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Actually, he's done that in the past. He let some folks from the DF forums have part of the source code, specifically the part which uses OpenGL to draw the graphics. They were able to improve it so that it was much more efficient, and so that it could use TrueType fonts. The results were quite successful, in that the graphics now take up much less of the game's time, and TrueType fonts can make the game much more approachable.

On the other hand, Tarn has said that he now no longer understands this part of the code. If he ever needs to modify it he'll either have to learn how it works from scratch, or farm the work out to the community again. Since he has no desire to become a project manager, he's unlikely to do the latter.

Also, the game isn't completely closed-source; it uses SDL, libpng, zlib, etc.

Interestingly enough, this hasn't really stopped people from improving on DF after the fact. Just take a look at the dfhack and Text will be Text projects, for instance.

  On the other hand, Tarn has said that he now no longer understands this part of the code. If he ever needs to modify it he'll either have to learn how it works from scratch, or farm the work out to the community again.

Reasonable, but that's when, surprise, revision history is pretty useful in figuring out what the changes are and why they were made :)

In theory yes, but in practice I've rarely been satisfied with the 'why' of a change unless I was able to talk to the author about it. Everyone seems to leave these things out of commit messages, because they seem so obvious at the time. Bug trackers are often better for this than version control.

Agreed. I guess that he is not practicing basic software engineering. Developing code is not just updating code and then check it into version control with a helpful comment. They should be some documentation for the "what, how, who, why" answers.

I sympathise with this point of view, but I think it misunderstands what Tarn is doing. DF is a weird (also fun and deeply rewarding) piece of outsider art. Source code is his medium, but expecting him to apply professional software engineering practices is like expecting Andy Warhol to use the same process as Campbell's when making the label for a soup can.

That's a really great way to look at it, thank you :)

Commit messages with a link to the bug tracker and some short description are the best IMHO.

This is something that I hammer into newer members of my team (mostly about code comments rather than commit messages):

The comment that tells you what happened is merely saving you some time parsing the code. The comment telling you why it's done like that is completely irreplaceable.

It has earned me the Stickler moniker, and I'm absolutely alright with this. They've never had the displeasure of refactoring code from 3 years prior where the function's name is getIpAddress(), but it does 6 additional things within the method. The docs says, "Gets the IP address". The commit message says, "gets user's IP address". The function really gets the IP address, does some weird encoding (of which I'm still not sure why), does some other stuff with the request headers, then returns the IP.

Documentation saves lives, people.

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live"

You may want to also consider refactoring this code. A function should do what it says, not have unexpected side effects.

Not only can this be surprising to a client, but it also makes it difficult to leverage the code for reuse elsewhere ("I only wanted the IP address, not the rest, guess I'll write one called getIpAddressOnly", etc).

Functions like this also tend to become muddled and difficult to maintain because as time marches forward, functionality may need to be added between these side effects, and again, unless it is refactored, it has to end up within the same function, making the whole problem even worse.

the best thing in life (almost better than hearing the lamentation of their women) is when there's a good explanation WHY it's done like that and later someone changes the code while not updating the WHY (writing documentation is for people who don't get things done).

Dwarf Fortress desperately needs multithreading and optimization for data locality. Without that it is permanently limited in scope.

But it will never ever happen. Forget it. Anyone dreaming about open source DF should go make their own game. And I mean that sincerely: Dwarf Fortress is very good, but there are even greater things that will come. Build those things!

This has somewhat happened a lot. To an extent, the entire crafting genre owes itself to DF, which inspired Minecraft, and between the two of them, a genre was born...

However, as yet, no-one's come close to the epicness of the generated world and story, even if they've made progress on the core gameplay.

I hear that claim, but do you have sources to back the fact that Minecraft was significantly influenced by DF? I mean, there was a crafting mechanic before DF, right? And not many gameplay elements from DF found their way into Minecraft at all.

http://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecr...

Dead links galore, the way back version has the images, but not the games nor videos:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091102174928/http://notch.tumb...

Notch cited DF and Infiminer as influences.

Surely Sim City be classed as being based around a crafting mechanic?

How so?

Not to mention the dozens of "DF with graphics!" clones currently living on Steam... none of which remotely approach the complexity and flexibility of the original (though they do look better and have better UIs)

It's very different, but Rimworld gives me a similar feel to dwarf fortress in regards to depth, and has a far better interface.

Not that it's close to done yet.

Rimworld is a very direct clone of Dwarf Fortress, but in a Sci Fi setting and by a professional game dev. Tynan Sylvester previously worked on BioShock Infinite.

It has proper graphics (though simple, it is a one man project). It includes utilities like Dwarf Therapist. The random events are not so random, but tries for better story telling.

There are some limitations, which might or might not be fixed. For example, there is no digging down, only one z layer, so you cannot build elaborate fatal traps.

Overall, I really like it. :)

That sounds kind of like old schools DF, where you dug to the right instead of down.

