Dwarf Fortress in 2013

http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/195148/dwarf_fortress_in_2013.php

by akg • 13 years ago

117 77 13 years ago

jmduke3• 13 years ago

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982459

baddox3• 13 years ago

As for [porting to the] PS Vita, he notes that "if someone approached us, we're not giving the code to anybody for any reason, so it would have to be something we could compile ourselves."

Just imagine how good this game and community around it would be if it had always been open source. Just imagine how much money they could raise in a Kickstarter to simply open source everything.

devindotcom2• 13 years ago

Imagine how good it would be if two guys worked on it for 10 years straight, following their own vision and not compromising, making what they thought was cool and making a decent living the while. That's how good it is!

justin662• 13 years ago

The interesting thing is that, when they speak, these guys sound like planners who would be happy to delegate some of the work involved in realizing their grand vision. That's obviously not how they're operating.

a3_nm• 13 years ago

How exactly is this incompatible with it being open source? Being open source does not mean that you have to accept contributions from others, nor is it incompatible with making a decent living especially when the game is free as in free beer anyways.

hristov• 13 years ago

If they open source it they can still control things and follow their vision for their own main branch. But they can accept patches that have improvements for things that (i) are needed and (ii) do not necessarily go against their vision.

There are several great weaknesses of DF that are not the result of the maker's vision but of their limited time and resources.

For example, it is not Toady's vision for the game to get very slow even on powerful hardware when you have a big fortress. This is perhaps a negative blowback of Toady's very laudable vision to have each dwarf be independently simulated. However, an expert in parallel programming should be able to improve this a great deal. AFAIK, DF currently runs as a single thread, and many of its processes can be split off. This is, however, not easy and probably not something Toady is able to or wants to do.

It is also not Toady's vision for the game to be controlled by a mindblowing number of complex menus and obscure key combinations. It was probably not his vision for about half the game controls to be mouse enabled and half of them not. He has admitted himself that the interface needs a lot of work. But he is obviously not working on it, but adding new features like vampires, and Indiana Jones style careening mine carts (last time I checked). I am not saying he should not add those things -- it is a free game and he should work on what is more fun for him. But if he opensourced it perhaps someone else would fix the interface for him.

It is obvious the game needs outside help. People are hacking the game in memory in order to add functionality. Last time I played, you needed to run another program called "dwarf therapist" while playing in order to be able to manage your dwarf's skills and professions. Dwarf therapist would work by directly reading and manipulating dwarf fortress data in memory. Sorry but if the game worked well, nobody would take the time to hack DF just so he can write a helper program.

If they opensourced the game, the people that wrote dwarf therapist could just add that functionality directly into the game.

I say this as someone who loves DF, but has suffered plenty from its frustrations.

eropple9• 13 years ago

And in open-sourcing it, they dilute their vision for their game. No thanks. (And I am a donor. I don't care about being given their code.)

IgorPartola• 13 years ago

Open source games are rarely very good. There are exceptions (looking at you NetHack), but this is the one area where "give away software, sell support" does not seem to work. Then again, I wish more games were open sourced a la Quake after their sales start declining.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

I wish more games were open sourced a la Quake after their sales start declining.

That is where open source in games seems to excel: keeping old games alive and running on modern systems.

LanceH• 13 years ago

Closed source games are rarely very good.

jmduke3• 13 years ago

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is an open source game (and not open source in the sense of "you can look at our code but don't expect us to value your input", open source in the sense of "make pull requests!") and it's probably the best game I've ever played. I don't think I disagree with you, though: the reason it works so well for Stone Soup is because the game lends itself to personal extension (it's a roguelike, so you're dealing almost exclusively with game logic).

baddox3• 13 years ago

Dwarf Fortress is completely free (gratis) to play. The developers make money via donations, which I expect would only increase if the game were open source.

Argorak• 13 years ago

Quake is not open source. The engine is. To actually play "quake", you need to buy the assets.

