Bay 12 Games Forum

I wanted to start this theme for a while now.

Why Toady keeps df proprietary, when he isn't selling it anyway? Why don't he turn to progressive open-source development? And i mean, if he was a genius-level autistic programmer it could be reasonable to code hundreds of features in his own style and keep lesser men from interrupting, but he is not. Dwarf Fortress is well known for it's issues, there is active feature poll, and it all could be programmed much better and faster, by orders of magnitude, if Toady only turned to repository-based open source development. There are dozens of people here who mod and hack this game as much as they can and they would help develop it.

Toady- I'd like to ask you directly- you claim to be building the game with limitless possibilities. Why don't you let others help?

Are you afraid that somebody may steal your code? But people spew df-clones out at great rate- there are direct clones, there are things like game of dwarves and towns, minecraft, they don't need your code to rip off ideas. Are you afraid that people stop donating? But they didn't go to any other games from dwarf fortress, they won't go to any fork because it's the community that donates you money, and community won't go anywhere from bay12forums.
If that's it, if you are killing this magnificent game because of greed for several thousands dollars- then this is the stupidest monetization method I've ever seen.

And i'd like to urge all the bayers to boycott Toady for disrespecting our freedom. Do not donate- help us make Dwarf fortress better.

Well, let's part with gunpowder for some time.

I have certain idea of underground keeps. You know, when you mine out huge pillar, place here barracks with garrison and magma-throwers and ballistas and traps and such, well such a keep can be quite epic.

But every fortress needs an enemy and caveman tribes are definitely NOT a decent enemy, with their wooden weapons.
So i could mod in ratfolk akin to skaven, with rat-ogres and hell-pit abominations and jezzails and pestilence-monks(praise the syndromes, yea) and general awesomeness which would make underground much more dangerous place, but here arises questions about raws:
First- which part of raws count for [LAYER_LINKED] entries? Can they have ethics and art or build tunnels?
"*** ethics copied from kobolds for now"- that's not so informative, yea.
Second- how do underground entries hold sites and territories and migrate? Is this even possible to have hostile tribe that bring sieges from map borders? I've got tribe of antman only once and they were basically just hanging around in my fortress basement. Can we overflow underground with ratman if they breed fast and can put decent enough fight?