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> I don't even see the ASCII anymore. All I see is dwarf, plump helmet, magnetite ore

It's even more than that - I can spend ridiculous time in legends mode just reading facts and events going from one personality to another trying to "feel" the world. It's like from these pieces of trivial information a bigger picture emerges, partially consisting of the facts and partially of random connections my brain made. It's an amazing experience.

Even if it were open source I doubt there would be enough impetus to implement multithreading.

It would literally be easier to completely make a new game from scratch with async and threading designs taken into account, instead of trying to adapt an existing monolith.

Async and multithreading are complex and introduce many subtle bugs. It's not so easy to just move to that from a single-thread event loop.

I would hope there would be low hanging fruits. Pathfinding for example causes huge huge issues late in the game, same with the fluid calculations. Of course we have no idea how Tarn implemented these things, but I would have to guess if you need to do pathing for 50 entities in a single frame, you could probably parallelize them?!

Not if those entities are moving relative to one another (combat, tasks, social interactions, just moving past one another)

It happened to me with Nethack/Slashem and interactive fiction games.

Once you get absorted at night by imagining your surroudings upon reading the game actions, the game feels scarier and more "real" than any current 3D adventure game.

Passion project? It is the sole source of his income.

It might be both.

He's lucky enough for it to be both.

Lichess is Thibault's source of income, passion project, AND it is open-source.

I suspect that Thibault is making money from it because he is actually deploying a web service, and the value there is coming from the network effects of its multiplayer user base.

Even if I deployed his code tonight, there's no guarantee users would switch over to my LeeChess clone :)

In the case of Dwarf Fortress it's just "download my exe and please donate if you like it!"

I've been working on a project for a long time. It's not even yielding income, though I hope it will. A friend referred to it as a passion project. That hurt for some reason. I can't explain why.

I think you're interpreting his meaning in saying that incorrectly.

You're not an employee for somebody else (correct? It's your own project) - it's not a salaried or hourly position where somebody else is currently signing your paycheck. You obviously don't hate it (I hope? If so, not sure why you wouldn't have canned it yet)

Thus, this is what most people would refer to as a passion project. You may have a different meaning of that term in your own mind, but I think, on average, most people would refer to what you're doing as such, and not to be malicious in doing so. I wouldn't let it hurt you, I'm sure that's likely not a friend's intention.

Yeah for sure, he didn't mean anything by it. I try not to be super sensitive, that makes interacting with people impossible. But sometimes it's hard :).

I have a similar sensitivity around my primary vocation: I'm an artist with a day job, like many others, but since my day job is programming and I take it seriously, a lot of people think of my art as a "hobby." Which it very much is not.

FWIW I have found that three things help me deal with this sensitivity:

1) Take it as motivation to be more outwardly "professional" about my art. Improve the website, be more active on social media, try harder to exhibit, even (ugh) sell things.

2) Remember that most people are just saying that out of ignorance: they don't have a mental model for anything outside of "work for the Man" or "mess around in free time."

3) Have examples ready if someone needs an explanation, and also as inspiration for yourself. For instance: was William Carlos Williams[0] a "hobby" poet?

[0]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-carlos-willia...

Yeah I just found out this year the William Carlos Williams was also, by the way, Chief of Pediatrics at Passaic General Hospital. What if people referred to his poetry as a hobby?

Yeah I agree with this, I would feel hurt too. For some reason the word "passion" has this hidden connotation for me which makes me feel like the project isn't serious, isn't making money, isn't popular, and is just eating up all my time as it is something I constantly obsess over.

In the case of Dwarf Fortress, I would say for him it is "the sole project he's been working on for 20 years now, which takes up $large_number of hours per week, and which has been sustaining his life now thanks to a fan base which have proven themselves reliable contributors of financial support. And he really enjoys writing the code too"

> For some reason the word "passion" has this hidden connotation for me which makes me feel like the project isn't serious, isn't making money, isn't popular, and is just eating up all my time as it is something I constantly obsess over.

This is spot on. If only you would articulate my feelings for me all the time, that would be great!

Why can't a passion be serious or popular?

Because, increasingly, doing your job is a mind-numbing, passionless activity? Most people retire as soon as they have an opportunity, and if they don't it's because they need more money. Imagine a world where people often take pride in their jobs and keep working past retirement age because they enjoy it. Is that fantasy or science-fiction?

People do their best work when they care about it. I'd measure success in quality of work rather than monetization. I'll never be impressed by someone with a boat but the person meticulously building what they love will get a beer from me.

I once called Rust a 'hobby language' on #rust on freenode. It turns out it's the most offensive thing you can say to sirius cats.

> That said, I've always wondered if Dwarf Fortress would be a more smooth experience if it had more developers

Maybe, but only if it was under the benevolent dictator model.

There exists at least one Dwarf Fortress done in Tarn’s model - it seems there exist zero done via any other method.

He perfected a Patreon-style support system before Patreon was really a thing, and he keeps plugging away at it, keeping people interested.

(Dirty secret - he’s found ways to let people access parts of the code he doesn’t care about such as the sound or SDL)

Your comment is true in a literal sense, but there are other games with very similar mind-boggling complexity that exist and thrive thanks to being open source. SS13 and CDDA jump to mind.

I think those take a different kind of person as a leader - the “Tarn + bro” person would need to be better at delegating and management of others vs implementation of his design himself.

Often if you have an idea but aren’t doing the low level implementation it’s harder to understand why something should change vs doing it yourself - in the latter case you just change the implementation and the design at the same time.