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[thisisjimmy]

Zarat's post was perfectly appropriate.  He doesn't say anything bad about Toady.  In fact, we spends the whole first paragraph giving immense praise to Toady and Dwarf Fortress. 

This is the suggestions forum.  OP had legitimate concerns and laid out his reasons and suggestions in a well thought out manner (which is more than can be said for many other suggestions).  OP is not trying to criticize Toady, but rather wants to ensure safety of DF from copy-cats.

Again, ask for thread deletion, IMHO, and apologize to Toady, then see if you can engage him in conversation privately. 

Deleting this thread would be ridiculous.  Toady doesn't need you to protect him.  You don't have to agree with the suggestions, but at least allow the suggestions forum to contain carefully thought-out suggestions.  You aren't helping Toady by pretending everything about DF is perfect.

[Farmerbob]

Zarat's post was perfectly appropriate.  He doesn't say anything bad about Toady.  In fact, we spends the whole first paragraph giving immense praise to Toady and Dwarf Fortress. 

This is the suggestions forum.  OP had legitimate concerns and laid out his reasons and suggestions in a well thought out manner (which is more than can be said for many other suggestions).  OP is not trying to criticize Toady, but rather wants to ensure safety of DF from copy-cats.

Again, ask for thread deletion, IMHO, and apologize to Toady, then see if you can engage him in conversation privately. 

Deleting this thread would be ridiculous.  Toady doesn't need you to protect him.  You don't have to agree with the suggestions, but at least allow the suggestions forum to contain carefully thought-out suggestions.  You aren't helping Toady by pretending everything about DF is perfect.

The attempt here wasn't to try to protect Toady.  He's a big boy.  The attempt was to try to get the OP to clean the crap off his shoes before he walks any farther on Toady's carpet.

No matter how well meaning the OP really is, he's basically slapped Toady in the face, then declared that he's going to decompile Toady's code.  Do you imagine this will go over well, even if Toady is a saint?  I don't.  Taking two steps back, apologizing, and then trying to actually communicate with Toady directly would be the appropriate step here, if this person actually has any idea of what they are talking about.

It's easy enough to try start up a friendly dialog.  Make a donation and apologize when making a request for crayon art, while asking for thread deletion.  See where it goes from there.

[Footkerchief]

Farmerbob, I think you are overstating the offensiveness of Zarat's statements and the degree to which Toady desires to be kowtowed to.

[Farmerbob]

Farmerbob, I think you are overstating the offensiveness of Zarat's statements and the degree to which Toady desires to be kowtowed to.

If Toady wanted to be kowtowed to, I suspect he would already have a lot more employees, so I agree with you there.

Saying "Oh this is great, but you're doing it all wrong so I'm going to take apart what you did without your permission and work on it myself." is not respectful.

I do not feel as if I over-reacted, but if you feel this way, we can agree to disagree.

[Footkerchief]

I must have missed where Zarat said he was planning to decompile and rip-off the game.

[Farmerbob]

I must have missed where Zarat said he was planning to decompile and rip-off the game.

He does not say that he's going to do it for personal gain.  He does say he is going to decompile and tinker with it though.

<snip>
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, 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.

To the OP

Please understand here that I am NOT saying that your ideas are baseless.  I am saying that I cannot see any possibility of you ever getting anywhere with Toady by following the path you have started.

Toady has been doing this for years.  He obviously is happy doing it this way.  He has a fan base that donates enough to pay him a living wage.  He is not going to be moved by "You're doing it wrong and I can tell you how to do it better" arguments.

If you want to reach Toady, you are going to have to appeal to the creator in him, emphasize the benefits of what can be done with a team, AND convince him of the safety of his intellectual property.  If you cannot do this in a way that Toady will listen to, I predict no change.  After your current start, I cannot see him paying you much attention.

*edited color - the blue was impossible for me to read without fuddling with text settings*

[FallingWhale]

Look at the log in dates.

[Starhero]

Yeah this is a dead horse guys...Someone lock this/delete this...

[Zarat]

I've been very busy at work lately (coming up on a deadline soon and lots of travel), so I haven't had time for much idle Internetting, but there's plenty here I intend to respond to when I get a chance, because I'm afraid I didn't communicate some of my points clearly and they were misunderstood as a result.

I don't have that time right now, but I want to respond to this quickly so my intentions are clear:

Farmerbob, I think you are overstating the offensiveness of Zarat's statements and the degree to which Toady desires to be kowtowed to.

If Toady wanted to be kowtowed to, I suspect he would already have a lot more employees, so I agree with you there.

Saying "Oh this is great, but you're doing it all wrong so I'm going to take apart what you did without your permission and work on it myself." is not respectful.

I do not feel as if I over-reacted, but if you feel this way, we can agree to disagree.

