Dwarf Fortress in 2013

&gt; As for [porting to the] PS Vita, he notes that &quot;if someone approached us, we&#x27;re not giving the code to anybody for any reason, so it would have to be something we could compile ourselves.&quot;<p>Just imagine how good this game and community around it would be if it had always been open source. Just imagine how much money they could raise in a Kickstarter to simply open source everything.

I will continue to have no interest in Dwarf Fortress until it has an actual UI instead of whatever insane random combinations of controls the developer felt like adding on any particular day.

I have not played in quite some time, but if you are looking at playing: after you get the rough hang of things, make sure you look for mods. Specifically bug-fixes. There&#x27;s a (small) community around the `dfhack` tool that fix a lot of game-breaking bugs. Masterwork [1] is a comprehensive mod that lets you turn off some of the &quot;flavor&quot; in exchange for a more performant game (about 25% or so). For example, the default game has dozens of types of leather. Do you really care if your dwarf&#x27;s mitten is made of cow leather or bull leather?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=125633.0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bay12forums.com&#x2F;smf&#x2F;index.php?topic=125633.0</a>

I&#x27;ve said it before and I&#x27;ll say it again. One of the central philosophical questions of our day will become whether or not it is ethical to even turn off dwarf fortress.

Prior discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982459" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5982459</a>

Okay, new idea. What if he did a Kickstarter for $500k for additional high-quality devs to come on the project for a year and focus on 1) improving the UI and 2) improving performance. That&#x27;s it. No promises of additional functionality, no open-sourcing to make Toady feel like he&#x27;s given up his baby.<p>Given the cult following of the game and the people who would like to play it but are otherwise frustrated, I doubt they&#x27;d have trouble reaching the limit. The press they&#x27;d get just from announcing would give them a boost as well.

Every time I see threads like this, the comments are all about telling the developers what they should do. The developers make enough money to survive, seem perfectly happy, and are working on exactly what they want. They aren&#x27;t in a situation where they owe the community something more than what they are already doing. Why are we trying to solve their problems?

They should not focus on interface at all, but provide a socket and a protocol to communicate with the engine. Then the community can build fancy clients, mods, whatever.