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[Hrothgaar]

What do you think, would it be wise to to stop implementing one new feature after the other (and introducing many new bugs with it) and spend some time on fixing the bugs we already got instead?

Something like spending some extended time on just fixing bugs without implementing new stuff?
I recognize that my games consist of 1/3 time playing and 2/3 of the playtime reading the forum and wiki for workarounds for different problems.

I took a look at http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view_all_bug_page.php and see 45 pages of reported but unsolved bugs.
Thats 50 entries per page, wmich means something of 2250 bugs   

I think this would make gaming for us all more enjoyable and lowers the entry barrier for new players quite a bit.
This game is complex enough with all the things to avoid and all the workarounds which are out on the forum and the wiki.

[MrWiggles]

Oh my god. Not this conversation again.

ToadyOne is constantly fixing bugs as well as adding new content.  After this release, there going to be several months of bug fixing before moving onto another major/moderate release.

[Psieye]

Some bugs aren't worth fixing because Toady wants to just throw away the relevant section of the code and do a completely new thing there. A lot of features are just temporary placeholders so bugs in them are going to go away when they get replaced. Problem is, we don't know which features will be next replaced.

All the serious bugs get fixed, the remaining bugs were not serious enough (or were too big in scope) to fix during the last bug-fix spree.

[MrWiggles]

A great example, to what Psieye is talking about, is Cow Milk. It used to be, in the 40d era this community preceived low hanging fruit item to let cows be milkable, to give the much scorned milk maker something actually to do, beside dying in the military.

But, ToadyOne held fast and didnt add in some throw away system to let mammals get milk.

And you know what let us have these milkable creatures? An entirely new system that handles milking to fire breath to poison and disease. An entire new materiel system.

Its that kind of lack of the 'big picture' view that really hampers the community ability to really judge what are the 'easy' fixes or just replacing one throw away system for nother.

[Hrothgaar]

I see!

So I will just hang in there and get used to these things until they are changed later but thank you for pointing out this hint to me.

My personal problem is that I am just a very casual gamer with sometimes weeks between I have the opportunity to play again and many of the issues I looked up once need to be looked up again, I am sure if I would play more often and remember more things the gameplay would be much more fluid for me ;-)

[Bavette]

Don't worry Hrothgaar, you can still enjoy the game even if you focus only on one side of it. I once made an embark to create a gigantic farmland on the surface that would sell food and booze to the humans, elves and dwarves. It felt awesome, but then came along a cyclops and destroyed everything, so I decided to make a military stone fort.
Doesn't matter how things go, you can just change your perspective of the gameplay.

[Lida_Brainbroken]

One also needs to remember the game is still an Alpha release.  Most games aren't really playable, and often not available to the general public, while an Alpha.  afaic, Toady is a genius.

[i2amroy]

One also needs to remember the game is still an Alpha release.  Most games aren't really playable, and often not available to the general public, while an Alpha.  afaic, Toady is a genius.

Of course, even being in alpha this game still has more content the most released games out there.

And as a note Toady will be spending some time on bug fixing before he actually gets around to releasing this version (though the majority of those bugs will be bugs he created with all his new content. In fact that's how you know that Toady is wrapping up and approaching a release; he spends the last month or so on bug-fixing. Then after the release is actually given out to us we usually spend several months on almost solely bugfixing, before he moves into another cycle of development.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Just to add: the last few releases *were* primarily about bug fixing. The last major release was mine carts, but since then all the releases have fixed bugs: hospital bug, hauling bugs etc. Toady's pattern is one huge release of new content per year or so, then 2-3 updates that fix the stuff from the release as well as old bugs.

[joeclark77]

Put your money where your mouth is!  Make a big fat donation and ask Toady to use it to hire some programmers in India to fix the bugs in the code.

[MrWiggles]

ToadyOne refuses to work with others.

[Lida_Brainbroken]

ToadyOne refuses to work with others.

Yes, go hunt down the some of the articles written about him, (the NewsWeek one was good) and you'll start understand what kind of eccentric mega-genius he is.  There will be a movie about him some day, and it'll be lies, nothing but lies.

[sneakey pete]

Biggest annoyance I have with the game, really, is the ore distribution issues. But as said above, why bother fixing it back to what it was when its going to be rewritten eventually into a much better terrain generation code etc.