALES figures (because nothing Dwarf Fortress has never had a price tag); perhaps open another line of funding in the form of Official Ownership of a Dwarf Fortress copy - charging £5 a piece during alpha is what got Minecraft going - although it's more simple, 1st-person gameplay more easily shows where the money is going. If nothing else, this rant has made me consider donating some more - but good god man, why isn't a rocket up this project's ars* already?

He doesnt have help, with programming, because he doesnt want it. He doesnt even like programming with his brother.

[Honour3]

I edited my post.

But if another line of funding was introduced, a one-time licence purchase, perhaps the cash made would pile high enough to easily carve a small team out of it. I love Toady, I love Dwarf Fortress, but are you telling me Toady won't hire staff regardless of funding??

[Greiger]

That seems to be the gist of it yea.  Dwarf Fortress is his baby, his hobby and his income.  If I understand it correctly, he enjoys working on DF and feels that that joy won't be there if he worked with multiple people. The donations are a great bonus, and keeps him able to continue working on the game full time.  But if donations dried up suddenly he would probably just go back to his Teaching job and do the game part time like back in the pre-3D days.

He does work with his brother, but I was under the impression his brother didn't do much coding just because Toady One is better at it. 

I guess it's kind of like folks who build a big model of something.  Doing it yourself is a great enjoyable experience.  Doing it with one other person you know very well is still pretty good, but once too many hands are involved it loses some of it's magic, no matter how dedicated to the Adams' exact plans they are, something gets lost in there.  I think the brothers don't want to lose that something.  We just get to enjoy the results.

[Farmerbob]

The fact is that Toady can do releases like this only too many times before he realizes that he's got to limit feature creep and put ideas like that on the dev board.

Why?  If he spends the next year fixing bugs and making minior tweaks while simultaneously rewriting code to allow implementation of multithreading, DF will be able to expand in complexity to a massive degree, with no performance hits.  Eventually, for sure, there would be performance issues again.

No, I'm not a coder, so I do not know how hard this would be, though I do know it will be at least unpleasant, and perhaps nigh-impossible.

Simply coding temperature and liquid effects on a different CPU would make a huge difference.

With more than 2 cores, split off pathfinding and something else that does bad things to game speed.

Even if he does not do these things, computers are still getting more powerful every year.

And NO, I do not know if Toady has multithreading development plans.

[Rose]

As a coder who has done threading, I can say that it is incredibly unpleasant.

[Kogut]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27_law

"Brooks's law is a principle in software development which says that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. The corollary of Brooks's Law is that there is an incremental person who, when added to a project, makes it take more, not less time. Brooks adds that "Nine women can't make a baby in one month"."

[Andrej]

As a coder who has done threading, I can say that it is incredibly unpleasant.

As a coder who does multi-threading a lot I can only say: It's the only way to go in Windows. It opens up a lot of possibilities and once the threads are stable you program much faster. HOWEVER, in Linux I'm either to unknowledged or it is too limited. Threading without "waitformultipleobjects" is simply too stressful.

[Rockphed]

As a coder who has done threading, I can say that it is incredibly unpleasant.

As a coder who does multi-threading a lot I can only say: It's the only way to go in Windows. It opens up a lot of possibilities and once the threads are stable you program much faster. HOWEVER, in Linux I'm either to unknowledged or it is too limited. Threading without "waitformultipleobjects" is simply too stressful.

And how many years did you have to work to get the experience necessary to make multithreading easier than single threading?  I don't think anybody would enjoy the segfaulting mess that would result from Toady's early attempts to make DF multithreaded.

[MrWiggles]

This is also ignoring that Toady, in a Dwarf Talk, stated that he doubts Multithreading will offer any real gains for DF performance.

[Honour3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27_law

"Brooks's law is a principle in software development which says that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. The corollary of Brooks's Law is that there is an incremental person who, when added to a project, makes it take more, not less time. Brooks adds that "Nine women can't make a baby in one month"."

The Wiki article almost starts off with "Exceptions" and gives only 2 general examples of it's meaning. Not science, right?

My point is even with problems being added due to the added complexity of the system of development (added people and maybe even departments), it would progress faster, better - not more efficiently, but surely more effectively over a term of 5 years.

Apart from this, I would assume that the development team of Dwarf Fortress (Toady alone, or with whomsoever the future may bring) wouldn't initially be able to use all technology in a PC rig at current, but wouldn't an upgrade help for many reasons? I'm just griefed if this fantastic project with such a thriving community and fandom, really does stay limited to the pace of a hobbyist; it could be the fastest-paced hobbyist imaginable, but it's still a single man. It saddens me. I want Toady to be rich, I want a quicker development schedule, I want full publicity, I want every other game to look at DF and many of them to try aspire to make such a great game. This won't happen if it's controlled and progressed by only 1 set of hands.

I'm sad. 

Edit: Hell, let Toady do a Steve Jobs and control every aspect in full: made Apple world #1.

[SalmonGod]

I'm happy that DF is more unique and wonderful than that.

[LoSboccacc]

The Wiki article almost starts off with "Exceptions" and gives only 2 general examples of it's meaning. Not science, right?

It is, actually. The book cites all the relevant data and case studies. As usual, remember that wikipedia is no more than a glorified content scraper, you always have to dig further. 

[monk12]

I want Toady to be rich, I want a quicker development schedule, I want full publicity, I want every other game to look at DF and many of them to try aspire to make such a great game. This won't happen if it's controlled and progressed by only 1 set of hands.

Thing is, Toady doesn't want to be rich, or have the project done right now, or fame and acclamation. As I recall, he's already been offered a ton of money and complete control over content by an undisclosed development studio (or publisher, I forget which.) It's undisclosed because Toady turned them down. And I don't blame him one bit.

That's all I have to say about that- this argument has been hashed and rehashed across the forum over and over, particularly whenever a release runs long. If this community was less civil, this thread would probably be one big flame war by now.

[eeviac]

I read 'release compile'. I am excite. 

[Stormfeather]

I read 'release compile'. I am excite. 

That, and "pain and rot" and "envenomations"