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Comment by gilrain | Hacker News Reader

Dwarf Fortress is beautiful art. I feel confident the Tarn brothers will be remembered for centuries for this work. I don't know of any other game, software even, being so laboriously created from the heart.

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It is certainly a fun experiment but it's also the poster child of wasted potential. If even a few more developers and artists could work on the game with toady still making 100% of the decisions the game would be much more flexible and much more polished and accessible. It is still a wonderful sandbox that can be experience by a select few but I hope one day the code is released to others and the game can truly blossom.

The project's success is due to the ecosystem they've created. Any introductions of designers/developers could spell entire doom for the project. I can appreciate not bringing in new talent as it is an unnecessary gamble.

That sounds appealing, but it would be something else. There are hundreds or perhaps thousands of polished fun games to play. Dwarf Fortress is different. It's raw. The wretched interface and myriad bugs are part of the whole experience. In a lot of ways, it's like punk rock. Yeah, the musicians could keep better time, and be in tune, but then it would be a different kind of music.

The lunacy of one guy writing so much depth and detail has it's own magic that you can't really get anywhere else. Maybe it is indeed a waste. I think i've spent more for that game than any other, save maybe WoW because of all the expansions.

Except that then he'd be a project manager rather than a programmer.

No need. Plenty of 3rd party tools. Take a look at the Lazy Newbs Pack: http://lazynewbpack.com/

It contains utilities to do just about everything you feel is lacking, save some major interface overhauls. I agree, the interface is byzantine, but at the end of the day, it's basically like emacs or vi....

Tools in the Newbs Pack include 3D fort imager, StoneSense, Dwarf task/military/nobles manager Dwarf Therapist, dozens of pixel art packs to turn your d's and c's into little dogs and chickens. There are even tools to directly modify the game: turn off aquifers, turn off invasions, remove races, turn off vampirism, limit the number of children.

The only wasted potential in Dwarf Fortress is people who maybe can't get into it because it's so freakin' complex. Tarn knows the code's a mess. He's not a programmer. He's a mathematician. He writes code that works, and when it does, he moves on. Nothing in Dwarf Fortress was written to be touched by an outsider. It's a truly personal project for the Adams.

Sargos mentioned 3 benefits that they would expect - flexibility, polish and accessibility.

Sure, maybe we have enough flexibility right now, but Dwarf Fortess definitely isn't a paragon of polish or accessibility.

And it never will be. And that's a good thing.

Also, if you don't think DF has polish, you've never played it. The polish is very subtle, but the game is SUPER polished with tons of details you'll miss if you don't go deep.

> No need. Plenty of 3rd party tools. Take a look at the Lazy Newbs Pack ....

A lot of trouble has been put into making tools such as Dwarf Therapist in the Lazy Newb Pack. They're basically made by snooping the memory of the DF process (unless I'm mistaken here). If DF source code was available (even if it would be immutable), a tremendous amount of effort could have been into better use than practically reverse engineering parts of the core game.

In my opinion, Dwarf Fortress could be much better if the source code was open or at least available.

Or there was some formal API or at least some convention for communicating without hacks

He does talk in the interview about why he doesn't do that, and the reasons aren't completely unreasonable (basically he wants to avoid professionalising the dev process)

That sounds unreasonable to me.

To put a different license and dump the source somewhere, you don't need to change your personal process at all.

You absolutely do. Open sourcing code is not just throwing a tarball over the wall. It's comments, it's documentation, it's changelogs that go a lot deeper than "fewer children are spawned." When people are reading the code, they want to make changes. They want to help. Tarn has no interest in changing his job from one of programmer/designer to one of gatekeeper/manager. I can completely understand why he doesn't want to do this. It'd make a lot more work for him, and people would come to him with complaints, demands, questions about it.

No, you don't need to change anything about comments, documentation, changelogs, anything. You can totally just throw a tarball over the wall. No, you don't need to accept contributions. When it's your project, you do whatever you like, regardless of the license. Whether you occassionally upload a binary or a source snapshot.

I'm all for OSS but that would be a privilege, not a right.

They're keeping it close to their hearts, where it belongs. Call me a purist but I'm more than happy with the way it's progressing.

Not really contradicting you here, but DFHack for the last couple of years has worked as a shim between DF and the SDL library. Substantially simplified the process of changing the game's behaviour, and mostly eliminated the need to poke around memory addresses. DFHack is also essentially the third party modding library for everyone else, with only Dwarf Therapist still poking around memory last I heard.

Kind of uninteresting for most players, but hey; this IS hacker news.

There are other ways that people have contributed, though. Take, for example, the project that led to the solid density values being updated for all sorts of materials.

Saguaro wood density only exists online thanks to Dwarf Fortress, for one example.

Adding graphic would completely change the proccess, because new features to add would have different comparative costs than now.

This would result in completely different game in the end, probably a lot more mainstream.

I'm glad he decided not to pursue that path.

I think you're right here. I read the comments of another link to this article where someone was going on about how DF only runs on a single-core and could benefit from a layer of threading.

Apparently even though it's text only there are points in the game where it slows down to a few frames per second.

The modern iteration is based on SDL graphics, not text (though that is available). The game slows down because you end up with 80+ dwarves, cats, forgotten beasts, Mothmen, kobolds, and more, all trying to pathfind to their next thing, and by that time you have dug down 60+ z-levels and there's rivers and fish and some dwarf really wants a sock from his/her dead friend and it all adds up to an awful lot of computation 100 times a second. The graphics of it all is probably one of the easiest parts.

However, this is a 14 year old, very complex codebase. Tarn has said himself that multithreading is highly improbable at this point, it's not something you can just drop in. It would probably absorb an entire release cycle.

The Sistine chapel roof is such wasted potential. If he'd got a team together and sculpted it before painting it, and used a bigger range of paints, it would have been much better.

"See son? That @ sign there represents God and the - is God's finger. The _ is the hand of Mankind, reaching out, and # is of course Mankind."

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