Comment by snerbles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snerbles | Hacker News Reader

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Being a personal project, there's also a concern of losing control over one's art. Would Rembrandt invite a hundred paintbrushes upon his canvas?

Quoting a comment from a thread several months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11999393):

> 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.

I feel like a good compromise would be to stick the code base for each big release into some sort of vault. Not open to the public, but for there to be an agreement that should Tarn ever be done with it, it can be released. Basically give keys (or copies) to Tarn's brother as well as a few of the DF community members that Tarn trusts the most.

This way it stays just Tarn's work of art for as long as he wants it to stay that way, but if anything did happen it wouldn't be lost to society.

Why not just open-source and continue solitarily working on and releasing his personal fork of it?

As in, Dwarf Fortress: Tarn Edition, with only one contributor, and multiple forks from other people taking the game in different directions, as well as projects that just incorporate the best features from multiple forks into one version.

The minute that happens the more accessible community version with polished graphics and interface will become the dominant one. Only dilettantes will play the original.

The problem is he has zero motive to do so. His income is adequate for his needs and he apparently has no interest in fame or other reward. To him there's nothing to gain and everything to lose from open-sourcing it.

If Rembrandt could duplicate his canvases for free why not?

Why can't official Dwarf fortress exist alongside clones? Didn't seem to hurt the Quake engine and Carmack's engines were every bit the craftmanship as DF. Today you can run Quake on anything, it's been modded for VR support, new effects, etc. DF? We'll be lucky if it doesn't die and people hack it anyway.

You gotta respect people's desire to control their baby, doesn't mean it's productive, though. He'd literally lose nothing other than some notion of control by releasing it out in the open. He might even be able to find a novel open source business model if he tried (though that's not his desire or goal).

The last part about understanding does make sense; though if development was out in the open he'd have no problems finding people to explain it.

I know at least in some cases the reason for people not wanting to make something open source is that they don't want people to complain about their style of coding or to say that they are "obviously" bad programmers because they don't use design patterns or whatever the critic's favorite philosophy is.

I imagine a DF source release would spark a handful of Medium articles lambasting Tarn's coding practices.

And at least a few praising them as a refreshing new alternative to blah blah blah, or something.

The engine is the foundation upon which the content runs...but engines in and of themselves aren't content. In the case of most game engines, the two are well-separated.

In the case of Dwarf Fortress, I imagine the content and the engine are heavily coupled - if not one and the same. Separating the two will be an enormous task for Tarn, who likely has other priorities in DF development and is uninterested in the inevitable bikeshedding that will result should he open the whole project open up to others.

He's a mathematician, not a software engineer or project manager.

> You gotta respect people's desire to control their baby, doesn't mean it's unproductive, though.

While I agree, you'll probably find that his notions of "unproductive" will be wildly different than yours.

Depends, usually the content and engine become quite intertwined about 3 months before release as you try to squeeze every MB/cycle out of hardware.

Even then game design will dictate architectural choices(off the top of my head streaming, networking and platform all have huge engine implications and can't be easily retrofitted).

Quake was only open-sourced years after it was superseded by more advanced games. It was still an awesome thing, and I'm glad that ID seems to have made it a tradition.

What I like about Open Source software is that I can audit it to make sure it's doing what it says it's doing, and that I can modify it to make it work better on my system. I miss that when I'm playing a game.

But games are art, and art is a little different than non-art. I don't want to spoil the fun of a game by looking at the source code for it; I like that the author has some definite vision for the game. I don't even like to visit a forum for a game in order to report a bug, because I'm bound to read about other bugs in the game. I frequently enjoy games that are moddable, but if I start looking at mods too soon, then I also feel like the game is spoiled. Early-access games are also somewhat problematic, although I've been playing Factorio for years now, with no regrets.

I wish there were a level in-between. If games were half-way open source, so that the platform layer was open source while the game mechanics and artistic vision were not, then I would be happier about it.

  Quake was only open-sourced years after it was superseded by more advanced games. It was still an awesome thing, and I'm glad that ID seems to have made it a tradition.

Not since id Tech 4 (Doom 3/Quake 4), now it's proprietary (thanks ZeniMax).

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