Actually - *IF* Toady wanted to do anything even remotely like support this - he would build in callable functions to the program. It would represent a change in design strategy - and could even lead to splitting the UI from the 'core' program which would in turn open the door for 3rd party graphical UIs. In other words - he wouldn't bother to support memory hacks, he'd go ahead and support data manipulation tools. Or he'd directly code in cheatie bits and side step the need for all this.
Problem with this... is that if you have 3rd parties maintaining the interfaces / 3rd party tools, what happens when DF significantly updates? The 3rd party tools have to update as well. If any of the maintainers looses interest, they we're immediately back to just the core game. Except people are going to want to blame Toady that their favorite 3rd party tool doesn't work...
The only reason I can think of for a 3rd party tool stopping a new release is if vitally important functionality was left to 3rd party developers. As long as Toady continued to do his own thing and not rely on 3rd party tools for fancy GUI interfaces or other things to make the game work, this should be a non-issue.
Yes, if 3rd party support was implemented there would be some degree of blame laid on Toady for certain 3rd party tools not working with the latest release. Not to mention all the added pressure this would entail and extra effort trying to coordinate stuff with tool maintainers. Those are pretty good reasons and I can see why he does not want to add callable functions or any sort of support for 3rd party tools.
Still, with the way thing are now 3rd party tools rely almost entirely on DFHack. It works pretty good right now. But, just for the sake of argument, what if (
heaven forbid) something happened and DFHack could no longer be updated? Where would that leave all those 3rd party tools?
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Topic: Runesmith - A DC like tool (Read 366063 times)