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[H.P. Urist]

Let's have another round of useless productions about the next release, shall we?

[Bortness]

I have a great idea.  Let's log in to a forum representing an awesome community of strategy gamers who love one of the deepest and most unique game systems ever devised, and take a dump all over it because we're frustrated that the singular programmer of the entire project, despite his enormous commitment to the project, isn't moving forward as fast as we would like.

Wait a sec.  That's a crappy idea.

And yours is a crappy post.

[Manveru Taurënér]

I have a great idea.  Let's log in to a forum representing an awesome community of strategy gamers who love one of the deepest and most unique game systems ever devised, and take a dump all over it because we're frustrated that the singular programmer of the entire project, despite his enormous commitment to the project, isn't moving forward as fast as we would like.

Wait a sec.  That's a crappy idea.

And yours is a crappy post.

I believe that the op intended to write useless predictions, as in having another go at release date speculation rather than intending to call DF a useless production as it seems on first glance atm :>

[Bortness]

I have a great idea.  Let's log in to a forum representing an awesome community of strategy gamers who love one of the deepest and most unique game systems ever devised, and take a dump all over it because we're frustrated that the singular programmer of the entire project, despite his enormous commitment to the project, isn't moving forward as fast as we would like.

Wait a sec.  That's a crappy idea.

And yours is a crappy post.

I believe that the op intended to write useless predictions, as in having another go at release date speculation rather than intending to call DF a useless production as it seems on first glance atm :>

Very possibly true.  If I have misread OP's post, I apologize.

That said, it's a very easy post to misread.

[Broken]

It will be released in april.

Why? Because it will always be released one month from the prediction.

When we reach april, the release will be in may.

[H.P. Urist]

...yes, that's a typo.  I'm at work and stealing company time for DF. 

[TruePikachu]

It will be released when it's ready.

If Toady announces a specific date that the next release will be ready, it could be of the quality of many of the non-indy games. Specifically, Indy games tend to be somewhat better (in terms of quality per coders) because the coders don't have to work with such deadlines. Announcing a release date is the same as making a deadline. Deadlines cause stress. Stress causes programming problems, which requires debugging, which can cause more stress. In the end, you get a mess of code which may or may not actually work as intended, frequently a lower quality then what could have resulted with the exclusion of a deadline.

On the other hand, if one does "snapshot releases" (where they aren't trying to meet a deadline, but still have an announced release schedule for whatever is written then), you can end up with loads of builds which aren't really useful for playing, but more tailored for finding bugs in new code. However, because of how complicated DF's code seems to be (the 9+MB executable is _after_ heavy size optimization I surmise, taking evidence from the non-standard calling conventions used at the machine level), a good number of these builds might not even work in any meaningful way due to all the interactions, and the heavy optimization makes code debugging a pain (when I do compiles with gcc, I always `-g -O0` if I will debug). Besides, this technique pretty much only makes sense where the codebase is open, since then anyone could `-g -O0` it and then gdb it to the circus and back.

In the end, tl;dr, it is better the way it currently is, where releases are released when they are ready. Scheduled releases of any form aren't really appropriate for what Dwarf Fortress is.

EDIT: In case it isn't clear to anyone, I am a Great Programmer, but administration roles display with a greater priority

[nekoexmachina]

Announcing a release date is the same as making a deadline. Deadlines cause stress. Stress causes programming problems

Kinda wish product managers would knew that...
sigh

[fortydayweekend]

Announcing a release date is the same as making a deadline. Deadlines cause stress. Stress causes programming problems

Kinda wish product managers would knew that...
sigh

Product managers probably do know that, they just don't care, because meeting ambitious release dates cause greater profits

[Koremu]

Announcing a release date is the same as making a deadline. Deadlines cause stress. Stress causes programming problems

Kinda wish product managers would knew that...
sigh

Product managers probably do know that, they just don't care, because meeting ambitious release dates cause greater profits

Well, to be fair here, when you are dealing with a big vendor they have deadlines because their promotional stuff, artwork, boxes, shelf space deals, amazon promotional codes and so on and so forth are all worked out months in advance and for specific timeframes.

Indy game creators don't have that, so can be flexible.