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[Neonivek]

The problem is that a large spiked ball made out of wood is still absurdly valuable.

It would be. A Polished wooden ball of wooden spikes of that size?

[DG]

Relative practicalities should exert influence on value. If you are not going to use the giant spiked wooden ball as a death trap then its value to you is closer to negligible than it is to invaluable.

[Scoops Novel]

Right now, due to necromancers and so on, the world keeps going from Age of Myth to Age of Legends and back, so you often get something like the 8th Age of Myth. Do you ever plan on changing up the Ages, or adding more of them?

Knight Otu brought up that it was due to megabeast reproduction, and it isn't really something that is supposed to happen -- having any age that only lasts a few years isn't really an age at all, but an event within an actual age or a period of transition (or part of an otherwise uncharacterizable chaotic period).  The game should name things after it has some time to reflect, really, even if that means you don't get to see the age transitions during world gen.

When you get to this, will the way history itself works be fleshed out a bit more? There should be more palpable differences between ages then Megabeast count, even with their machination's added. A sense of historical rise and fall, technological advances within and up to the constraint's, changes in thought, new opportunity's, hell geology, etc. Lengthier history's would be excellent, but I'm uncertain as to how it would work.

[monk12]

Right now, due to necromancers and so on, the world keeps going from Age of Myth to Age of Legends and back, so you often get something like the 8th Age of Myth. Do you ever plan on changing up the Ages, or adding more of them?

Knight Otu brought up that it was due to megabeast reproduction, and it isn't really something that is supposed to happen -- having any age that only lasts a few years isn't really an age at all, but an event within an actual age or a period of transition (or part of an otherwise uncharacterizable chaotic period).  The game should name things after it has some time to reflect, really, even if that means you don't get to see the age transitions during world gen.

When you get to this, will the way history itself works be fleshed out a bit more? There should be more palpable differences between ages then Megabeast count, even with their machination's added. A sense of historical rise and fall, technological advances within and up to the constraint's, changes in thought, new opportunity's, hell geology, etc. Lengthier history's would be excellent, but I'm uncertain as to how it would work.

Actually already in game, to an extent. You can have Golden Ages (when civs are at peace and prospering,) Twilight Ages (civs are at peace, but crumbling or in retreat, Tolkien style,) and the Age of Civilization (when civs have colonized most of the world.) You tend to see them in long world-gens or pocket worlds, when megabeasts are mostly dead and let the peasants do their thing.

Other things like Ages based on tech advancement, changes in thought, etc, will have to wait for those things to actually happen in the game, and there's no timeline on any of that (well, HFS-related things might have changed, but we won't know what or how much until the release comes out.)

[vadia]

how soon until Toady calls the game beta?

[monk12]

how soon until Toady calls the game beta?

20 years was last estimate. Well, I don't remember whether it was 20 years until all the features are in (traditional start of beta,) or 20 years until done, but certainly not anytime in the near-to-moderate future.

[paldin]

I can't speak for economy in the fort (since I got to playing after it had been phased out), but economy in real life can be easy to track. Will the macroeconomic system be based on differences in supply and demand (and influenced by your fort's trade success?) to include difference prices to different traders, or will the prices of goods in-game simply be re-evaluated? I like the idea of finding optimal solutions in games, but not when those solutions are exploitable and unintentional.

[King Mir]

how soon until Toady calls the game beta?

20 years was last estimate. Well, I don't remember whether it was 20 years until all the features are in (traditional start of beta,) or 20 years until done, but certainly not anytime in the near-to-moderate future.

The 20 years estimate stems from the fact that development on Dwarf Fortress started in 2002, and is currently at version 0.34, a little over a third of the way done in 2012. So to get to version 1.0 would take another 20 years. You can look forward to 1.0 in 2032!

But it does speak to the fact that Toady does have a vision of what the complete game would be like. He has even mentioned that some features that would not be considered until after version 1.0.
 
EDIT:More accurately, If you extrapolate from the release of 0.31, the version 1.0 should be in 2027. For 0.34, its 2031. Not that their is any precision to these guesses.

