Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Starver]

You messed up your quoting.  I nearly didn't spot...

This is kind of baffling to me. How are these people going to find these almost-impossible forks and yet never ever hear of Dwarf Fortress and Toady?

Put it on Steam?  I don't know ('cos I don't use it) what sort of IP protection checks the Steam administration put new submissions to, but without DF currently on there it's possible that people who use Steam as their primary game-getting would be shown this 'new' game from "Cove13Entertainment"[1] or somesuch and believe it to be original.

If it were that easy, what stops them from doing that right now? Anyone can spend 10 minutes, remove the Bay12 strings and replace it with Cove13Entertainment, and post it anywhere. Maybe demand payment, donations, or whatever. Or heck, not even bother removing the strings, just pretend you're Toady and put it up for $10 in your account.

I think that was the point. or did I mis-explain?  With the additional point that this would be uncovered almost straight away, with ample proof (despite string-switching) of being a rip-off.  As it is now.  With obvious markers in the game-play even if you vastly redefine what it looks like.  Mountweasels, effectively.

When it's 'worth' copying, then it might well be.


And I've never read the New York Times.  (I don't even read The Times, never mind the similarly named 'Merkin paper!)  I came to this corner of the web from a conversation on a MUD.  Maybe because I don't lurk in certain other key social areas of the web, I don't think that I've heard of Dwarf Fortress (or anyone else who knows of DF) in any other location than there and... well... here.  And in RL conversations where I've been the one (not necessarily successfully) evangelising.

So apart from that one conversation, I consider that if Cove13Entertainment managed to get word of their 'exciting new product' onto one of those other bits of the Web/Internet[1] that I do inhabit, I'd be in prime position to be fooled by them.  (Getting money from me would be another issue, but the point still stands...)  Not on Steam because while I still think they'd not necessarily spot a sufficiently rebranded package from the sufficiently renamed name alone it'd still be a case that I don't use Steam either.  (But, again, the point stands.  A 'converted clone' of the B12G website, perhaps even with a minimal pre-seeded forum under Cove13forums, if they were being particularly offensive in their ripping off of the product, would not be beyond someone who thought it would be worth it.)

But I still think we're chasing that red herring.  I even feel like I'm being asked to attack someone else's straw men, in a bit of a reversal from the usual fallacy set-up.  If he don't wanna (and I'm not saying he isn't changing his mind while he monitors this thread, but from past words on the subject he historically dislikes the basic idea) then he don't wanna.  I don't like arguing point-for-point, and am trying to stick to only the replies-to-my-replies stuff, where not ninjaed already, but I think you already know that I personally majorly disagree with a lot of your assertions or what you think is refutations of mine, and I can see that you have a similarly entrenched viewpoint.  I'm not keeping score, but from a quick mental note there seems to be two active players on each side of the argument, and I've no idea what the lurkers are thinking about (nor the ever-changeable mind of Toady, himself), but this is getting nowhere.  Fast.


[1] Sorry, I get pedantic over the separation.  Or at least the subset/superset status of the two.

[Immortal]

I honestly agree with the opening post for a majority of it, I mean Toady should let a few trusted, and actually talented coders join his team. He could even just give them the whole path finding chunk of code or water-pathing and let them work with that. Yes we all know adding more programmers may slow it down, but it won't slow him down if Toady just has to let a few people see the code then ignore them. Once they understand the code on their own and when they have a suggestion it should be ready to implement and have the changes well documented.

I personally believe you have no right to go against Toady's wishes and decompile his code, but I applaud you for it and hope you succeed so that you may offer actual help. I have played this game for around five years, and you seem to be one of the only people who actually made sense for some of their post. The usual post is calling Toady names, which I agree he is stubborn. Though I disagree to a fully open-source strategy, Toady should let a few see his code. Hell let him write a test and if the applicant passes it then he can decide to let that trusted person see the code.

Also that whole community support thing, I've been here far to long and each time this thread comes up, it is shot down and the general view is negative, we agree with Toady's actions, it is his choice and he gets final say. Though I believe Toady should open up a little and begin to consider that letting people do some "black box" work on the performance of already implemented features would not hurt.. how bad would it be to release little snippets of useless code, give them the input and the output, let the people who really want to help figure it out.

