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[feelotraveller]

What I mean is if this issue will be addressed before moving on to work on the Steam release.  I guess I left out the 'to work' but generally that would be understood as implied, if I had meant the release of the Steam version I would have said something like before releasing on Steam. 

[Shonai_Dweller]

What I mean is if this issue will be addressed before moving on to work on the Steam release.  I guess I left out the 'to work' but generally that would be understood as implied, if I had meant the release of the Steam version I would have said something like before releasing on Steam.

Yes, and besides these crash bug quick fixes, Steam development is imminent (and will have started by the time fotf rolls around). But, this time, that doesn't actually matter as he's doing fixes in parallel.

[feelotraveller]

Pretty sure Toady will read these messages before then, but happy to hear what ended up happening.

I'm asking specifically because this next couple of weeks is the window where it might get addressed before being swamped in the morass of the Steam related stuff.  At that point stuff will naturally be driven by the other people working on that project who have other concerns that are unrelated to the friendship issues.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Pretty sure Toady will read these messages before then, but happy to hear what ended up happening.

I'm asking specifically because this next couple of weeks is the window where it might get addressed before being swamped in the morass of the Steam related stuff.  At that point stuff will naturally be driven by the other people working on that project who have other concerns that are unrelated to the friendship issues.

Fixing up the game (somewhat) and addressing (some) long-time issues is Steam related stuff. Let's not forget that, it's not just a "let's add graphics" arc.

[PatrikLundell]

My understanding of the process is the same as Shonai_Dweller's:
- Fix serious bugs (now).
- Get graphics going to avoid the artists getting health issues with their thumb joints from excessive twiddling.
- Make bug fixes for the current arc in parallel with doing Premium improvements of two kinds:
  - a. Things that have to wait for Premium, such as the rest of graphics, and probably the UI overhaul with its associated rework of some things the UI presents (stockpiles, military, etc. are candidates). I wouldn't mind it being doled out piecemeal, allowing for feedback, but it might be hard to untangle the pieces from each other. You don't really want to reassign keys for the same functions multiple times, but you'd have to do that if you've updated one part, but not the one that would "donate" its key binding to the new one.
  - b. Things that can be done piecemeal and released into the current arc. Needs balancing essentially has to be in this group, as it will probably have to be tweaked several times, requiring feedback to inform the adjustments of the next iteration.

[feelotraveller]

But I wasn't asking about what happens during the steam release development period.    All of that was already understood (by me at least).

I wanted to know if a specific issue would be looked at before then.  It is semi-traditional for Toady to make a few bug-fixes/adjustments not immediately related to the current release towards the end of a release cycle.  And it seems that period is going to be shorter this time and indeed is already quickly passing us by.

I am very happy to see some work on the raid equipment list crash bug noted in the devlog.  Needs have recently been asked about by Immortal-D on the previous page, and although the friendship stuff is arguably less important than those - I think so, at least - it seems like it could be quicker and less complicated to address.  And we have been waiting years... the last 'window' where it might have been looked at was close to 2 years ago...  If I was in a negative frame of mind I could think it would drop off the end of the list under the pressure of the steam release and still be problematic in a couple of decades.  Mentioning it (again...) makes that a little less likely to happen.

[DG]

The steam release development period is now so it's too late to ask what will happen before it. The development of something doesn't start when it's released.

[PatrikLundell]

Well, the previous development paradigm has indeed been:
- Work 1-3 years
- Release the first of the arc
- frantic bug fixing
- less frantic bug fixing mixed with tweaking and some new stuff
- Repeat the previous point for something like ½-1½ year.
- Work 1-3 years (at which point any bug fixing is dropped: the development strategy could handle only a single active branch).

This is in the process of changing into parallel development where the current arc can be supported while the next one is developed. As far as I understand we're actually still in the frantic bug fixing period of the Villains arc, and I don't think Toady has any time over for actually starting on the Premium stuff just yet (a recent post indicated that was intended to start before the end of the month). As far as I understand, nothing non critical for the Villains arc will be done before the Premium arc graphics has been done (some of the bugs fixed aren't "critical", but they're part of the tail bug fixing, rather than tweaking/additions, etc.).
In essence, the tail of the Villains arc will be overlapped with the initial development phase of the Premium arc (while some of it is postponed to be merged into the tail of the Premium arc).

There's a lot of stuff that will remain on the table when the time's up for the Premium initial release. Some of it will probably be done in the tail, and some will probably be put off for another decade. I'd say needs and relations are sufficiently important to have to be addressed before the initial Premium release, although I wouldn't be surprised if it requires more tweaking along the way. Where the pressure resulting from the initial Premium release will lead remains to be seen, though.

