Taffer, I wanted you to know that I do appreciate this mod and all the time and work that goes into it. Just looking at all the comments in your GitLab Commits makes my head spin. (BTW: Does GitLab have a "Releases" tab? I can't seem to find old releases or the date of releases.)
Thank you! You'll want the
tags feature to see old releases.
Anyway - and no pressure intended - but do you think you could risk giving a rough estimate when the next release might come? Before the end of the year? Sometime this month? The last release was in August, wasn't it (judging by the last edit of the OP)?
Yes, this release has dragged on and on. I admit it. I'm now a father and I work full-time again, so I don't have that much free time left compared to what I used to have. Seriously, even most of my weekends are now devoted to family. I don't know what other parents do. Theoretically I'll have more time in a few years. My laptop also refused to turn on one day, which made me lose a few day's progress. I've also been reluctant to release while I'm in the middle of something, and there's been plenty of those. Hell, half of my animal people descriptions are in a new style that I'm enjoying, and the other half aren't yet. At least I'm not delaying the next release to sort that out. And one of the biggest problems is that I've lost track of what all I changed, so I need to redo my documentation. I don't want to have undocumented features. Trying to test and sort out what I want combat to look like has also taken an embarrassing amount of time to sort out, and I'm still not completely content.
To more directly answer your question, next week sometime, followed shortly by a few more releases as I add on some other things. I'm on vacation for two weeks and I'm planning on using much of it for Revised. My sincere hope is that I can finish my various todo list items for Revised, with the exception of the descriptions. I find description editing much more relaxing and easier to fit into my schedule, so then I can clean up the descriptions at my leisure. I've also got some larger plans for Revised that I don't want to announce, but I can work on that during Toady's "long wait".
Right now I'm comparing the raws to vanilla and reviewing for bugs. I also want to file bug reports for Toady.
Full Sver's mod will be not compatible with Revised?
Sver's mod overwrites every relevant file it needs to, so it's more that Sver's mod is compatible with Revised. I could tear out Sver's work or replace it with something else and it would still be compatible. I don't plan on adding anything that might unbalance Sver's work, either, but I suppose it's possible. Adding features isn't really my thing, for the most part (if that's not obvious already). Given that premise, then Revised should always be compatible with Sver's mod, so long as Sver keeps integrating my changes.
Since I don't play without Revised, my mod is pretty much designed to be compatible with it and will continue to be this way.
Thank you!
For me looks like it will be effective for you both to merge mods and develop together.
Not really, because both mods are passion projects, hence, me and Taffer have different vision and different core goals. Revised is a quality-of-life rework of vanilla, which touches almost every aspect of it with fixes and improvements, yet sticks to the original game's premise as close as possible. My mod is solely combat-oriented and noticeably strays from the vanilla combat balance (or lack thereof), while also trying to be challenging and entertaining for military-loving players, thus, the added variety and all that.
Any player with vanilla DF experience (or a newbie with a wiki on hand) can play Revised with little to no adaptation required, but playing with my mod requires getting familiar with the new balance and new items on the mod page first, and then the willingness to experiment with it all (as I'm yet to write any definitive descriptions for weapons, with too many changes still going on). To conclude: my mod is best played in conjunction with Revised, but Revised is not necessarily best played with my mod. On a positive note, my mod is pretty modular, so Taffer can easily take only the select parts of it (like the reworked default weapons) and improve the combat balance without making any radical, challenge-inducing alterations to it.
As Sver said, we have different visions and goals. I like quality of life and I like flavour. I'm also much, much more focused on creature descriptions, names, and colours than combat. As far as I'm concerned I don't want to touch combat again for a while, as it's drained too much development time already.
To be honest, when I "stick with the original game's premise as close as possible", this is as much to make modding easier and more carefree as it is to defer to Toady. So there might be some changes that the wiki can't explain easily (but I'll have my own documentation to explain things). For example, the next release renames bird people to harps/harpies and reworks the original harpies as crawling 'feral harpies'. Similarly, snake people are renamed to naga/nagi and snake people are now 'feral naga'. This is a departure IMO from Toady's lore but it's exactly the kind of change I like: it improves the atmosphere of the game (IMO) but is mostly just window dressing. The creatures have barely changed, making updating easier and ensuring that there's less chance for unexpected bugs or changes to have crept in. (Seriously, why do so many people add naga when there's already so many snake people as it is? Naga are just a name change away!)