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[nighzmarquls]

For the last two years I've been working in the game testing industry.

Toady is fixing old bugs right!

Most developers would look at a bug and try to fix it with as minimal a change as possible (to avoid making more bugs) or they will even compromise the design in order to accommodate the bug.

This happens more then you would imagine.

Toady on the other hand is looks at this as a way to expand and enrich the gameplay, to explore the concept in a more fundamental way and to expand it into what in some ways would be a core mechanic of an entire game.

I felt the need to let you all know how lucky we are to have the mad genius Toady One working the way he does, he does not shy away from making the game more amazing but also more difficult.

He also has the discipline to fix a bug when he feels he can do it right.

These are very rare traits from my experience.

[NTJedi]

I felt the need to let you all know how lucky we are to have the mad genius Toady One working the way he does, he does not shy away from making the game more amazing but also more difficult.

I agree... now we just need siege attacks to actually include the enemy bringing siege weapons.

[loose nut]

I am super stoked watching old bugs being fixed and being reconceptualized into new implementations of old features. I wanted to cheerlead this somewhere and here looks like as good a place as any!

[Gatleos]

Toady is a good bugfixer, it just takes him a few years to get around to it sometimes.

[Ieb]

Not to diss on the guy, but I'm not sure if that qualifies him as a "good bugfixer." It's nice that he's finally getting around to fixing the bugs, but why has it taken so long anyway? Not that I have any idea of his schedule. Maybe I'd get it too if I had a crazy super-project that hundreds of players play the shit out of, and I kept coming up with ideas to make the game even better every single update and shit. Does that lead to "let's just fix these bugs LATER" thinking?

[Mike Mayday]

hes doin it man
hes making this happen

[Yaotzin]

Not to diss on the guy, but I'm not sure if that qualifies him as a "good bugfixer." It's nice that he's finally getting around to fixing the bugs, but why has it taken so long anyway? Not that I have any idea of his schedule. Maybe I'd get it too if I had a crazy super-project that hundreds of players play the shit out of, and I kept coming up with ideas to make the game even better every single update and shit. Does that lead to "let's just fix these bugs LATER" thinking?

It's nothing complicated. Adding features is fun. Fixing bugs is incredibly boring. So no one is a truly *good* bugfixer, just levels of bad. That Toady is willing to go back to old annoying bugs makes him one of the better ones.

[xaldin]

It's nothing complicated. Adding features is fun. Fixing bugs is incredibly boring. So no one is a truly *good* bugfixer, just levels of bad. That Toady is willing to go back to old annoying bugs makes him one of the better ones.

Actually not entirely true. Back when I did more programming in life I was considered a great bugfixer because I actually preferred to track down bugs as opposed to new features (though I did lot of those too). Even when I was doing it as a volunteer on a mud I'd add about one new thing a week and spend rest of week fixing all the bugs everyone else created.

So yes there good bugfixers, it isn't however the norm. It takes a certain level of OCD about things working right.

[werechicken]

Toady is in a fairly exclusive club with developing the game and fixing bugs at the same time. Not even small incremental developments, but massive ones such as 3D and the underground caverns.

We need to accept that some small, admittedly annoying, bugs won't yet fixed for years almost no direct impact on gameplay. Especially with things which are likely to be massively changed in the future, case in point the dungeon master.

[dennislp3]

He also is trying to keep development rolling...he has a LOT to do and to stop and fix EVERY bug would all but halt the game...its an unfinished game and as such he is working towards completing features and implementing things to reach goals.

[Naros]

I got an other friend into playing DF.

He remarked on some of the crazy bugs, and I told him that we tolerate them, because, to put it kindly, Toady's unorthodox ways is what makes DF so awesome.
If we'd have little guys doing what they're suppose to do in an efficient, sane and careful matter ... we'd never have any Fun.

(yes, it was hard to pronounce the capital F)

[Malarauko]

Dwarf Fortress is so obviously crafted as a labour of love its amazing. Its what makes the game so good in my opinion. Its the little details you only get when someone obviously cares but applied to everything. The revamped crime thing (for catching vampires) is a great example of this. When you go on the crime page now you can hit tab to review cold cases. That feature on its own is worth a million points. I mean it makes you feel like a detective or some shit. I have to wear a fedora and overcoat, smoke a cigarette, drink a glass of whiskey and make a speech about "Red headed broads with hot heels and hotter looks" just to even contemplate that button.

[Jelle]

Maybe it's just easier to let the bugs pile up and splat them all in one fel swoop! I can imagine adding all these features keeps him busy, if he's going to bugfix might as well make it a substantial task! 

[GreatWyrmGold]

Not to diss on the guy, but I'm not sure if that qualifies him as a "good bugfixer." It's nice that he's finally getting around to fixing the bugs, but why has it taken so long anyway? Not that I have any idea of his schedule. Maybe I'd get it too if I had a crazy super-project that hundreds of players play the shit out of, and I kept coming up with ideas to make the game even better every single update and shit. Does that lead to "let's just fix these bugs LATER" thinking?

...He has a LOT on his plate. Did you notice the dearth of updates between this time last year and late last month? Toady wasn't sleeping in late and taking four days a week off, he was coding in tons of new stuff, fixing a few old bugs, cleaning up the UI some, and making sure it was relatively playable. He's ONE GUY. You can't expect him to clean up all the bugs as soon as they show up. If he did, we'd be playing a bugless version of 40d within a year, with some luck.
He fixes bugs. Not all programmers do. This makes him better than those bugfixers. The fact that he tries to do other stuff, too, doesn't make him a horrible bugfixer.

Besides, some bugs are as fun as the rest of the game!

[Misterstone]

I think what you've noticed here is this:  often the "bugs" in Dwarf Fortress are what you get when you have an old feature that isn't updated while the rest of the game is updated around it. So what this really is, is Toady writing in a set of features (animal training) that he's meant to update for some time, which stopped working, but he didn't want to waste time fixing it because he knew he'd replace the whole thing with something more robust. So it's more of an update than a bugfix, as far as the training stuff goes.