[FantasticDorf]

Since necromancers/mummies are active conquerers with their own living ensemble of people-things whether they're intentional or failed, have you effectively surpassed your old development log targets around 'haunted hamlet' type abodes populated by peoples of some description or are they still on hold for a better time to address?

I ask just on account it threw me how often ruins are left behind rather than refilled up by experiments, though i imagine the villian themselves might be more single-minded about the end-goal to worry about the needs of the people they've made.

[Miuramir]

I remember far back Toady talking about knowledge systems near the beggining of when he was working upon libraries, and that scholars would embark upon putting their new contraptions of which there were only a set number of discoveries that could be made in the world into use in fortress mode as well as guarding knowledge they had obtained already, things being lost and taken by force accounted for. Discoveries do happen as momentous events hailing the writing of a new book, like subjects on toxicology for medicine, but they have no mechanical meaning other than being good reading.

• So to pipe up about some mentioned examples there's no feudal-cyberpunk gear-operated prosthetics (sourced from one of threetoe's stories, i believe short of the arm, migration, plots & religion has already delivered us there) or astrology tracking machines just yet. (i forget but its a named discovery subject)

One of the things that we may need in the Magic arc era is some idea of directed research.  With procedurally-generated world origins, pantheons, and magic systems, the relative value and interest of various sorts of research will vary widely. 

For example, the relative value of something like astronomy would be very different in a world where all magic is governed by the dance of the seven moons (the ascended seven dwarf-fathers), vs. a world vaguely like our own ("fixed" stars and a few distant planet-specks), vs. a world swimming through space on the stomach of a giant otter, vs. a world inside the core of a globular cluster where each star is a god, and they visibly move about over just a few days.  In some settings, fairly esoteric (by our historical mundane standards) research may be essential to even have a civilization; it's fairly easy to come up with a whole set of worlds where advanced ritual knowledge would be a prerequisite for agriculture and/or cities existing. 

Of course, there will typically need to be some random elements; even if everyone in "the establishment" is focusing on the stars, some bookkeeper tallying invention reports writes "On the Theory of Special Relatives" and leaps Dwarven social science ahead unexpectedly. 

[Nopenope]

Could you clarify whether there are going to be intermittent bugfix releases during the Big Wait (or even the Steam Wait)?

[Shonai_Dweller]

Could you clarify whether there are going to be intermittent bugfix releases during the Big Wait (or even the Steam Wait)?

Yes. Big Wait periodic bug fix releases for major crashes was confirmed a long time ago before Steam was ever a thing.
(And Steam Wait intermittent bug fixes are confirmed in devblog latest release, top of the page).

[sly]

apologies if this has been asked before, but are we ever going to see the option to generate more history *after* a game has been played in a world? for example, if I have a fortress that makes a really valuable artifact or wages some war, I would want to see how it impacts the world on a larger scale, over the years.

[Shonai_Dweller]

apologies if this has been asked before, but are we ever going to see the option to generate more history *after* a game has been played in a world? for example, if I have a fortress that makes a really valuable artifact or wages some war, I would want to see how it impacts the world on a larger scale, over the years.

Last mention of this was that it's really, really hard to pack everything back together into a state that you can restart worldgen at the kind of speed initial worldgen runs at. But not impossible and is something Toady wants to try one day. Don't expect anything soon though.

(Actual time passes in real-time of course though, the world is generating history as you play. So you can play fortresses and adventurers for many years and then go check how the world is doing in Legends).

[PatrikLundell]

apologies if this has been asked before, but are we ever going to see the option to generate more history *after* a game has been played in a world? for example, if I have a fortress that makes a really valuable artifact or wages some war, I would want to see how it impacts the world on a larger scale, over the years.

It's a topic that's brought up regularly...

The big technical problem is that world gen, including history, uses simplified logic, and it's very hard to put the game back into that box once it's been opened without cutting away a lot of information that's been generated but doesn't match that format (or convert part of it to its corresponding simplified form, for that matter).
It is possible to run the world in its game play format without having any active part in it: this is what happens during the 2 week embark period, but as you may have noticed, it takes a lot longer than world gen does, so while it's possible to extend the period (I believe it's been done with DFHack manually, but not as a tool, by changing the end date), you'd have to let the game run in the background for days to get anywhere.

Shonai_Dweller answered while I wrote my post, so there's a significant overlap.