I hope we can end this thread and that Toady may actually read, consider and hopefully respond to the possibility of some black box programming. I personally never worry of it becoming fully open-source because we know how much he dislikes that idea. Please though consider a little help.

One last thing, STOP COMPARING THIS TO infiniminer/minecraft/and any other stupid game or project. We play dwarf fortress for its complexity and many other things, it appeals to the niche of gamers, it is not meant to have the general "stupid" public be interested, let them have skyrim, minecraft, WOW and whatever else. Those games require no intelligent thought, they appeal to the masses and the majority. None of those games are as complex or stand anywhere near this games complexity when it comes to the games mechanic.

[dakenho]

(flaming removed)

[ayoriceball]

(flaming removed)

I'm sorry, but... was that sarcasm?

[Fedor]

I just want to say that Dwarf Fortress is a great game, maybe one of the greatest I have ever played - and Toady, for making it, one of the best game designers.

Agreed without hesitation.  There has simply never been anything like DF.

Unfortunately, great ideas are crippled by a bad implementation. That’s no slight on Toady: Dwarf Fortress is a very large project, and he’s only one person – and furthermore, he’s one person without the education, training, or experience to work on really large software projects. He’s a hobbyist coder, if DF is any indication, and he’s done some extraordinary things…as a hobbyist coder. And certainly some of his experience has come in handy – as I thought, he does have a math background, and I’m sure that was invaluable for certain aspects of DF.

What makes me say the implementation is bad? Well, I don’t think I’ll be saying anything that hasn’t said here before. The interface is tremendously horrible, unworkable. The performance is god-awful – and while yes, Dwarf Fortress could never run efficiently on a desktop from 1999, given what it’s simulating, I am quite sure there is room for a tenfold improvement, especially in some corner cases, like running over frozen oceans in Adventure Mode.  And finally, the game is overrun with dozens of very annoying bugs – the beekeeping problems, for example, or the full bucket problems.

I'm going to set aside all my objections to particular, arguably exaggerated wordings, or particular cases, because all such quibbles are just that.

I will simply say "AMEN".  I have seen all three of these problems - the difficult interface, the lack of performance, and the lingering bugs - becoming more and more serious for at least four years now.

So I agree with all the major points here, and will add to them the lack of updates, another symptom of the same great issue.  Toady is an extraordinary man, but he is only one man, and DF and what DF simulates has for some time now grown big enough that any single person would struggle to continue advancing it.

The community has addressed these issues to some degree with mods, utilities like Dwarf Therapist and DF Hack, and complex workarounds posted on these forums (when you can find them, anyway.) But these basically amount to putting a band-aid on an axe wound. The game is nigh-unplayable without them. That’s, quite frankly, absurd.

Again, agreed with all three points.

There’s really only one thing Toady could really do to fix these problems: get other developers to work on DF. Since he (quite commendably) doesn’t charge for DF (which I also believe gets him many more users), hiring more developers is out, because there’s not enough money.

He does not necessarily have to hire them.  Baughn's graphics engine work is an example of others generously volunteering their services to assist Toady.

The only other viable way of getting more help is by open sourcing DF.

Here, I do not quite agree.  Toady has given at least one other person (Baughn) access to a specific portion of the code, to do a specific, mutually-agreeable, task.  I believe that such "ad-hoc" collaborations are quite able to allow Toady to both continue to actively advance the game for at least some time yet, and avoid going all the way to open-source.


That said, and now set aside to continue with the argument as presented, ...

Your discussion of open-sourcing, and in particular your use of prominent examples, seems fairly well-informed.  Open-sourcing can indeed be made to work well.

The question of whether Toady is willing, I set aside.  I'm not Toady.  I don't speak for Toady. 

As a mere user, I'm more interested in discussing the question of whether Toady has the personal character to make an effective "benevolent dictator" that has a team of contributors to encourage and make to feel appreciated, give firm but polite direction to, inspire, and get along with?  Open-source projects very often fail because team dynamics breaks down.  Only a professional attitude can keep a great team going, and only a great team can advance a truly major project.  And DF is beginning to evolve in that direction.


My take on the objections to open-source:
1.  DF is Toady’s baby, and he want to retain full control over it.

