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[Aqizzar]

These things have sort of gone into a temporary limbo due to the disappearance of our hired full-time coder (Don't worry, we only paid him for the time he was here).

That Metal Gear Zombie guy was a giant tool, but I have to say, his blithering criticism is starting to sound a little valid.  Is there a plan for what to do if you can't find another coder?  I doubt Kickstarter would cotton to another fundraiser.

[Sean Mirrsen]

These things have sort of gone into a temporary limbo due to the disappearance of our hired full-time coder (Don't worry, we only paid him for the time he was here).

That Metal Gear Zombie guy was a giant tool, but I have to say, his blithering criticism is starting to sound a little valid.  Is there a plan for what to do if you can't find another coder?  I doubt Kickstarter would cotton to another fundraiser.

Well, the project is opensource. Maybe it needs some centralized organization? I.e. some place for all willing coders to converge to and coordinate their efforts? The existing development crew can act as directors, so that there is a plan that is followed instead of branching out into a billion interesting ideas.

And don't look at me, I'm as disorganized myself as can be. I can just see how such lack of organization can hurt progress.

[Funk]

Well thay are planing a bounty system to pay out reward for new bits of code.

I reckon that can be expanded into a kick starter like pool for late ideas.

[BurnedToast]

These things have sort of gone into a temporary limbo due to the disappearance of our hired full-time coder (Don't worry, we only paid him for the time he was here).

That Metal Gear Zombie guy was a giant tool, but I have to say, his blithering criticism is starting to sound a little valid.  Is there a plan for what to do if you can't find another coder?  I doubt Kickstarter would cotton to another fundraiser.

Well, the project is opensource. Maybe it needs some centralized organization? I.e. some place for all willing coders to converge to and coordinate their efforts? The existing development crew can act as directors, so that there is a plan that is followed instead of branching out into a billion interesting ideas.

And don't look at me, I'm as disorganized myself as can be. I can just see how such lack of organization can hurt progress.

I assume he means a plan about what to do about the money and goals. Kickstarter people payed almost $10,000 and were promised scenarios, z-levels and a mod manager as well as a bunch of backer-related NPC stuff and we have none of those (unless mod manager is actually in now, someone mentioned something about it a few pages ago).

"It's open source, random willing people should work on it for free" is only a valid option *before* you take money.

I hope a bounty system works out, but if they couldn't get all that in for $7,000 with a dedicated coder... I'm not sure they can get random people to do it for $2000 (or whatever they have left).

Edit: I don't mean to suggest you've accomplished nothing, obviously there's been a ton of stuff added and the game is much improved. But none of the major bullet points except (arguably, depending on what you meant by plug and play) graphics support have been finished.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Not sure about "manager", but the mod support seems to be working now.

And no, not "should". Never "should". But, it is open-source, and the game is popular enough, so capable and willing people could work on it for free, especially if there is a feature they want to see that the project lacks. It beats starting a new project that does all of the same things.

[i2amroy]

Yeah mod support and most of the accompanying manager functions were finished off by an awesome coder who stepped up to do the work, meaning we've finished 2 out of 4 main kickstarter goals. (We've also done a fair bit of the required NPC rewrite base, which is needed for the NPC rewards). It also leaves us with a little over 2k of money that is earmarked to only be used to finish the remaining kickstarter stuff.

That said I'm pretty certain that we can finish the kickstarter things eventually with a bounty system. I know for a fact that we have plenty of coders out there who are willing to handle some of the bigger tasks for free, and I'm pretty sure that with a bit of financial motivation they could be moved from working on some of the easier system replacements to some of the harder ones (I know for a fact that I would be ).

As for central organization, the biggest difficulty with that is the fact that the majority of our codebase is pretty transient, which makes it night impossible to organize much. It's fairly common for potential devs to drop in for a month or two, then leave the community. I mean we've lost several contributor devs with git merge powers and even an owner dev (TDW, who is on the forums but doesn't dev anymore) over the last several months. Add into that the fact that often the amount of time a dev spends helping is inverse to the difficulty of those tasks (meaning devs that pick up harder tasks often leave sooner) and you run into a bit of problem with organization. I will agree that yes, organization can be a good thing, but when you are having people join or leave the project on a weekly or even daily basis, it's difficult to do much on the manpower side. That said we have done plenty of organization on the planned features side, and have plenty of outlines drawn up and nailed down on where we are going with the game and are slowly chipping away at them. It's just a bit of the DF syndrome I guess, where we have very large plans for the game but only have a relatively small consistent coder-base to work on them, so it takes a while to get anything done (especially since that main coder base is also our git-merging base for the most part).

[GlyphGryph]

Technically they've lost me as an "active" dev as well. Since I'm mostly writing letters now. I'll be setting up the bounty system in late February, probably (I'll be out of the country for several weeks before I can finish).

[wer6]

Just wondering how the idea where you can have Survivors spawn somewhere else(( police in a police station, mutated lab escapee  etc))

[scrdest]

Jesus. I just found two Clownberry bushes, and apparently picking one made a Clown spawn at me.

[forsaken1111]

Jesus. I just found two Clownberry bushes, and apparently picking one made a Clown spawn at me.

the fuck? Is this in the main game or a mod or what? Clownberries?

[scrdest]

Jesus. I just found two Clownberry bushes, and apparently picking one made a Clown spawn at me.

the fuck? Is this in the main game or a mod or what? Clownberries?

Re-read the code in the quote. It's vanilla, except spoiler-proofed.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   Ah yes, the venrable clown. Since forever ago said entity has been the stand in for all things spoiler on the Bay12 forum. Though generally it relates to the deep spoilers of DF and its candy (yet another stand in) it has been used as a "spoilers be here" marker on many other games.

[Ivan Issaccs]

I assume they still only spawn on fungal tiles but I have never yet found said Clownberry bushes.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

I have only seen them while debug teleporting around to test out tilesets. They are quite rare or I am quite unlucky.

[pisskop]

The whole forest just tried eat me.  by forest I mean field.