[fridif]

You don't need a math phd to code it either, you just need skill and motivation.

That might be correlated with having a phd, but it isn't mandatory.

EDIT: I physically cannot comprehend how what I have said is somehow worthy of a negative reaction.

[munk-a]

I think it's arguable if you even need skill - I believe Toady One has mostly taught himself good project design through having to deal with Toady One's code from three years prior. Changing a fixed 2D legacy game to 3D and completely rewriting fluid dynamics in a shipped title will do that to you.

I agree entirely about motivation though - he's stuck with that project for an immense amount of time. Urist Borushdumat[1] and Boatmurdered[2] are both from 2007 - George W Bush was president then and The Colbert Report had barely gotten started - your nephew in high school was still in diapers. However - over the full run of nineteen years dwarf fortress has been in development[3] he has received pretty tremendous community support - well probably since 2005 or so - I don't know if anyone knew it existed in 2002.

1. http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=15572.0

2. https://lparchive.org/Dwarf-Fortress-Boatmurdered/Introducti...

3. Wait - wtf - it's older than Firefly! (that's the show that made Nathan Fillion famous before Castle or Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long-blog FYI) I can now use the line "I'm getting too old for this sh*"

[bombcar]

And the number of times save compatibility has been broken is surprisingly small for a long-lived one-man project.

[chongli]

To code something like Dwarf Fortress takes an uncommon level of dedication. The project has been going for a decade and a half!

It's only recently that the project has been paying off via community funding/patronage. A great deal of those early years must have been very difficult for them.

[_jal]

> It's only recently that the project has been paying off via community funding/patronage.

Another way it is like a PhD - a ton of up-front work for an uncertain payoff, largely dependent on the whim of others.

[bspammer]

I know it’s silly but for me the most impressive part of the whole project is that he doesn’t use version control. I can’t even comprehend how that’s possible.

[3pt14159]

Regarding your edit, I do not disagree. DF does not require a PhD. It would help, but it is not necessary and the people downvoting you, in my opinion, are misusing the privilege.

That said, talking about downvotes on HN is pretty boring, so I won't be replying to responses to this comment.

[swayvil]

I'd say it just takes motivation. The skill comes through that.

Also, yr talking to a crew of whimsical fairy folk. Don't take the neg personally.

[fridif]

Appreciate this response :) Those who are actually out there building things are a bit too busy to pontificate here anymore

[hoten]

Certainly one of the most important shared attributes between getting a math PhD and working on the same game for 15 years is the stick-to-it-ness required.

[Supermancho]

One attribute that people don't often ascribe is luck. This was a labor of love and luck.

We hear about projects all the time that have been developed for longer (Linux, Star Citizen, Temple OS, et al) and those are the successes and failures that people have actually heard about. Lots of other people fail along the way (or succeed in not achieving much) with decades of development. I think DF's development need not be elevated to a quasi-religious tale because someone got good enough life RNG, anymore than being born with the money to brute force it is laudable.

[danblick]

I'd recommend thinking a little about the algorithms involved in efficiently assigning a nearby task to each dwarf and then planning a path for each dwarf to its destination.

It gets interesting pretty fast and a PhD would not hurt. :)

e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08291

Would you maintain a roadmap telling you how to get from place to place, or just constantly replan? What happens when you change the available paths by building a wall or locking a door?

[izend]

That's not even the most complex algorithm Tarn has implemented, I believe the ones he created for fluid dynamics are much more complex.

[setr]

Pathfinding is largely not that bad — hierarchal A* for long distance pathing, flow field for dense agent areas (eg your fort). With sufficient density, it’s worth recalculating the field repeatedly. Partitions can also be used for resource-lookup, threat caching, etc. Brogue’s djikstra maps[0], and Dave Mark’s modular influence maps[1] are very interesting possibilities as well..

Your paper is dealing with a completely different problem — collision avoidance is hard, and you really shouldn’t care about it in a game like DF anyways. Simply treat existing dwarves as a wall, or allow multiple dwarves to be on the same tile momentarily (with a very strong preference to stand on their own tile).

Task assignment is DF/rimworld/etc is also pretty dumb — they’re fairly obviously simple greedy algorithms. you don’t need to be anything close to optimal to be effective. There exists a list of open tasks (place building, move x59 stone, fight baddie. User actions generally corresponds to multiple tasks). When a dwarf is idle, he takes the task-list, merges it with his needs (food, water, self-preservation, etc). Filter this list by permitted activities for the dwarf, prioritize the list (needs first, then by user-defined job priority, then by random roll). Lock any relevant object (eg x59 rocks in a move task) and execute.

As far as I know, there’s no attempt at global coordination in DF beyond simple locks — which I’m not sure are actually that strict. In DF I’m pretty sure two dwarves can go for the same pile of x50 rocks, and it’s simply first one wins. In rimworld it’s quite clear only one entity can hold a claim. DF in that case is much simpler and error-free (don’t need to care about dwarves dying while holding a lock) but rimworld’s would be more consistent and make better progress over time (eg a far away entity doesn’t keep getting screwed trying to grab resources from the base).

Pathfinding is largely a solved problem. Resource allocation doesn’t need to be smart.

I’m fairly positive DF’s biggest hurdles are largely in finding game-sufficient and efficient estimate models for complex processes: planet, fluid, wind (a kind of fluid), plant growth, etc. These models are all fairly well defined (to our gaming needs) by their respective communities, but they’re also far more involved than what we need — we just need to be roughly correct, and ideally have a self-stabilizing sim.

The difficulty of gamedev generally is simplifying the problem to find only what actually matters.

[0] http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/The_Incredible_Power_of_...

[1] http://www.gameaipro.com/GameAIPro2/GameAIPro2_Chapter30_Mod...

[cheesetable]

Headlines often aren't meant to be read literally.

It's just a teaser to read the article.

[MaxikCZ]

> Headlines often aren't meant to be read literally.

Why is this normalized?

[fridif]

But why is it bad to react to a headline? It offered something interesting to consider.