Toady makes the rules, but he has to deal with facts.  Again:  DF and what DF simulates has grown big enough that any single person would struggle to continue advancing it.  Toady can continue to struggle, more-or-less alone, against a forest that all his labors add to ... or he can get some sidekicks.  If he wants sidekicks, then while he will continue to be in overall charge, others will be able to make decisions on secondary matters within their area of responsibilities.


2.  DF is Toady’s source of income, and open sourcing it would take that away.
Considered under point 4, because it can only take away income if a fork actually draws away customers for very long.  As you point out, that's deuced rare.


3.  Too many cooks spoil the broth.
You answer this point well.  Too many cooks only spoil the broth if they don't know who (or what rules) are in charge.


4. There would be 100000000 forks of DF.
As you say very well, forks take work to maintain.  But merely maintaining a fork is not enough - it has to compete.  And that's real hard to do against an original creator who's even the slightest bit active.  Most forks get whatever was worth keeping, brought back to the main stem and the rest discarded and forgotten.   

If Toady keeps private some tricky and essential code, even starting a fork can be difficult.  While I honestly doubt the need to do this, this trick can allow one more way for him to test before committing fully.

Frankly, the community doesn’t seem to be serving Toady well in this regard, where a lot of them seem to defend everything and profess knowledge where they have none.

Agreed.  Fanboism doesn't contribute to providing discussions that Toady can consider for solutions to his problems.  What does contribute is, firstly, calling a spade a spade and, secondly, thinking together about solutions.

The best example seems to be the implementation of multithreading in DF. I ran across tons of threads where this was derided as not realistic, necessary, and too hard.

I agree with your dismissal of the the first two claims.  The claim that "multithreading is hard", however, is simply a painful fact.  Getting multithreading right,  especially starting with an existing singlethreaded source, takes both skill and effort.

However, what you say about processors is spot-on.  DF and Toady's vision for DF are always going to be hindered - badly - until the code smartens up about modern computers.

Personally, I think it’s really disappointing that things turned out this way, because DF has so much potential. As a personal project, I’m going to decompile DF and see what I can do. Decompilers aren’t magic – comments, other documentation, variable names, how the software is modularized, etc. – are all stripped out in the process of compilation, so it’ll be a lot of work and drudgery, but maybe it’ll be interesting, especially when I get to the point where I can fix things or (I suppose) add to them. It would be clearly wrong for me to publicly distribute it in either source or binary form,

I will say what you doubtless already know, because I believe strongly that it should have been clearly and explicitly stated by you.

Sharing a decompiled version of copyrighted software is both wrong (as you correctly state) and illegal (which you should speak up and recognize if you haven't already). 

Not only does Toady have copyright now, it is very easy for him to retain entire and absolute legal ownership, should he so choose (and he need not so choose), even of a project in which multiple developers participate.

so it’ll never be more than an experiment, but that’s also sadly all DF will ever be if Toady doesn’t step up and get over his personal hesitation. Yes, great projects and works of art require a single vision. But they also take a lot of engineering, architecting, and many, many hands, and Toady simply isn’t a software engineer.

I'll end a reply largely supportive of your valuable points by lamenting the occasional injudiciousness in phrasing.  DF is not merely an experiment.  It is an accomplished work that has grown so much as to task the ability of any one person to support and advance it further.  This is very far removed indeed from a mere test under controlled conditions.

[jaxler]

I agree with the lot of what you are saying... but open sourcing DF...    I think no one has the right to tell toady to do that he made the game and just because its popular doesn’t mean it's our game, he made DF and he has spent 5 years on the game so you have no right to tell toady to open source a game, I think open sourcing ruins games as any person can edit a master peace, it's like giving a marker to a 5 year old and telling him to make the Mona Lisa "better".

[dyllionaire]

It's all great for us to debate what should happen to Dwarf Fortress, but the truth is that it's Tarn's.
I personally think that Dwarf Fortress is doing just great as it is, but regardless, this is someone's life work and his personal project.
As he's said many a time, he started this game with the intent to create something he could play himself. It just so happens he was kind enough to share his genius with the public and a strong and thriving community sprung up around it.

I personally find it offensive that Zarat marched in here, assuming ultimate knowledge and discrediting the opinions of other programmers and developers on the forum who have offered their own views, experience, and opinions in various other discussions.

You have an opinion Zarat, and that's all it is. Don't go violently shoving it down other peoples' throats if you want them to listen.

