Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rolan7]

Out of general curiosity (I don't actually play this game, I just love the stories) what is it about the code itself that makes it technically unfit to fork?  Lots of code that would be hard to debug/maintain except by the original coders, who wouldn't be migrating?

[Flying Dice]

Out of general curiosity (I don't actually play this game, I just love the stories) what is it about the code itself that makes it technically unfit to fork?  Lots of code that would be hard to debug/maintain except by the original coders, who wouldn't be migrating?

By my understanding it's more that these days a lot of the people who were originally involved in coding for DDA have moved on. That's why kevin is nominally in charge now, he was the only one of that cohort that's still regularly active and willing to run things beyond doing his own contributions (even if because it's an ego-tripping power fantasy deal for him). He wasn't a great guy back then, but he wasn't nearly as much of an asshole as is he now that he thinks of DDA as his personal fiefdom.

[zaimoni]

Out of general curiosity (I don't actually play this game, I just love the stories) what is it about the code itself that makes it technically unfit to fork?  Lots of code that would be hard to debug/maintain except by the original coders, who wouldn't be migrating?

Not at all.  Even when restarting from Whales, it's just refactor for legibility.

The C:DDA team nuked things like explicitly slicing assignment operators [just plain broken], and varargs functions for proper C++ classes [undefined behavior] a long time ago, and object orientation changes are still on-going so from that point of view C:DDA is much easier than Whales.

TLDR There has been no "Last Known Good" revision of C:DDA for the past two years (and that's simply when I started watching C:DDA) -- and no reason to think there will ever be a "Last Known Good" revision in the foreseeable future.  This is due to completely reasonable policy decisions; Mr. Granade and the true core playerbase both appear comfortable with optimizing C:DDA for a grinding playstyle (with proper UI support for grinding) and relying on rapid public advisories of which features are currently broken to compensate for never having a "Last Known Good" revision.

The entire technical problem is that the changeset approvers have direct orders, from Mr. Granade, to merge changes that explicitly break existing features in the game.  These direct orders are publicly backed by banning anyone who openly objects.  [For the past two months, approved merges of explicitly breaking changes have commit-logged at typical rate of 1-2/day, and reliably identified as breaking within 2-3 days of being merged.]  This should become less of a material problem once the automated tests are actually in place (a breakage that is caught there will procedurally block merging in a change), but that will be at least two years even if prioritized above new content.

The current 500-line soft limit on changesets to merge, is because it's hard to experience auditing larger changesets properly.  That dictates the direct orders above: such changesets are too small to not break existing features when merging in new ones in a single complete changeset.

[azmodean]

Out of general curiosity (I don't actually play this game, I just love the stories) what is it about the code itself that makes it technically unfit to fork?  Lots of code that would be hard to debug/maintain except by the original coders, who wouldn't be migrating?

I'm not sure what all that was about, there's a lot of conspiracy theory smelling stuff in there, I don't have time to manage a conspiracy.

There's no technical reason dda is hard to fork, the thing that makes it hard to fork is that I'm coordinating a very large number of contributors that are making changes very rapidly, to have a decent chance of a fork succeeding, you'd need to convince the most productive half (or maybe a bit more) of the contributors to defect to your fork, and isolated pockets of griping aside, *people are generally pretty happy with the game*.

Basically each time someone organizes a fork, they're coordinating a vote of no confidence against me, and I haven't lost a vote yet.

Is it a mainstream game? not remotely
Does it follow the usual formula for seeking a lowest common denominator of user to gather as large a user base as possible? nope
Does it clearly have an angle that resonates with people and maintains a solid fanbase, and regularly convert fans to contributors? Yep

[Broseph Stalin]

I'm not sure what all that was about, there's a lot of conspiracy theory smelling stuff in there, I don't have time to manage a conspiracy.

There's no technical reason dda is hard to fork, the thing that makes it hard to fork is that I'm coordinating a very large number of contributors that are making changes very rapidly, to have a decent chance of a fork succeeding, you'd need to convince the most productive half (or maybe a bit more) of the contributors to defect to your fork, and isolated pockets of griping aside, *people are generally pretty happy with the game*.

Basically each time someone organizes a fork, they're coordinating a vote of no confidence against me, and I haven't lost a vote yet.

Is it a mainstream game? not remotely
Does it follow the usual formula for seeking a lowest common denominator of user to gather as large a user base as possible? nope
Does it clearly have an angle that resonates with people and maintains a solid fanbase, and regularly convert fans to contributors? Yep

Do you feel that the complaints people are raising are that the game isn't mainstream enough or that it's failing to seek out the lowest common denominator? I mean, this is a Dwarf Fortress crowd they don't need every game to be Call of Duty Shoot-a-Man. Nobody's complaining about the game being too experimental or even too difficult, they're saying "tedious" and "busywork." I'll also confess that I'm perplexed by the logic that their failure means that multiple votes of no confidence being initiated doesn't reflect a serious problem.

[azmodean]

Do you feel that the complaints people are raising are that the game isn't mainstream enough or that it's failing to seek out the lowest common denominator I mean, this is a Dwarf Fortress crowd they don't need every game to be Call of Duty Shoot-a-Man. Nobody's complaining about the game being too experimental or even too difficult, they're saying "tedious" and "busywork."

My point is I'm not making a game for everyone, I'm making a game for me, and people who are looking for the same experience I am.  The fact that a large number of people are not looking for that experience is a *given*, so its nonsensical for me to worry about people who dont want to play the game I'm making.

I'll also confess that I'm perplexed by the logic that their failure means that multiple votes of no confidence being initiated doesn't reflect a serious problem.

Out of tens of thousands of players and hundreds of contributors, a handful cast a vote of no confidence.  Excuse me if I'm unimpressed.