I do not intend to ever distribute anything, ever, resulting from that work. Not source code, not binaries, which would be both wrong and illegal, and not any DF knowledge I might glean from it. I don't have any intent to write any games of my own, ever. I don't see how it is wrong or disrespectful to get an idea of how things are put together. Do you think it is disrespectful to take your car apart and rebuild it? Replace stock parts if you think that trying something else might work better for you? I think it's exactly the opposite, you get a whole new appreciation for the guy that built the thing. Nor is my position in any sense "Toady is doing it all wrong"; that would be a funny thing to think for the guy who started a thread titled "Dwarf Fortress is the best game I have ever played."

[Farmerbob]

I've been very busy at work lately (coming up on a deadline soon and lots of travel), so I haven't had time for much idle Internetting, but there's plenty here I intend to respond to when I get a chance, because I'm afraid I didn't communicate some of my points clearly and they were misunderstood as a result.

I don't have that time right now, but I want to respond to this quickly so my intentions are clear:

Farmerbob, I think you are overstating the offensiveness of Zarat's statements and the degree to which Toady desires to be kowtowed to.

If Toady wanted to be kowtowed to, I suspect he would already have a lot more employees, so I agree with you there.

Saying "Oh this is great, but you're doing it all wrong so I'm going to take apart what you did without your permission and work on it myself." is not respectful.

I do not feel as if I over-reacted, but if you feel this way, we can agree to disagree.

I do not intend to ever distribute anything, ever, resulting from that work. Not source code, not binaries, which would be both wrong and illegal, and not any DF knowledge I might glean from it. I don't have any intent to write any games of my own, ever. I don't see how it is wrong or disrespectful to get an idea of how things are put together. Do you think it is disrespectful to take your car apart and rebuild it? Replace stock parts if you think that trying something else might work better for you? I think it's exactly the opposite, you get a whole new appreciation for the guy that built the thing. Nor is my position in any sense "Toady is doing it all wrong"; that would be a funny thing to think for the guy who started a thread titled "Dwarf Fortress is the best game I have ever played."

I am glad to hear your clarification, but I still see a problem with understanding borders and psychology of a person who lives on incoma based on intellectual property.

It would certainly be disrespectful if I let you borrow my car to make a few errands with, and I found you in your garage with my engine completely disassembled.  If it were indeed your car, then it would be yours to do with as you wish, but in that case it's NOT your car.  Dwarf Fortress belongs to Toady.  He has intentionally built it to be highly customizable, but it still belongs to him.  If you tear it the engine out of Toady's software and reverse engineer it, you are going too far, even if you do not plan on making a profit from it.  Toady lets us use his software and we have lots of fun with it.  Some of us donate to him because we want him to continue developing the game.

Toady has made it abundantly clear that he is not interested in making Dwarf Fortress a larger development project.  This does not mean that he might not be convinced some day to do exactly that, but your original post most certainly is not the way to make a favorable impression and gain his ear.

Every project has warts.  We all know this.  Toady certainly knows this.  He knows his limitations, and unlike most others, he seems to know his strengths as well.  When I read your OP, all I saw was a global complement, followed by a bunch of complaints.  Something like an art critic saying "Oh, this is a great landscape, but it would be better if the artist were not both colorblind and needing glasses badly." Whether justified or not, this is not how you convince someone who is happy doing things their way, to try doing it a different way.

Toady's a big boy.  NONE of my comments here are directed at him.  I'm trying to help YOU understand that you are dealing with someone who is not going to respond to negativity like a typical coder might.  Toady's motivations appear to be closer to an artist's motivations than to a profit-driven entrepreneur's motivations.

If you, or someone like you, can convince Toady to modularize his code and task out chunks while maintaining control over the core functions, that would probably be the best of both worlds.  Like you, I believe that DF might benefit from changes in development methods.  However, I also understand that this will only happen if Toady is convinced by people he trusts, who know what they are talking about.  If you want a shot at being one of those people, I am certain you started out on the wrong foot.  Toady HAS, on occasion, allowed others to touch code for things he needs help with.  He did so on this release, if I am not mistaken.

I'm done here.  If I haven't explained myself well enough to be perfectly clear, then I doubt you are ever going to understand what I am saying.  I might even be somewhat off in my understanding of where Toady sits motivationally, since I do not know him in real life, but I can certainly tell you that you are on the wrong track even if I cannot tell you exactly what track you should be on.

[Maklak]

The car example is wrong. If you borrow somebody a car, you want it back in good condition. Seeing it a few hours later with engine disassembled means that at best you'll have to wait a few more hours before you get it back, and at worst the friend will botch putting it back together, and it will need costly repairs.

Not so with a program. It is more like writing a book, letting a friend copy it, and a few hours later seeing that he did something with his local copy, like cut something out, corrected grammar mistakes, or whatever. It doesn't matter as long as you still have your original, and he isn't sharing his version under his name, or something like that. 

That said, Toady wouldn't like fully reverse engineering DF into another game, but disassembling, looking at the code, or even making binary patches for the exe or tools that hack it, is fine. Quietus (or whatever that is spelled) published some patches to 31.25 after disassembling the code, one of them fixed crystal glass. Dfhack and Dwarf Therapist and Stonesense also needed disassembling, and looking at DF code to be written.

