It might be useful to add a description of the overall DF development process to the Dev page, as well as using the Arc concept in the development description. The purpose of this would be to help people new to DF to understand the process used for DF development to temper their expectations.
In order to keep the things most people want most of the time closer to the top, I'd suggest a link in the Overview section to a new section at the bottom of the page.
The info I'd like to see is roughly:
- DF is developed in Arcs, where an Arc is a development cycle mainly focusing on the development of a single area of the game.
- DF development is subject to change, with more or less sudden additions of things previously intended for later development.
- An Arc takes somewhere between 1 and 6 years from start to finish.
- An Arc consists of the following broad phases:
- Development: DF is developed without any releases for the majority of the Arc. Dev notes provide some insight in what's happening.
- First release and emergency bug fixing of crash bugs, typically lasting for a number of weeks.
- Bug fixing and further development. This phase includes fixing of less serious bugs, with a primary focus on those introduced with the new contents. It also contains balancing of the new features, as well as addition of more contents to the features (which may be fairly bare bones at the first release). This phase can be fairly long, depending on how much additions it contains. This can result in semi major releases with their emergency bug fixing releases.
- End phase. This phase tends to be rather short, typically weeks, and typically fixes general bugs as well as bugs and balancing of the Arc's contents.
- The beginning of a new Arc, with a long development phase...
It would be useful if this section also explained how Premium releases would be handled, as automatic pushing out of rather unstable/unbalanced first releases to everyone through the normal auto update process isn't desirable. It might take time to decide on such a process, though.
Another useful piece of information would be to describe how DF development will work with respect to Premium releases, once that's been decided upon. My suggestion would be to state that the aim for the development phase of Arcs is to see small bug fix releases for the last Arc approximately once per month (or some other suitable interval) to show that the game is supported and in development (this would require maintaining parallel development environment for both the current and the previous arc).
A further suggestion is to use the Premium Arc to set this system up and trim it so it's working smoothly once the Big Wait starts.
I'd also like the "Upcoming Development" section to make use of the Arc concept to state that the current (as the time of this writing) Arc is the Villains one, the next one will be a small Premium one (which currently is completely missing from the Dev Page, which isn't surprising since the announcement was made after the page was last updated), and the one after that will be the Myth & Magic one. The Arc beyond that is not set in stone (unless Starting Scenarios has been set), but candidates are ...
Something that's currently missing from the Dev Page regarding the Myth & Magic Arc is all the infrastructure work it requires, as well as an explanation that this will result in a Big Wait and save game incompatibility. Adding the infrastructure items to the page might help improve understanding of why it will take time, and also provides items to tick off to show progress.
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Topic: Dev page process addition (Read 776 times)