Quote from Tarn Adams (DF's creator):<p><i>I don’t even use version control. If you don’t know what that is then you’re not gonna yell at me. If you even know what version control is you’re gonna be like, ‘You don’t use version control? You don’t use source control? What is wrong with you? How can you even work?’</i><p>If you're the sole developer of a project and you have, say, hourly backups, then maybe version control is a waste of effort? I would still use it out of habit, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that Tarn would choose not to.
Dwarf Fortress is beautiful art. I feel confident the Tarn brothers will be remembered for centuries for this work. I don't know of any other game, software even, being so laboriously created from the heart.
The Software Engineering Daily [podcast] interview with Adams is a great listen. It's a great narrative about software development as art and passion.<p><a href="http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/10/22/dwarf-fortress-with-tarn-adams/" rel="nofollow">http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/10/22/dwarf-fortres...</a>
Poor Zach Adams (Tarn's brother), not getting any mention in the article (or even this comment thread). Even though he doesn't work on programming the game, he still writes the stories that (as far as I can tell) carry the creation of DF forward.<p>Even more weirdly, the article calls Tarn Adams just "Adams", as if that name is unambiguous when discussing Dwarf Fortress.
Dwarf fortress is one of my favorite examples of emergent behavior- the maneating carp, cat-explosions, cats getting drunk, etc. Actually, a lot of cat based bugs in general.
The most epic of Dwarf Fortress epic tales<p>Room Carnage<p>This is the link for episode 58, but start from 1<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/49iiom/roomcarnage_glacial_victories_and_crushing_defeats/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/49iiom/roomc...</a>
This is great. Dwarf Fortress is a huge part of the reason I became a programmer.<p>Maybe that's why I'm a bit disappointed now that I actually am one, but that's life :p.
The thing that really scares me is that he doesn't use version control. I hope and assume that he has SOME kind of backup approach, but the thought of trying to wrangle that many lines of code without proper VCS, in what is clearly an insanely complex codebase, is just beyond me.