You sound like a genuinely nice guy Amos, but this effort, in my opinion, is wasted. Toady has declared his codebase his own, doesn't want open source contributions. Whilst we can mod it through memory hacks, it doesn't seem like his intention to release control.
There are better games.
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Now that's fine if that's your cup of tea, but it's not much fun when you realize the limits of what can be modded in this game. It was just a heads-up, that passion and keenness is a poor thing to throw a blanket on, but perhaps a 'been there, done that, and got frustrated' kind of reply I guess. Running around finding memory addresses and tweaking things via DFHack, when the author could just expose an API or functions, is utter pain.
Sorry for the offtopic.
I can understand your frustration. However I feel that you are neglecting the main contribution Toady made by creating this phenomenon of DF.
He never asked for any assistance nor did he demand money for playing the game. He's the one in charge and he's the one who has the vision of how the things should work.
Obviously you may have your own views on some things but the thing is: you're mixing commercial games with the one being made on a pure enthusiasm.
Look at the *nix OS family. Which one should I use - Gentoo, Mandriva, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu or some other? Which fork? Which version?
This chaotic structure is very typical for any decentralized coding. Although it may be very flexible it serves different purpose of utilizing system resources.
Here we have a work of art with quite a natural desire of the author to keep the rights of authorship to himself. Being named on the main screen is the only reliable thing Toady gets in return for his constant wok (I'm aware of contributions but we all know the nature of them not being a reliable and stable source of income).
Long story short. We all appreciate community work here (bug reports, solutions, software extensions, etc) but nobody forces you to do this. If it troubles you and leaves you frustrated - then just quit doing that, as simple as that. Save your energy, enthusiasm and morale for something that makes you happy.
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Back to the topic.
Thank you very much, Amostubal, for keeping Meph's and Toady's works up-to-date.
I recently felt the urge to have MDF installed (after a typical break of ~2 years) and now I'm enjoying the struggle with FUN like back in the old days.
Thanks Dave!
I agree toady is never going to share the glory for his game and he rarely takes anything from the modding community and puts it into his game... but I see his game as more of just an engine... like unity, just with more game mechanics permanently installed. Take a look at some of the zero DF mods out there that toss all the original game raws and tries to replace everything except the exe... You can make a lot of changes within the confines of the game...
another note... I don't care for most of the crap commercially produced.... I've been taking a vacation for the past "month" with my oldest son... we've played 4 major game titles... in order:
1. dragonage: inquisition - Too many game play options, abilities, crappy content; for a quick hard crap ending, 100hrs game play(hard mode) to complete all quests and side quests, with no feeling of reward at end, really we turned it into a story book game by replaying it in newbie mode and running the conversations in 10hrs and just to get a better ending. The best part of this game was discovering how many broken/incomplete map content we could discover. really why give me the option to jump if jumping isn't really necessary to play the game... The only reason we played this one so much was that it did draw you into the characters and story early and made you invested in finding out how screwed up your bad advice messed up a bunch of medieval characters... Really the best moment in the game... near end I found out that like the second or third time I talked to 1 character I had set her on the path to be a ruthless evil killing machine... making killers while trying to get approval for love... I actually would say this game is a solid 7/10 if and only if you avoid all side content and all the BS crap: play it in newbie mode, avoid all the additional content, play it as if its an interactive story book, avoid any fights you don't need, most of the game isn't worth messing with. done.
2. Assassin's creed - Twitch twitch twitch twitch twitch.... 10 hrs and I was tired of it.
3. Warframe - rather rewarding and fun gameplay... didn't take me long to figure out the controls and crafting... but you had to be online and you had to find others to play with to accomplish most major tasks... Lots and lots of gear crafting, i hate the timers, I hate the grinding... think 10 hours maybe 20...
4. Skyrim, enough said....
other than this we whipped out the old favorites... metroid, super metroid, super mario {1 2 3}, super mario world, super mario wii, guitar hero {1 2 3 world tour, aerosmith,, metallica}, zelda {1 3 ocarana, majora, skward, and shadow}, along with several others, lol. not including the board games. Honestly I've been really busy .... but back to that subject...
Honestly If I'm paying for the game I don't really care much for the mod packs... besides people want to charge for them and shit and I'm not interested. But I really find most modern games to be too short, before they become completely boring or their errors become glaringly obvious. Even top rated games to me are crap. Most games today rely too much on their graphics to dazzle, and if you take that away they wouldn't get a 3/10 from me. That's why this game makes me so happy, I can make it the game I want to play. I mean it... I play till the game hits 0 FPS death or I get undead fire men...
anyways next month I plan to be back 100%, see all of you there.