[zaimoni]

Talk is cheap.  From what I'm seeing Bright Nights may have been more of a mechanics test than a fork attempt (and if so it was reasonably successful), which would mean zero credible fork attempts (and zero votes of no confidence backed by action).

And yes, technically C:DDA is getting easier to fork.  Doesn't matter with the current commit rate.

[Flying Dice]

Do you feel that the complaints people are raising are that the game isn't mainstream enough or that it's failing to seek out the lowest common denominator I mean, this is a Dwarf Fortress crowd they don't need every game to be Call of Duty Shoot-a-Man. Nobody's complaining about the game being too experimental or even too difficult, they're saying "tedious" and "busywork."

My point is I'm not making a game for everyone, I'm making a game for me, and people who are looking for the same experience I am.  The fact that a large number of people are not looking for that experience is a *given*, so its nonsensical for me to worry about people who dont want to play the game I'm making.

See, the problem with that argument is that you need to actually be making a game.

Someone who can make that argument? Steve Walmsley. Aurora has consistently grown more interesting and more complete as a game over the years, and has gained popularity throughout, despite him explicitly working from the standpoint of "I'm making a game I want to play, but you can download it and play it if you want." The key there is a combination of coherent creative vision and competence.

You're working off the back of Whales' game, which was subsequently worked on by a fairly large number of people as a collaborative community project. Part of the reason people are fed up with things now is because of the unilateral assumption of ownership of the game and stifling of any creative direction that doesn't match yours. It's not your game. Even if it was, the creative process of "I don't like how people are playing the game, so I'll add a broken fragment of a mechanic to stop them from doing that and then never expand or fix it" is monumentally stupid and will naturally drive people away. Doubly so when it's backed by an astonishingly arrogant degree of self-assurance.

Practically speaking the current state of DDA can only be attributed to maliciousness or incompetence, and given past tin-pot dictator behavior I'm inclined to assume the former more than the latter. It's almost as if votes of no-confidence are difficult to pull off when the person being objected to has total control over nearly all channels of communication through which community discussion can occur.

[King Zultan]

Butchering just became a lot more complicated with this.

Here's some of the stuff this thing does.
* Field dressing, quick and full butchery and quartering (+ dissecting ) are all sub-types of butchery action accessible form the butcher menu.
* Field dressing affects butchery yields removing internal organs like stomach/offal from the list of possible results - and yields internal organs.
* Field dressing can be performed with varying results, from fully successful to a bloody mess. Failed results might destroy or fairly damage the corpse, and significantly affect butcher results.
* Successful field dressing reduces initial rot of harvested meat, and reduces rot rate of the corpse itself.
* You can quarter field dressed corpse into four parts - applies to volume and mass, equals easier transportation. Might not help for huge creatures, as they are HUGE! Tiny creatures can't be quartered. Quartering ruins skin, so a confirm popup prevents unwanted destruction of valuable resource if not desired by the player.
* Quick butchery yields up to 1/4 of max corpse yields in flesh - its just a quick harvest before moving on. It destroys skin and anything else - what do you care if you just need few pieces of meat?
* Full butchery can be performed in a workshop consisting of a butchers rack, a nearby table, and requires extra tools, mainly sawing tools and cutting tools.
* Full butchery takes significantly more time, but yields full potential of a corpse.
* Meat yields were significantly increased, influencing some other yields too.
* You don't have to field dress a corpse to perform full butchery, but it will take longer, and you might have trouble if you want to drag your overgrown bear to the butchers workshop.
* Morale now affects the possibility of butchery. Depressed person would not engage in bloody work.
* CBM removal from corpses was moved to DISSECT option only.
* You have to have a fine cutting tool to remove CBM's while butchering.
* Dissection takes a long time.

[AzyWng]

Was there any issues being raised with how butchery used to perform? Like, was there some problem where if you tried to cut up a hulk while standing in a pool of acid or whatnot that would cause a game to crash or anything like that?

What issues does this change fix? What is the purpose of the overhaul?

[Gentlefish]

This is a great example of a more realistic and enjoyable change to the game.
It's more complicated to butcher - you can't just do it in the middle of a field
Full butchery is more complicated and harder to set up - but the yields make up for the set up.
Now you don't have to butcher zombies to get their CBM's! You gotta pry them out nicely.

[King Zultan]

It mostly looks like one of those realism for the sake of realism changes, and I don't think it fixes anything. Also now you need the full butchering setup to dissect a corps to get the CBMs out which apparently takes a long time and destroys all meat and bones.

[Gentlefish]

I don't know where you're pulling CBM's from but I don't typically eat zombie or human meat in my playthroughs, and CBM's should be fairly late-game either way. A setup to pull (hopefully now guaranteed) sweet CBMs out of a zombie's steaming corpse is good news to me

[Random_Dragon]

Most of this overhaul seems okay. This, however:

* Full butchery can be performed in a workshop consisting of a butchers rack, a nearby table, and requires extra tools, mainly sawing tools and cutting tools.
* Full butchery takes significantly more time, but yields full potential of a corpse.

Translation: added tedium to restore original functionality.

Mainly, this needs adequate playtesting to ensure that the reduction in rot from field dressing is adequate to overcome the increase in rot caused by needing to haul the body parts to a workshop.

If it isn't then it'll magnify existing problems with how spoilage of ingredients makes long-term perishable goods spoil faster than their shelf life implies they should, via introducing gratuitous rot on the short-term side of the equation.

On the plus side, this means that if it DOES cause problems in practice, I have more excuses to recommend Nonperishable Overhaul as a balancing factor.

[Gentlefish]

Did you forget the part where it said it increases yield by a significant amount, giving you incentive to full-butcher and not just field-clean?