Zarat's way of putting his intentions was maybe clumsy, but You're overreacting Farmerbob.

[Farmerbob]

<snip>
Zarat's way of putting his intentions was maybe clumsy, but You're overreacting Farmerbob.

I said I wouldn't respond again, because I thought I made myself clear, but apparently not.

1) I do in fact agree that DF might benefit from a different development style.

2) I've seen Toady brush off free offered help from many people for years.

3) I've seen where Toady has actually accepted help at least once.

4) Toady's motivations seem to be the motivations of an artist, more than that of a profit-driven person.

5) It appears, based on the text, that the OP might actually have a knowledge level high enough to encourage changes

6) It appears, based on the text, that the OP has little or no understanding of tact.  Nothing wrong with this in and of itself.  I have issues in this particular area myself, as you can see

Now, to tie it all together.  It's going to take both tact and expertise from someone Toady trusts who can appeal to his creator side to ever get him to significantly change his stance on development, IMHO.  He's not completely against letting others touch his code, but it's rare when it happens.

Do you think his family and friends have't seen the income earning potential of DF and tried to convince him to do things differently?  Do you think randomguy on the forums is going to have better luck while stomping his virtual feet and mixing backhanded complements with complaining?

[Mr. Palau]

I for one agree with FarmerBob, Zarat you seem very experienced in matters relelating to open sourcing and managing a game, and you are right Toady could definitely use some help. However it is the extreme desire of Toady to maintain the personal feel of the game that he shaped it with his own two hands. Asking Toady to collaborate with other artists is like saying to a sculptor that his statue should be made by him and other artists, because it would get done faster and better. In the end through the sculptor will not have a personal connection to said statue, it was the group's work not his. So in any proposal for limited open sourcing or the inclusion of more programmers into a development team we must strike a balance in preserving Toady's personal attachment to the game while maximizing the effects of any development collaboration or limited open sourcing.

I for one would like to see Toady allow more programmers to work with him on the source code of the game. The only way I believe he would ever do it however, would be if he knew and trusted the programmers. If he knew the people he was working with, trusted and perhaps was even friends with them, I think that game would still have a personal feel to it. He may not have built it just by himself, but he doesn't do that now. Now his friends help him out and the game still has that personal feel to it for him or else he would have already quit. The question my fellow Urists is just how many friends and fellow programmers Toady can bear to work with on the game. I would guess than it is more than are working with him on it now.

Zarat what I believe would be the best option for you to encourage Toady to allow more people to work on the game would be for you to put out a clear and detailed plan. I have read the entire thread, in all its length, including your detailed proposals for how all this could be accomplished, but you still haven't turned it into a plan that could convince Toady. It hasn't been laid out clearly enough and the ideas of how exactly all this would work is spread throughout many pages. If you can turn the ideas put forth in this plan into a coherent plan, that appeals to Toady by maintaining that personal feel while advancing the game, you would have a much better idea of having your ideas considered. You are mostly just addresing arguments agaisnt open sourcing in general instead of presenting a plan and defending that, which would not only be potentially easier to argue for but would also advance the conversation above what is now a heated discussion that is quickly moving out of the realm of a reason able discourse.

Another possible route is to aim for the low hanging fruit and present a coherent practical plan that would improve a central or drastically flawed aspect of the game and ask Toady to help with implementation. Or perhaps just to start a dialogue about Toady giving out small portions of the source code, which I believe he has done in the past, for a specific purpose.  An approach focusing on Toady giving out small portions of the code has the potential to go much farther than the dramatic proposal to revolutionize the way dwarf fortress is developed, because he would agree to it much more readily then he would the gigantic ultra-deluxe open source proposal.

Famerbob is also right in that Toady has probably thought about this a lot more than I ever will, so whatever ideas you put forth have to be new, or at least just laid out in a new convining format. If I knew as much about the nuances of managing a development team or open sourcing a game as you do I think I would have written one up myself long ago becasue this has the potential to be very beneficial if done right.

[simonthedwarf]

Has anyone attempted a fairly large donation for specific features that are not doable by modding? If anyone has attempted this, what was the outcome in terms of what was suggested and the time it took to implement?

[Starver]

I may not be entirely correct, but I think that with the exception of the animal sponsorship drive[1] there has been no significant case of "I give you this money in order to implement feature <foo>", and quite a few instances where suggestions of such activity (e.g. "can we pay him to put in a better pathing algorithm?") have been put down fairly heavily.

And I think it's covered by the "he does it because he wants to" clause.  He was happy to put more animals in, and was happy to be directed as to which (or something), but I can't see it going any further.  ICBW.


[1] Which itself had passed me by.   I never even realised it was happening until announcements that it had happened happened.  So I might be equally ignorant of various other more subtle and private actions along these lines.