Prison Architect may be more influenced by Dungeon Keeper than Dwarf Fortress but it's pretty deep and complex.

I haven't tried other DF inspired games from Steam, though...

Chris Delay has called PA "my very own Dwarf Fortress" and it was directly inspired by his work on Subversion, a failed "universal simulation" game based on similar ideas as DF.

Subversion tried to generate everything and have deeply complex simulations -- mostly because he realized Introversion couldn't design every last detail by hand at the scale the project was trying to provide. PA itself was actually directly the result of Chris realizing that he had more fun trying to build these intricate simulated scenarios than actually playing them.

There's a beautiful demonstration of Subversion where he shows a heist scenario with intricate alarm and security systems and how the player could just bypass all of it by simply shooting people -- that was apparently the dying blow to the project.

>> "To an extent, the entire crafting genre owes itself to DF"

There's plenty of crafting games way before DF. In fact, some of the earliest RPGs I played, like Neverwinter Nights (1991), allowed crafting weapons and armour. Maybe crafting has taken off a bit (too much) since DF.

Different kinds of crafting, definitely. Not just a quantitative difference. DF and it's descendants, you take apart the world to rebuild it. RPG crafting is just fetch quests and recipes.

There is no name for this genre, though.

I'd try "survival sandbox". In Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress the initial goal is to survive. Later the game turns into a sandbox where you can build magnificent structures. For the sandboxing there is some complex simulation going on (biomes,fluid dynamics,etc).

Survival sandbox seems pretty good... but I don't think that difficulty curve description is accurate.

http://i.imgur.com/YzevDTs.png http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/4/40/FunComic.png

Interesting point, apparently no one knows where that image originated, or what it originally said.

I know EVE was in the original version I saw years back, and there seems to be some misattribution to XKCD (presumably due to the art style and humorous graphs?). Bonus points if anyone knows the POTBS reference offhand.

http://images.mmorpg.com/features/4577/images/LearningCurve....

https://m.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3m1ahz/which_games...

Throwing it out there, but if anyone is interested in building an open source DF, email me. It's been a side project of mine (more specifically, the story/history generation components) but I haven't pursued it as much as I'd like.

There are already games that are better than DF available today. Several of them, some 3D, some 2D, all of them are superior games.

The only thing DF has going for it is the depth of detail. That is a significant feature, but some day one of these superior games is going to have that too.

I am a huge DF fan, I wish they'd hire an art developer or something. It's just ridiculous.

What's some of those games? Interested in trying out some new stuff

Gnomoria is my personal favorite.

There is a great 3D one that lacks features but the interface is great, that one is called Dwarves! if I recall correctly.

I tried Gnomoria and it simply doesn't compare to DF. You could read multiple reviews on steam to find out lots of stupid bugs, but here's a taste: gnomes don't comprehend levels and path finding across levels fails badly - if you want to build a fence around some tunnel entrance, you'll find them running around confused until they die. (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=67559...) And it won't be fixed. Gnomoria is "complete" as far as I know and no updates are planned. My next favorite is that gnomes will happily do any work when injured, but if you have a hospital? They'll lay on the bed and die out of hunger just because nobody is assigned to care for them. (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=675590...)

And that's ignoring the lack of any story component, complex interactions, any interesting events apart from "something came to attack your area", etc. It's just boring once you play it a few times.

To be fair, that's a similar bug to what Dwarf Fortress had until recently: unless you built walls from certain directions, your dwarves would end up on the "wrong side." And you can't say Dwarf Fortress doesn't have stupid bugs; a recent fort had a were-elephant scared up into a tree. He couldn't climb down, being an elephant, but inflicted terror on anyone who dared approach, including a lumberjack instructed to chop the tree down. In fact, the stupid bugs make the game amusing [and frustrating] [and !FUN!].

I'm not saying DF is free of bugs, but actual bugs in it are going to be fixed, so it's easier to ignore them. If you knew your dwarves are going to get stuck now, and in a month, and whenever you want to play, would it be still fun?

If a game depends on future changes to be fun, it's not fun until those future change actually occur.

I have to disagree with this. I'm definitely going to have fun with a game with a known bug that's going to be fixed in a week. It can even be a crashing bug, or making some mechanics unavailable. I'm just going to avoid that area, because the game is still evolving.

The same bug that's never going to be fixed makes the game not fun at all for me.

> I'm just going to avoid that area, because the game is still evolving.

That sounds to me like you're avoiding parts of the game because they're not fun, regardless of the chance of them being fixed in the future.

I love when people use the word "fun" without knowing what "FUN" means in the context of Dwarf Fortress.

For context, I think it's a shame Carp don't gain the Swimming skill anymore. Or teeth, apparently, if the wiki is to be believed.

The difference is, for some reason DF bugs are amusing as hell. It's pretty freaking funny to imagine a were-elephant in a tree yelling at everything. I think part of it is that DF doesn't really have graphics. You have to imagine what's going on, which makes it pretty freaking funny. Also almost no bug doesn't have solution, and none really stop the game either- even with that tree you could probably tunnel under it and collapse it, which is again, funny as hell.

