Here is one for a grand discipline. lest have a New official version that everyone can play. So it is in just before the x-mass and just before the summer holidays. A new game two times a year.
So if Toady One dose not post a new DF, then I like there to be an official dome put one one of the mods as a mod of the season or something like that.
Basically. New things to play every 6 months, sometime late in month 6 and 12 !!
Yes, getting videogames out by Christmas is always such a good idea...Aside from the obvious parallels with major flops (the worst Sonic and Spyro games and two of the worst games
ever, for instance), Toady's development schedule doesn't work like that. 0.34.11 was released about a year ago, just in time for the summer holidays I guess. If he had to get the next release out by Christmas, where would that put him?
"Death comes before birth, if you were wondering. There are potentially several thousands of historical critters to check in the wider world, so it sets up a schedule at the beginning of the year and then checks specific people on a daily basis for the "old age" death you might have seen happen in your forts. Later on we'd like to have diseases and so on, but for now it's basically a reaperish visitation that happens to people that aren't currently loaded. I'm getting the first taste of handling all the extra information that is present post-world gen, and I had to rewrite various code for how the historical figures are stored on sites and in armies, but they seem to be dying properly now."
In short, he wouldn't have half the features he wanted to put in, nor would they be at half the intended quality.
There's a reason DF is barely over 1/3 complete despite a dev time of over a decade to date: DF is awesome but requires making a LOT of code, then making sure it works. (For now, add "well enough" to the end, but wait until 0.90 or so...) It obeys schedules as well as a tantruming toddler at best...and that's ignoring the various impediments that come up with a self-employed, one-man dev team, as well as Toady's tendency to go off-schedule. Toady knows this, which is part of why he doesn't make promises on releases.