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[Combatjuan]

I've been following the development log of dwarf fortress for a couple years now (actually 23 months).  I've enjoyed it thoroughly and I think I've come to understand a bit about the way Toady thinks.  But for the past few months, I've been a little lost.  I'm not exactly sure what this numerical countdown represents.

I'm going to move on to explicitly planning and coding the framework for the underground for this release. As usual, I'll post a larger blurb here in a day or two once I get that sorted out. That'll be the last category of changes, and then the idea is to go back and get everything finished up. That will take a while of course, a long while, and there will likely be countdowns again. I'm always about the countdowns.

- Toady, Dev Log 2008.10.14

So here's what I think is going on.  "Coding the framework" means developing the new objects and structures that will now hold the game data and perhaps also rewriting the raws to handle the new format?  Since adding new entirely new objects in and new properties to existing objects is pretty trivial from a coding standpoint, am I to understand that the entire object system is being reworked into a new (possibly extensible) version?  And that these numbers are the numbers of objects that are left to be converted?  Or do the numbers also include the raws being filled in for the new object hierarchy?

If I understood right, the previous objects had lots of bit flags and rather than using full pointers, Toady was using byte or multi-byte sized offsets from various locations in memory (maybe from the start of the geographical chunk?).  Is that system being replaced by full vectors and maps and whatnot?  I've been writing C++ professionally for 7 years and I'm still constantly learning better ways to do things so I think I'm sort of projecting my own lessons on the dev log.

From the way the bloats and features and whatnot are recorded, I have gathered that Toady makes actual todo lists--todo lists of epic length.  So my imagination has Toady next to his computer with a 52 page print-out of objects that he checks off as he updates them.

It doesn't really matter of course.  Whatever it is will be done when it is done.  But just about every morning I check and see what the current number is and if Today has posted anything exciting.  I feel like I could be more encouraged watching the number drop if I could relate to it more--if I knew what it meant.  Can someone please explain to me what is actually going on?

[DuncanFrost]

Aren't his countdowns the number of bugs recorded? He normally tries to get the total amount below some certain number before a release.

[Mike Mayday]

The Countdown (of Doom) is a list of dev items (features, pieces of code, goals) to implement before the next major release. When it's done, there's another countdown for bugs to be fixed.

[Combatjuan]

In that case I'm surprised by Toady's ability to identify the number with such precision.  He should get some kind of award.  I'm curious if this list of doom exists in digital form somewhere.

[thvaz]

Before the 3d version, there was a .txt list with everything Toady needed to do before the release, and after each thing there was a number. It was the first time he used a countdown in the dev_next, I think.

[Draco18s]

Found via search: what is Toady's "countdown"?

[Combatjuan]

Draco18s: Yeah.  I should have provided a link to that topic in my original post.  I guess I was looking for something more specific than "they represent things that Toady needs to get done".  Thanks for the link.

[B0013]

11/05/2008: 1138.[...] What's left, by the way, not necessarily in order, are 193 worth of these body changes, 250 worth of wounds and health care concerns, 165 for map features, 260 for entity positions, 195 for squads, and 75 for random crap and tests.

Roughly:

*material improvements
*individual pholymorphism and size changes
  *"descriptions of each of your dwarves and your adventurer."
*underground features remodelling and improvements
*wound tracking
  *body changes (layers and smaller parts, materials)
*military & squads changes