Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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.

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