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[Spriggans]

I know you said once you don't consider yourself a good game developer.
Will you at any point hire some highly competent monkeys developers to improve the game's implementation, in order to improve FPS ?

Greetings from France !

[Putnam]

no

[Hartsteen]

Are there plans for a more challenging 'normal' enviroment like impenetrable underwood (i.e. thornhedges, swamps)? Will large stacks of items (like wood, stones) be able to block floortiles?

[DG]

How will fortress mode remain challenging in a mundane world devoid of megabeasts, semi-megabeasts, werebeasts, good/evil areas, etc.? Is a mundane world intended to be a sort of casual/easy-mode version of dwarf fortress? The same goes for adventure mode, though not as much.

You just have to look into our own world to answer your question
The slider of fantasy does only that, extract or add fantasy, it doesn't add dificulties. So the things you mention would get changed to diseases (black pest), economically-induced famines(once  farming and the economy aren'r broken, this'll be a serious problem), devastating wars, etc.

Assuming that the technological cut-off remains independent of fantasy slider, a no-fantasy world will become easy-mode (in a relative sense) just by taking into account the absence of things like dragons, forgotten beasts, werecreatures, necromancers, husking clouds etc. Calidovi asked a very good question. None of the things you mentioned wouldn't also be a threat in the fantasy world on top of everything else.

[Shonai_Dweller]

How will fortress mode remain challenging in a mundane world devoid of megabeasts, semi-megabeasts, werebeasts, good/evil areas, etc.? Is a mundane world intended to be a sort of casual/easy-mode version of dwarf fortress? The same goes for adventure mode, though not as much.

You just have to look into our own world to answer your question
The slider of fantasy does only that, extract or add fantasy, it doesn't add dificulties. So the things you mention would get changed to diseases (black pest), economically-induced famines(once  farming and the economy aren'r broken, this'll be a serious problem), devastating wars, etc.

Assuming that the technological cut-off remains independent of fantasy slider, a no-fantasy world will become easy-mode (in a relative sense) just by taking into account the absence of things like dragons, forgotten beasts, werecreatures, necromancers, husking clouds etc. Calidovi asked a very good question. None of the things you mentioned wouldn't also be a threat in the fantasy world on top of everything else.

Evil humans, human infiltrators, human gangs seeking holy artifacts, ambushes, invasions, thieves, revolutions, forest fires, earthquakes, volcanoes, buffalo stampedes, woolly mammoths, Yetis(?!)...life is dangerous for above-ground dwelling humans.

Besides, Toady says there'll be an actual 'danger/horror' slider which is a separate thing to the fantasy slider.

[Dirst]

The horror slider might need to go to further extremes if fantasy elements are low or off.  It takes recurring Criminal Minds style psychopaths to present a similar level of difficulty to a single necromancer.  But seems quite doable so long as it doesn't get repetitive/predictable.

[DG]

I don't think I made my point well.

[Dirst]

I don't think I made my point well.

Well, no-fantasy can still be seen as an easy mode if the game doesn't intentionally make up for no-fantasy by cranking up the quantity.

Besides, in a no-fantasy world you don't have to worry about Criminal Minds style psychopaths who breath fire.

[LordBaal]

WARS. Wars would keep the game challenging alone. In real life it didn't take dragons or zombies to make history utterly interesting and horrific.

[Calidovi]

WARS. Wars would keep the game challenging alone. In real life it didn't take dragons or zombies to make history utterly interesting and horrific.

Then we need actual wars and revolutions. Not this 'site captured by 3 goblins and a beak dog' stuff. The capturing of sites as it is now seems to be inconsequential. If dwarf fortress had things like a tribute system, puppet states, full-fledged army, and religious conflict, it would deepen the game many times over. No doubt it's tough, to implement though, and artifact conflict is already a step in the right direction.

[Rubik]

I didn't explain myself well enough before
As many of you have said, fantasy adds a lot of things, and all the things that happen in a non-magic world also should happen in a magical world(mundane things like wars, misery, hunger, etc.)
The problem is, that's not the hostility slider, that's the fantasy slider
In a fantastical world there are dragons, horrible creatures and sacrifice magic cults, but there are also fairies, healing potions, and a generally more advanced culture, in terms of technology (see 'The Witcher')
Magic wisemen means culture, knowledge and common sense, something that affects the world positively, resulting in less wars, better controled countries, etc.
That's very general and all, but it makes a point.
What I mean is that in a well designed system like the sliders, everything kinda equilibrates , and it's not about difficulty, but flavour, which you can decide how much you want, and that's totally cool

[Inarius]

I know you said once you don't consider yourself a good game developer.
Will you at any point hire some highly competent monkeys developers to improve the game's implementation, in order to improve FPS ?

Greetings from France !

Bonjour à toi aussi,

I think you don't understand how game (and DF) development work.
How you code is something very personnal.
If you are employed by a big company you use a lot of rules, way to work, in order to make sure everybody can read your code.
But if you are working alone, and especially if you are coding for a long time alone, your code will slowly be not understandable for everybody else.
That's the first main issue.