[FearfulJesuit]

Toady, you mentioned directly after the last FotF that you had a list of 800 notes, and were working through them at 5 to 10 a day. Where did that 800 figure come from, and what is the figure now of what's been done? You say you're bad at deadline prediction, but 800 data points will probably give us a clearer, if still rough, picture.

[Cobbler89]

Thank ye, o Great Toady One!

[Putnam]

Toady, you mentioned directly after the last FotF that you had a list of 800 notes, and were working through them at 5 to 10 a day. Where did that 800 figure come from, and what is the figure now of what's been done? You say you're bad at deadline prediction, but 800 data points will probably give us a clearer, if still rough, picture.

800 things that need fixing; the timescale of each is a known unknown.

[King Mir]

Toady, you mentioned directly after the last FotF that you had a list of 800 notes, and were working through them at 5 to 10 a day. Where did that 800 figure come from, and what is the figure now of what's been done? You say you're bad at deadline prediction, but 800 data points will probably give us a clearer, if still rough, picture.

Yeah, I wish Toady gave more information like this about what he plans for every major release. The only way to get better at deadline prediction is practice, and a good way to do that is to periodically make a guess at it, learning from the inaccuracy of previous guesses. More importantly, despite the bad rep of missing a date on a published schedule, I would prefer to have a tentative date, than the little information that Toady gives us. That date could come indirectly from a list of what remains to be completed for the release, instead of Toady making the guess of a release date himself.

[King Mir]

Toady, you mentioned directly after the last FotF that you had a list of 800 notes, and were working through them at 5 to 10 a day. Where did that 800 figure come from, and what is the figure now of what's been done? You say you're bad at deadline prediction, but 800 data points will probably give us a clearer, if still rough, picture.

800 things that need fixing; the timescale of each is a known unknown.

Sure, but if he had a monthly update of how many things need fixing, we'd have a way to estimate the average time for each, and to extrapolate the release date.

[monk12]

Judging from the blog, its just bug fixes before release? Or are you just on an extermination spree? If not, whats left?

I'd prefer not to get pinned to a countdown of a specific list, since that hasn't worked out well in the past.  There's still a lot left to do.  Dwarf sites are a good chunk of it, and I still have to resolve refugees.  And all sorts of other things.

Emphasis mine, of course. Also that post you mention ALSO said that one of the items unexpectedly took him a week, and the others were being done at the 5-10/day rate, which is why the list itself is not a perfect measure of "is it done yet." Not to mention the list itself probably contains spoilers of various descriptions, making it unsuitable for public release. And if I were in Toady's shoes, I know I'd rather be badgered about "show us the list" posts than "why aren't you done yet, this list looks easy!" type comments.

[King Mir]

Judging from the blog, its just bug fixes before release? Or are you just on an extermination spree? If not, whats left?

I'd prefer not to get pinned to a countdown of a specific list, since that hasn't worked out well in the past.  There's still a lot left to do.  Dwarf sites are a good chunk of it, and I still have to resolve refugees.  And all sorts of other things.

Emphasis mine, of course. Also that post you mention ALSO said that one of the items unexpectedly took him a week, and the others were being done at the 5-10/day rate, which is why the list itself is not a perfect measure of "is it done yet." Not to mention the list itself probably contains spoilers of various descriptions, making it unsuitable for public release. And if I were in Toady's shoes, I know I'd rather be badgered about "show us the list" posts than "why aren't you done yet, this list looks easy!" type comments.

Emphasis mine, of course. Also that post you mention ALSO said that one of the items unexpectedly took him a week, and the others were being done at the 5-10/day rate, which is why the list itself is not a perfect measure of "is it done yet."

There is no perfect measure, but that doesn't mean there's no good in an imperfect measure. There's inaccuracy in every measurement ever.

To reiterate, I'd prefer a tentative date that is way underestimated, than no date at all. For example, I'm happy Toady announced in December that he envisioned the release being in march, even though that didn't happen. It's not like Toady got a bunch of hate mail at the end of march for not releasing. There were some people saying that they don't want to start a new game, because they felt release was coming soon, but that seemed to happen even right after Toady announced that he took a month to do 20% of what remains for the release. Though I do think having a tentative date would decrease the amount of people doing that prematurely.