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[Footkerchief]

It's not gonna be six months.  I'm guessing about a month from now.

[Lord_Phoenix]

You know, if toady starts working with talented modders like deon, the next update will arrive much faster. Just saiyan.

There's a pretty big difference between modding and programming.  Modding can only take place within the confines of what has already been programmed (with the exception of specific editing tools which allow access to various scripting possibilities, such as the editors made by Bethesda for TES/Fallout), so I doubt that a modder could really help with the programming aspect of it, unless they are a programmer of the specific language which the game is being built in as well.

I doubt it will take too long for the next release.  A month or so, maybe less.  Remember, he's doing it in short releases now, and the next release is just "Better town maps involving workshops/markets/shops based on world gen economic activities", which is already apparently largely done.  In the latest post it says "The rest of the features (markets etc.) should be put into place shortly afterward." referring to catacombs being done.

[NW_Kohaku]

There are ways in which "mods" can be helpful - if you fill out dummied-out material, the way that Uristocrat came up with a list of specific densities of all the different types of stones, which were using a single default stone value for density.

Generally, however, the problem is one of organization.  When something has been continuously coded for years, it becomes a serious organizational nightmare unless you have very meticulous commenting and documentation.  Otherwise, it becomes problematic where one person is the only one who knows how such-and-such a piece of code works, and nobody else knows how to work well with it. 

Yeah, the pauses between releases can be from a day (when it's a quickfix) to a year (when it's a lot of new mechanics and features like additions of caverns and totally new underground mechanics).

I think this one should be in the middle, from two to six months.

It's not gonna be six months.  I'm guessing about a month from now.

This probably depends on how much work Toady wants to do in one release.  If he wants to set up the way in which furniture is randomized inside buildings, tenants are assigned living space, putting in marketplaces, manors, rules for the way that the pinned-in backyard areas of the city have small pastures for animals, working out the way that storm sewers work, and all sorts of other potentially complex and time-consuming functions all in a single big release, it should be at least a month or two. 

If he wants to push out a work-in-progress version where there is something like the bottomless food barrels, it might be in a couple weeks, followed up by fixing the bugs in the version he releases, followed up by finishing up the rest of the things he wanted to accomplish, and then more bugfixes. 

Even when all this is done, "Release 2" will have the "daily activities" portion of all of this, which means that we will have all the houses and cities, and be waiting on the code that involves actually getting the humans to actually walk outside and actually DO something in these cities, so it's not like having this release will actually be a major turning point in the game. 

DF just isn't something you should keep getting impatient over every update or release, because there's ALWAYS something exciting coming over the horizon.

[Deon]

You know, if toady starts working with talented modders like deon, the next update will arrive much faster. Just saiyan.

There's a pretty big difference between modding and programming.  Modding can only take place within the confines of what has already been programmed (with the exception of specific editing tools which allow access to various scripting possibilities, such as the editors made by Bethesda for TES/Fallout), so I doubt that a modder could really help with the programming aspect of it, unless they are a programmer of the specific language which the game is being built in as well.

I doubt it will take too long for the next release.  A month or so, maybe less.  Remember, he's doing it in short releases now, and the next release is just "Better town maps involving workshops/markets/shops based on world gen economic activities", which is already apparently largely done.  In the latest post it says "The rest of the features (markets etc.) should be put into place shortly afterward." referring to catacombs being done.

I agree, I am not a good programmer, I only wrote 2d "tanks", tetris and stuff like that . The reason why I dedicate so much time to modding is that I want to participate in game creation process yet I am too lazy/busy with other stuff to learn how to program and design game engines and games.

I personally think that DF is the game which we have mainly because we have our Toady doing what he sees as his main interest, so it's not a balance of many devs' thoughts or a compilation of different game designs, or a lot of people trying to understand what did other wrote in this piece of the code... Bah, there were too many threads about that.

So I say thanks for the compliment that you think that I can design a good game, but you probably do not understand the amount of complexity behind the DF programming. I think I don't understand it either, or rather underestimate it. I am amazed how fast Toady does what he does, I would probably lose starts and ends in such a huge project .

[Lord_Phoenix]

So I say thanks for the compliment that you think that I can design a good game, but you probably do not understand the amount of complexity behind the DF programming. I think I don't understand it either, or rather underestimate it. I am amazed how fast Toady does what he does, I would probably lose starts and ends in such a huge project .

I'm a pretty good programmer myself (C++,C#,BASIC,VB,PHP,etc.), been doing it over a decade, mostly web applications these days (PHP/JS mostly).  Taught myself QBASIC when I was 12 or so and started from there (well, with Programming at least, taught myself HTML earlier, in the days when animated gifs were all the rage and CSS didn't exist yet).  I can say that, while I have some inkling of where to start on a project like DF and the various systems that would need to be created and in place, it would be an undertaking that would border on insanity to do so.  You would pretty much require a PhD in Mathematics or Computer Science focusing in practical applications.

[Langdon]

You would pretty much require a PhD in Mathematics or Computer Science focusing in practical applications.

Which makes it a good thing Dr. Adams has a PhD in Mathematics, then.

[Lord_Phoenix]

You would pretty much require a PhD in Mathematics or Computer Science focusing in practical applications.

Which makes it a good thing Dr. Adams has a PhD in Mathematics, then.

Exactly why I mentioned it.

[Deon]

So I say thanks for the compliment that you think that I can design a good game, but you probably do not understand the amount of complexity behind the DF programming. I think I don't understand it either, or rather underestimate it. I am amazed how fast Toady does what he does, I would probably lose starts and ends in such a huge project .

I'm a pretty good programmer myself (C++,C#,BASIC,VB,PHP,etc.), been doing it over a decade, mostly web applications these days (PHP/JS mostly).  Taught myself QBASIC when I was 12 or so and started from there (well, with Programming at least, taught myself HTML earlier, in the days when animated gifs were all the rage and CSS didn't exist yet).  I can say that, while I have some inkling of where to start on a project like DF and the various systems that would need to be created and in place, it would be an undertaking that would border on insanity to do so.  You would pretty much require a PhD in Mathematics or Computer Science focusing in practical applications.

Heh, sorry, I was aiming at Befenismor with that quote, just quoted more than I wanted. So I didn't mean "you" .

[Lord_Phoenix]

Heh, sorry, I was aiming at Befenismor with that quote, just quoted more than I wanted. So I didn't mean "you" .

I know, I was backing up what you had said.  The context of it alluded to the fact that it wasn't aimed at me, largely because I hadn't complimented you nor was I understating the complexity and technicality of the work which goes into programming versus modding.

[Knight Otu]

The update will obviously come out a few days after you start your next serious fortress/adventurer.

More seriously, Toady has said Release 1 could easily take up all of April, and possibly longer, and with the other stuff going in (night creature/undead additions, sponsored animals, perhaps some quick bugfixes), I'd say early to mid May is realistic, if on the optimistic side.