The second is that, when you write alone, you have a general plan of your work in your head. Like if you had the map of a place and remember it. You know this goes there, and then here, and then use this and this to make this, until this happens, etc...it's like a functional map of your game. You can produce it with some external tool, but it requises a lot of maintenance work.
Penetrating a program made by somebody else is complex. Things can be really really hard to understand, and take hours because it looks like archaic, or stupid or absurd. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. You have to grasp all the tiny details everywhere. Even if the code is correctly commented. But coding is also a pleasure. Adapting the code to "modern standards" will be painful and boring and takes months. When you work 16hours/day on a project and alone, you can expect it to be fun. At least.

Secondly, you have to understand Dwarf Fortress is huge. In mid-2014 it was something like 450k lines, and It's probably over a million now. Printed on A4 sheets (on both sides), it would be higher than you and put together it would be 5 km long.
Thirdly, hiring someone (who will be mostly useless for several months to understand all the game) is costly. Toady makes more money now than he used to make, but still : he is living from our donation. If he pays a coder, how will he live ? Actually what will happen is that the coder won't work 16h per day on it (obviously). To make as much work as he is doing now alone, and with the same efficiency, you'll probably have to hire more than 3 or 4 people. So you will need a LOT more money than now. For a result that will be VERY LONG to be at the same level than now.
Last, remember that firstly, Toady is coding because he likes to. It's his hobby. Good or bad, it's what he likes. This is a precarious equilibrium. But it's also a performance. More than 10 years on the same program ! If you change his equilibrium, it can be better, but it can be worst.

[PatrikLundell]

I know you said once you don't consider yourself a good game developer.
Will you at any point hire some highly competent monkeys developers to improve the game's implementation, in order to improve FPS ?

Greetings from France !

Bonjour à toi aussi,

I think you don't understand how game (and DF) development work.
How you code is something very personnal.
If you are employed by a big company you use a lot of rules, way to work, in order to make sure everybody can read your code.
But if you are working alone, and especially if you are coding for a long time alone, your code will slowly be not understandable for everybody else.
That's the first main issue.

The second is that, when you write alone, you have a general plan of your work in your head. Like if you had the map of a place and remember it. You know this goes there, and then here, and then use this and this to make this, until this happens, etc...it's like a functional map of your game. You can produce it with some external tool, but it requises a lot of maintenance work.
Penetrating a program made by somebody else is complex. Things can be really really hard to understand, and take hours because it looks like archaic, or stupid or absurd. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. You have to grasp all the tiny details everywhere. Even if the code is correctly commented. But coding is also a pleasure. Adapting the code to "modern standards" will be painful and boring and takes months. When you work 16hours/day on a project and alone, you can expect it to be fun. At least.

Secondly, you have to understand Dwarf Fortress is huge. In mid-2014 it was something like 450k lines, and It's probably over a million now. Printed on A4 sheets (on both sides), it would be higher than you and put together it would be 5 km long.
Thirdly, hiring someone (who will be mostly useless for several months to understand all the game) is costly. Toady makes more money now than he used to make, but still : he is living from our donation. If he pays a coder, how will he live ? Actually what will happen is that the coder won't work 16h per day on it (obviously). To make as much work as he is doing now alone, and with the same efficiency, you'll probably have to hire more than 3 or 4 people. So you will need a LOT more money than now. For a result that will be VERY LONG to be at the same level than now.
Last, remember that firstly, Toady is coding because he likes to. It's his hobby. Good or bad, it's what he likes. This is a precarious equilibrium. But it's also a performance. More than 10 years on the same program ! If you change his equilibrium, it can be better, but it can be worst.

I agree with most of the above. However, hiring an employee to do the coding is not the only way to go about it (and that would probably be harmful to the longevity of DF). You could use other approaches instead:
- Hiring someone for a specific task, such as looking over a particular piece of logic Toady knows can be made better but haven't yet figured out how (and with "better" I mean achieve the desired result in an efficient manner, where "desired result" can be easily described in an understandable manner, and might be what's currently achieved, or might be close to the desired end result).
- Hiring someone or take lessons to improve either in particular coding techniques or for things that currently are implemented in a way that could be done better.
- Hiring someone to get the know-how needed to achieve a particular goal, such as e.g. how to gradually rework the code to eventually support multi threading (or make the assessment that it's not a realistic goal and possibly come up with a revised strategy for how to address limited areas instead).

I agree that taking on new people in a big complex project results in a negative productivity for a fair while.

Only Toady can decide how he wants to go about it, though.

[Dirst]

Brooke's Law: Adding people to a late project makes it later.

The reasoning is pretty much what Patrik mentioned about negative productivity, though I wouldn't call DF "late" as much as I'd call some of DF's fans impatient.

[Vattic]

Are there plans for a more challenging 'normal' enviroment like impenetrable underwood (i.e. thornhedges, swamps)? Will large stacks of items (like wood, stones) be able to block floortiles?

Toady has mentioned this kind of thing in the past. Here's a quote from DF Talk:

Toady One: The main thing there is up here in a lot of the parts of the Pacific north west where there's been logging recently and the trees ... there's not a whole lot of old growth forest left where I'm at, so there's a bunch of small trees, and when there are small trees there's a crapload of underbrush, and it's hard to go places; a lot of places you have to go around giant bushes and all kind of blackberries and that kind of stuff, you just walk through ... I don't want that to be super annoying, but right now in adventure mode there's a few scattered trees in the forest and they're little teeny trees but they somehow prevented everything but a few strawberry bushes from growing. And there are certain points where you should be walking through this brush and getting scratches all over your body, and mosquitoes ...