Considering the quality of open replacement assets like OpenArena, I also don't think that open source games work particularly well.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

Minecraft would be an obvious counterexample I think. It and its community are doing just fine.

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

I've being mostly uninterested in playing dwarf fortress until fortress mode sees improvement. However I've being watching its progress with gusto. Toady is focused on the simulation aspect of the game. The generated story. Right now, that has no value, presumably it will later.

If DF were to be open sourced, the first thing I would do is attempt to contribute to cleaning up fortress mode. I suspect many developers would do this as well. So as a long long long time observer of this game, I can understand the lament that it's not open source and I sympathize. These sore spots likely won't see improvement. But...

All the reasons I normally advocate for freely open source software just arn't here!

Toady is clearly not doing anything malicious with his program. He also has no intention of restricting his program in the future, anyone can use it. He's trying to make the best software he can, for the user. Dwarf fortress isn't doing dirty things behind the scenes, and Toady has more than earned my trust. Versions have being ported to multiple OS's, and it's clear he's going to work on it for a long time. Open source isn't needed here, it would only get in the way of what he's trying to achieve. I'm willing to wait until I'm a much older person to see the masterpiece he creates.

shazow2• 13 years ago

Once upon a time, Tarn Adams did an AMA on Reddit. I asked him [0]:

  Have you considered open sourcing more pieces of Dwarf Fortress so that the
  community can try to help with the nitty gritty engine bits while you can
  continue having sole ownership of the underlying direction?

  The pathfinding and multithreading optimization is a good example of
  something I'd love to help with given the opportunity. (Related to this
  question.)

  Is there any other way that the more technically-inclined can help?

Tarn's response:

  I'm just not a project manager. I tried sharing the pathfinding code with
  some people, and some progress was made, but unless my involvement is more
  hands-on, I don't think it'll work, and I didn't want to be involved in that
  kind of arrangement. On the other hand, the porting and graphics work with
  Baughn went pretty well, although now I can't work with the graphics code
  myself because I don't understand it. I'd hate to have that happen to more core
  pieces of the game. Baughn also had to suffer a lot of annoyances because I
  have no inclination toward things like version control.

"I'm just not a project manager." As someone who has several active open source projects, I can very much relate. I can easily see Tarn and his brother be completely overwhelmed by open source activity, paralyzed to make any kind of internally directed progress on it. Also, not everyone is good at maintaining this kind of thing, so it could cause more harm than benefit to the project.

I too wish the code was open source, but I can understand the reluctance and speculate that it may even be the correct decision until the project is completed or abandoned.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_o...

baddox3• 13 years ago

The thing is, they literally would not have to change a single thing after releasing the source code. They could refrain from looking at a single pull request. But perhaps their fear is that community additions may lead to a variously forked ecosystem which could dilute the "Dwarf Fortress" name thus dilute their grand vision.

chongli• 13 years ago

I have no inclination toward things like version control

This is the key right here! Without version control, there's absolutely no way he's going to be able to collaborate with a whole bunch of people on this thing. If he decides to dump the source code up on his site, it's basically read-only at that point.

Besides that, he derives his income from donations. He does not want his project getting forked and his community leaving him behind in the dust.

KVFinn• 13 years ago

Just imagine how good this game and community around it would be if it had always been open source. Just imagine how much money they could raise in a Kickstarter to simply open source everything.

I don't think he'd even need to even open source it, in terms of allowing anyone else to release it. If it was just possible to hook into it and make custom UI or Renderers, I think people would run with it. Some have tried but they are extreme hacks at this point.

zyxley• 13 years ago

I will continue to have no interest in Dwarf Fortress until it has an actual UI instead of whatever insane random combinations of controls the developer felt like adding on any particular day.

rorrr22• 13 years ago

That's one of the reasons why Minecraft is so much bigger than DF.

These guys just don't get it. DF can be SOOOOO much better, yet they are working on adding features instead making the game better.