That isn't the point, the game is a better game. It's existed for about 2 years, how long has DF been around?

I've read the developer's reasons for not having graphics, and it's BS. If he doesn't want to do it himself he should let someone talented in that area join the development team.

You're right of course, it's his project and he doesn't have to share it. It's free and beggars can't be choosers. But a game belongs as much to it's community of players as it does to the people who create it. The best games ever created have all been open, either open source or by embracing a modding community. As a gamer who's had a passion for all forms of gaming since before I could read, I find the developer's attitude extraordinarily negative in general.

That's my opinion, nobody is obligated to share it. I'm just saying something superior is going to come along and when it does nobody will remember DF. And that would be a shame, really.

DF has been around, and under active development, for ten years and is quite a bit more popular than you seem to realize.

> If he doesn't want to do it himself he should let someone talented in that area join the development team.

And it's also one guy living off Patreon and the donations generated by DF. Where should he find the money to pay an employee?

Kickstarter for Dwarf Fortress graphics initially, then Patreon again with an expanded community due to the Kickstarter. Seems like that would work reasonably well, without changing the basic game.

They don't want to hire an art developer. They make enough money to keep the lights on between donations and the Patreon, but it's not enough to subsist the income of another.

Toady's reason for the simple graphics is that it lets him focus on core gameplay, which is what he enjoys.

An art director? Ascii in itself is entirely it's own aesthetic. There's a huge roguelike community that much prefer graphics like that.

It seems that the project is now dead, sadly. But you could easily pick up where they left off since it's open source.

http://www.goblincamp.com/

Second that mulithreading and optimization. My computer is 8-core, but each core is only maxes at 1.8 Ghz, which prevents me from playing on large maps, which basically caused me to give up on the game. There are tons of smart people out there who would gladly volunteer time to improve the code if it was open source.

Dwarf fortress is the Bloomberg of gaming - used by a niche set of users, uglier than sin, non trivial entry barriers, and a focus on depth and breadth of services which are unmatched.

And in the same way, they are honey traps for young coders who don't get the sheer amount of different games which are working together here. (With the commensurate gripes about interfaces as well)

When is the Reuters Eikon competitor coming out for DF then? I want something pretty with an intuitive UI!

Rimworld certainly delivers on the intuitive UI aspect. It is a baby compared to Dwarf Fortress though.

i think the type of programmer who fusses over data locality and multi threading isn't the same one who happily implements sand in the eye making the creature blind (until it's washed out by rain or splashing fluids).

It might start off with version control, but it would then end with us gulping plump helmet slurpees watching the latest cgi DF-Marvel tie in at the local megaplex. Leave the brothers be, and let future historians earn their pay.

Version control and "mainstreamness" seem pretty orthogonal to me.

You haven't heard of the new Linux, The Movie! project have you?

Seth Rogen is to play a young Richard Stallman.

Adam Sandler as a young Linus Torvalds

Wow，I've heard slippery slope arguments before, but this definitely takes the cake.

I don't even know what it means.

You aren't going to convince an idiosyncratic developer to release the source code and do all the other things that make a good developer a good developer.

I see it as a double edged sword. It's good we get DF, but at the same time, DF itself is a huge mess.

Thomas Biskup of ADoM said that he'd not publicly release the ADoM code for two reasons. First, people would trawl it for the secrets (discovery is a big part of the ADoM experience). Secondly, he was embarrassed about the state of his code and didn't want to let people see...

He did do a re-release recently that I funded on $kickstarter_analogue, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet (and it's been a while...)

There are numerous public prereleases available and I'm playing the most current one right now (the barebones ascii version). It's still the ADOM I knew, but now with extra dungeons, stuff to do and a variety of fixes for bugs and scummy exploits.

Yeah, I understand they wouldn't be convinced to release the source, but that's why I am thinking about a middle ground, to have someone volunteer to help organize it, while still keeping the code private.

Though I guess there's the question of trust... would have to be someone they knew very well.

I'm sure he keeps regular backups. There's also his brother. If Tarn dies, his brother will probably release the code or have fans help recover it.

> In an interview I read, Tarn said something to the effect of that "he was not interested in learning about version control and it would just be a distraction that would take away time from the important work, since the way he works has worked for him for many years".

I want you all to imagine having to work with this person.

Why? He has stated on many occasions that he has no intention of working with anyone else.

I seem to remember at some point that Tarn said that if he ever stops working on DF for whatever reason, he would open source it.

I don't remember the exact words but if he is killed for this reason, it won't be.

I mean I love dwarf fortress but I probably wouldn't kill toady for it

"probably"

So, there's a chance?

Why not open source it? He would still be in control of the vision of the project.

He has stated in interviews that he doesn't want to turn into a project manager. He's said he's happy with how development on the game currently works and as long as the project brings in enough money to support him and his brother it's unlikely to change.