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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

I've often wondered if DF will ever get an open source version that tries to recreate the same experience but focuses on consistent interface design, performance and multithreading, and ease of extensibility.

DF has a huge head start, and two of the most incredibly passionate developers out there, but it's also clear they prioritize expanding the model first and foremost rather than trying to tackle any of the user experience issues that have plagued the game forever.

(To be clear, I adore DF. I've put many, many hours into DF. It's a truly amazing game and I continue to wish the developers success.)

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I feel like every time someone sets out to create a F/OSS successor to DF, they end up mired in creating dungeon and world generators and never produce a functional game.

Really, that's what DF is anyhow; they even call it a "story generator" IIRC. Tarn just managed to put enough of a playable game together before getting lost in the details of world generation, and people have stayed engaged enough with it to keep him involved in the project.

This is a common trap in game dev. You have to get that steel thread pulled through before you spiral off into building systems in depth.

Yeah, and with FOSS this is all the more important. No one is going to play your game, if it's not fun. Few people are going to play your game, while it's not yet in some tangible way better than DF.

And if people don't play your game, they're not going to contribute to it.

I've heard a rumour that DF is planned to be opensourced once zach and tarn die, but they're keeping this a secret in order to keep from being assassinated.

I think there will eventually be an open source game that captures the same kind of magic that DF has. I don't think it will be DF, though. If the DF source code was ever opened, I think it would be pretty similar to what happens when any classic games opens it's code: nobody touches it for a long time. You need someone passionate about developing the code to keep it going -- and if you are passionate about developing it, you're more likely to write your own.

If only I could stop playing the game long enough to write some code... ;-)

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is to Nethack as __________ is to Dwarf Fortress. My understanding is that Gnomoria isn’t there yet, but I haven’t played it, so I could be wrong. It certainly would be an interesting technical challenge to write a competitor in a modular, maintainable way that allows tile-based frontends without injecting memory.

Rimworld is kind of this. It's obviously a different, far more accessible experience. But I can't help but feel like it took much of its inspiration from this very idea of making a DF with much better UX.

It's good but it doesn't have the same kind of emergent feel that DF has. It feels a lot less alive compared to DF.

Hopefully when the developers are eventually incapacitated they've made provisions for the source code to be released. I know I stopped playing because occasionally there were bugs were so bad that the fortress had to be abandoned; and there is substantial evidence in the bug count and framerate that there are underlying architectural issues in their design.

An open source version would be technically superior; although how that would affect their income stream I do not know.

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