I wish they’ve asked about testing. The game, by design, has enormous complexity. I’d be terrified of making any changes to the game logic, because any small tweak can snowball into another drunken-cat-plague. Does he manage just by tweaking the code and playtesting it until it seems to work? Are there any unit tests, controlled simulations, or such?
The canonical answer to why Toady keeps it closed source is that he wants to make his vision, not manage a software project. I personally think it’s a little silly since by now he has a small army of talented programmers, mod makers, writers, artists etc who would happily devote their time to helping make his vision, but honestly, that’s fine. The guy is the poster-child of a mad genius: He’s spent nearly 20 years working on an incredibly vast and insane project, and has generally made it work pretty successfully. He’ll probably be doing it the rest of his life; I hope he makes the code open-source in his will.
Or rather “source available” but not open source. If he makes it open source and don’t accept any contribution, there’s a good chance he’ll lose control of it, because someone else will create a fork that accepts them.
I remember reading a few years ago that Dwarf Fortress doesn’t use version control. The software historian in me cried out in anguish. Anyone know if that’s true / still true today?
I wish they’ve asked about testing. The game, by design, has enormous complexity. I’d be terrified of making any changes to the game logic, because any small tweak can snowball into another drunken-cat-plague. Does he manage just by tweaking the code and playtesting it until it seems to work? Are there any unit tests, controlled simulations, or such?
You play it I suspect. And have the community report issues and fix them.
It’s a shame the game is closed source, I wonder if he’s embarrassed at some part of the 700k lines?
Oh I’m sure at 700k everyone would have a disappointing and embarrassing bit. I mean, on my solo projects I often times hit them before 1k :-)
The canonical answer to why Toady keeps it closed source is that he wants to make his vision, not manage a software project. I personally think it’s a little silly since by now he has a small army of talented programmers, mod makers, writers, artists etc who would happily devote their time to helping make his vision, but honestly, that’s fine. The guy is the poster-child of a mad genius: He’s spent nearly 20 years working on an incredibly vast and insane project, and has generally made it work pretty successfully. He’ll probably be doing it the rest of his life; I hope he makes the code open-source in his will.
Unless I’m mistaken, it is indeed a part of Toady’s will that the game becomes open source after he passes away.
I mean he could adopt the SQLite style of open source, open to read and fork but not to contribute to.
Or rather “source available” but not open source. If he makes it open source and don’t accept any contribution, there’s a good chance he’ll lose control of it, because someone else will create a fork that accepts them.
I’m quite sympathetic to him not wanting to make the source available. My only gripe is that it means no way to try and build it for OpenBSD. 😔
Obligatory: https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195 There was a DF bug where cats were just dying randomly, a fun emergent system bug too
There’s a twitter feed that posts some of the amusing bugs too: https://twitter.com/dwarffortbugs
I remember reading a few years ago that Dwarf Fortress doesn’t use version control. The software historian in me cried out in anguish. Anyone know if that’s true / still true today?
Judging how he mentioned in the article that he keeps his ~90 side projects in a folder he transfers from computer to computer, it sounds likely.
I wonder if he keeps old “forks” of the code