[Babylon]

I agree with the lot of what you are saying... but open sourcing DF...    I think no one has the right to tell toady to do that he made the game and just because its popular doesn’t mean it's our game, he made DF and he has spent 5 years on the game so you have no right to tell toady to open source a game, I think open sourcing ruins games as any person can edit a master peace, it's like giving a marker to a 5 year old and telling him to make the Mona Lisa "better".

Suggesting ways to improve the game is what this part of the forums is for.  That includes suggestions such as opening the source. Nobody is trying to make Toady do anything, we are explaining why open sourcing the game would improve both the game and his experience as the developer.

[Starver]

Forgive me if I didn't see it in those terms.

My POV is that Toady is aware of the possibility, and has said he doesn't want to do it.

Just like Toady is aware of the possibility of the more excretive bodily functions being both simulated (to at least the same level of detail as the limb-severing, organ-destroying and flesh-rending processes through the various possible traumas and diseases) and handled by sewerage systems and/or 'night-soil custodians', but he's stated that he doesn't want to do that, either.

Maybe he's wrong to ignore the possibilities available in one and/or the other.  Maybe he'll change his mind.  But I didn't see anything suggested that wasn't essentially saying "Toady must go open-source[1], or else it'll fail!".

And, as pointed out, it's done quite well for itself, so far.  There are imperfections (I disagree that anything's particularly Game-Breaking[2]), but they are numbered well within the order of those that appear within various other products; being multi-developer and open-source contribution schemes, alike.


If my opinion labels me as a Fanboy, then I would hope that this is purely because I am by necessity expressing such opinions as counter the (to me) erroneous view that sparked this all off.  I have in mind my own list of minor things that I wouldn't mind being 'sorted', but as they don't constitute valid reasons for the course of action originally being suggested I consider them not relevant mentioning.  And thus I may appear to be entirely in support of the status quo, rather than merely in that camp 'on balance'.

I may also be coloured by my own gut-feeling about various personal projects that I could consider 'my baby', and my own protectiveness of these (in my case, at the expense of rarely actually bringing anything into public view, something Toady has quite obviously avoided).  This may be considered a defect in my own sense of priorities.  I can't say that Toady's gut feels anything like mine, of course, but it is an element of mental inertia that I obviously cannot rebuke Toady for possessing, should that even be a factor...


And so again I spend far too long on a... no, not quite a refutation, but certainly closer to that than a mere denial... of the terms of the original argument.

TL;DR;  Make suggestions, not mandates.  Toady is his own man.  Also, I speak not for him, naturally, and would not seek to.  There is no Word Of God within this thread, so who is wrong about the direction it should/would take, or even is taking, (I imagine we all are, one way or another) is only ever going to fuel a speculative flame unless it gets worth replying to by Himself.

(nb: Word Of God and Himself are not slavish honorifics, merely suitably flowery terms used to break up the repetition of the name Toady.  And bouncing onto the names of 'Tarn', 'Mr Adams', etc, just don't sound right; so I perhaps go a little fantastic (instead of 'fan'atic), instead..)



[1] Or otherwise distributive of bits of his core code.

[2] There's been very little Game-Breaking, throughout my history with the various releases.  Game-Changing, definitely.  There have indeed been some awkward errors that caused crashes, and I remember one that I suffered from, in particular, but generally they've been found by us players, identified for what they are, reported and corrected in a decent time-scale.  Among the Dev Notes and various other forum posts there are hints at such peculiarities that got fixed prior to even getting a chance to show themselves in a public version.

[sobriquet]

EGADS! I did not know beekeeping glitches made the game un-playable! /sarcasm. I do not know of a bug that is absolutely game breaking, not to say it does not exist.
You raise some good points, and you even addressed this, but the man said NO. DF is Toady's child, and if HE feels closed soreness in all its inefficiency is what he wants to do, then more power to him. I would take an uncompleted DF by 2020, that Toady feels he did not compromise, over a completed DF by 2013 that Toady made by compromising his desire to create it single-handedly. If Toady has a change of heart then GREAT! But, I think most people(like my self right now), use "uninformed" arguments to defend a man who, who as far as I know, could not give less of a thought to the efficiancy of his dev cycle.