MereInterest• 13 years ago

Here's the difference: DF is Toady's baby, his life work. Toady has the idea for it, and he does not want anyone else working on the code. Minecraft started out very rough around the edges, and only started polishing it once it had already hit it big and he could hire other people.

With a one-developer game, you don't spend time polishing things. You bounce around different areas, adding things as you wish. Letting yourself get bogged down in polishing details that aren't exciting makes you start looking for other things to do, losing interest in the project altogether.

kbenson• 13 years ago

Ah yes. It's obviously they who don't get it. All they've done is create and turn into a career their pet project. Obviously they should just listen to all those that want to radically change what the game is rather than iterate on the design they (and many others) enjoy and see where it leads.

There is a reason DF has inspired so many others (including the creator of minecraft), and it was't the graphics.

devindotcom2• 13 years ago

Which do you think is more likely, that they don't get it, or you don't get them?

ajross• 13 years ago

Come back in 11 years and see if Minecraft is still so much bigger than DF. There's a difference between UIs crafted for hooking new users and those designed for long term use by experts.

Basically: you're starting the equivalent of a "vim vs. IDE" flame war, and adding just about as much value.

Freaky• 13 years ago

I'm not sure Minecraft's all that relevant a comparison - it's little more than a glorified Lego set. It's easy to have an accessible UI when you don't have to interface with much more than "Point at something", "Hit something" and "Place something". You might as well compare it with FarmVille - after all, it's a hell of a lot "bigger".

laureny2• 13 years ago

These guys just don't get it. DF can be SOOOOO much better,

Maybe. Or maybe it would lose its soul and become yet another pretty game with boring back stories.

I'm torn about that, but I can't help notice that the reason why the stories of your dwarves are so engrossing and so unbelievably epic and real is because 100% of Today's time is spent working on these stories instead of a pretty GUI.

erichurkman• 13 years ago

I have not played in quite some time, but if you are looking at playing: after you get the rough hang of things, make sure you look for mods. Specifically bug-fixes. There's a (small) community around the `dfhack` tool that fix a lot of game-breaking bugs. Masterwork [1] is a comprehensive mod that lets you turn off some of the "flavor" in exchange for a more performant game (about 25% or so). For example, the default game has dozens of types of leather. Do you really care if your dwarf's mitten is made of cow leather or bull leather?

[1] http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=125633.0

ghotli• 13 years ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again. One of the central philosophical questions of our day will become whether or not it is ethical to even turn off dwarf fortress.

InAnEmergency• 13 years ago

That was one of the taglines for SimCity 2000: "If this game were any more realistic, it'd be illegal to turn it off." (http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/198648-simcity-2000/images/box-11...)

sb057• 13 years ago

So that's why they dumbed down Simcity 5!

Sorry, couldn't help myself.

StevenRayOrr• 13 years ago

I am dangerously close to writing an MA thesis on just that question...

drewhk3• 13 years ago

They should not focus on interface at all, but provide a socket and a protocol to communicate with the engine. Then the community can build fancy clients, mods, whatever.

d232• 13 years ago

Okay, new idea. What if he did a Kickstarter for $500k for additional high-quality devs to come on the project for a year and focus on 1) improving the UI and 2) improving performance. That's it. No promises of additional functionality, no open-sourcing to make Toady feel like he's given up his baby.

Given the cult following of the game and the people who would like to play it but are otherwise frustrated, I doubt they'd have trouble reaching the limit. The press they'd get just from announcing would give them a boost as well.

eropple9• 13 years ago

He doesn't want more developers. He is happy with the project as it is. It is his life's work, so to speak, and he is content with progress happening over the span of years.

I don't understand why this is such a hard concept for some people.

kornork• 13 years ago

Every time I see threads like this, the comments are all about telling the developers what they should do. The developers make enough money to survive, seem perfectly happy, and are working on exactly what they want. They aren't in a situation where they owe the community something more than what they are already doing. Why are we trying to solve their problems?

Dwarf Fortress in 2013

Related Stories