Dwarf Fortress actually added another dev. Pathfinding isn’t even a third as important as just everyone looking around and seeing if there’s anyone nearby for them to beat up or hug.” The community figured out that building star-shaped staircases improved performance, but as Putnam says, it’s because the walls break the line of sight, so characters can’t see dwarves that are 20 steps down and aren’t forced to run the calculation to figure out whether they’re their mom or a rival.
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Tarn says that he’s always been afraid of somebody looking at the game’s code and finding something horrifying in there. Even though he’s not so worried about it now, he thinks he was more touchy about the idea some time ago — not just because of the prospect of dealing with different programming styles, an aspect in which, fortunately, he and Putnam have a lot in common, but also because of how argumentative people can be online.
“People can be nasty generally about those things, and I just didn’t want to deal with that,” he says. “But that’s not the vibe here, so it’s fine. It’s just going to be funny when we find stuff that Putnam doesn’t want to deal with ... We already hit something like that — there was this gnarly line, and I was just like, ‘Yeah, I must have been tired.’ I mean, you can’t be programming for a long time and expect everything to be nice-looking. It’s just not how it works. That’s why we have so many bugs in so many games, right? We’re all human.”
Showing code you’ve kept secret for sixteen years has got to be mentally intense.