Seconded.  Mods have their place in the world of modders, granted-- but DF's singular Toady-madness is what makes this game uncompromising, mad, and special.  Sometimes totalitarianism in art is the way to go if you need something unique.  WE NEED SOMETHING UNIQUE.  **sips swamp whisky**

[Muz]

Well, in the end it is Toady's choice how he wants to approach it. You certainly can't tell someone to just make it open-source if he doesn't want to. It's a useless argument. He has pulled in the help of the community over things that can be outsourced, like organizing suggestions, but overall, final decision is with Toady, and any arguments with the community doesn't change things.

Plus the concept of man hours is a myth with coding. I do agree that too many cooks spoil the broth.

[ayoriceball]

Plus the concept of man hours is a myth with coding. I do agree that too many cooks spoil the broth.

Cooks? Anyone who helps in the development of dwarf fortress has a say in all of the features that go in and out of the game? All final decisions and directions as to where the game should go belong to Toady One, not whoever he decides to help him code.

[Marble_Nuts]

Let's say that to many cooks spoil the broth if there are no chef in the kitchen

I don't understand how having sidekicks would overrule him in term of decision about the game... he ask for something, the sidekick does it, thats ALL about it... If he does not agree with with Toady request, then GTFO

[ArPharazon]

First off, thanks Zarat and Footkerchief and everyone else in the thread: The discussion of the considerations that go into open sourcing a project was very interesting to me. That said...

1. So how come there isn't a sticky or something somewhere, which addresses all of this to begin with? I've seen quite a few of these open source DF threads myself, and people always complain (understandably) that the discussion was done. Yeah, sure, you can search. But, well... Search. Why can't we have a sticky or something where we collate all the arguments and facts relevant to the issue, including what Toady has said? It can say that it's only fan-stuff and not Toady's official stance, if he has a problem with it. I mean, this is something a lot of people quickly get curious about, and besides, as I said I found it very informative to read because of what I learned about OSS in general from you guys, so why not?

2. With regard to DF, I get the impression that open DF is a pipe dream (to my disappointment, admittedly) because basically A) Toady doesn't want to work with other people, and B) There is a probably very small chance that he will lose income and thus his ability to work on DF full-time, but "probably a very small chance" is still not good enough for him (esepcially given that he has nothing to gain*). Honestly, I can totally see where he's coming from for either; I don't agree with it, but then again I'm not the guy developing DF for a living.

3. What has Toady said about the DF "copycats", anyway? And also, I don't think it's fair to call them simple copies. They rarely just do what DF already does- usually the whole motivation for creating a copycat is to do something Toady refuses to work on, thus DF does some things and the copycat does other things. Note that I'm just saying, it's not that they simply copy DF. I'm not saying I think it's right or wrong for their creators to actually do that (that's not a discussion I would like to have or read).

4. I guess the biggest issue is the two obvious things: Interface and graphics (and maybe multi-threading). These are annoyingly primitive, and *look* like they can be easily improved, the forums are full of people saying exactly how they can be improved, and a few of them could probably actually do it if they had access to the code. Except, Toady just doesn't do it, not because it's hard or beyond his ability but pretty much because he's doing other, more interesting things instead.

The graphics are particularly weird. From what I understand, for his earlier project he decided to have fancy graphics (again, from my understanding he did it in the most laborious possible way and wrote his own engine from scratch) and that turned out to be too much work and/or too boring to do, so his answer was to never have anything other than the bare minimum. So now we have probably the most complicated game in the world, running with the most basic visualization scheme one could think of.

So he's okay with all the hacks the fans are making, they fill a gap which he apparently agrees should be filled, even though he won't fill it himself. It seems weird that he won't just let people who want to do it do the work for him, but I guess realistically he either has to debug their contributions for them, or give them access to the code, and it's obvious why he would want to avoid either of those.

*: I disagree that he has nothing to gain. First, DF would be a much better game in ways he is unwilling to improve it. Second, arguably the improvement would increase the userbase and contribute to his income. But I'm probably repeating what has been said a million times at this point, so nevermind whether I agree with it.

Anyway, hope I don't offend anyone with this.

EDIT: Oh, and, Zarat: Worst thread title ever. I ignored it like 15 times thinking it was some guy talking about how perfect DF is and there shouldn't be a suggestions forum at all because it is so perfect.

[sockless]

I think that Toady looks at DF like a work of art. Imagine if the Mona Lisa had been a collaborative project (De Vinci did actually work on a few collaborative projects in his time).