QoL needs something more than just fixing a crash caused by the feature introduced in previous release.
There are so many features present in the game at the moment that some serious rebalance and polishing pass would be great for a change.
And I'm not talking about some most pressing bug-fixes. I'm talking about looking at the game as a whole and seeing the rough around the edges.
Many years ago someone somewhere said that "whole Dwarf Fortress" "is a placeholder for something else". I'd like to start seeing that "something else" taking shape before I grow too old to play DF.
The focus has been on adding features and fix serious bugs, with an occasional fix of not-so-serious ones for a long time. The bug fix releases have fixed some of the bugs introduced by the (then) latest major release, but the net result has been the addition of more bugs for every major release. QoL things have had a low priority because most everything is going to be overhauled completely in the future.
The Premium release has thrown a spanner into the old operational principles, though, and things might change a little:
- The commercial Premium release will have an official tile set, which can definitely be considered a QoL issue. The functionality in DF itself supporting the tile set will be available to all tile set creators, and that functionality will go beyond what's been available so far. As far as I understand, most of the functionality of TwbT is intended to be included (minus TwbT's bugs, but with DF ones instead).
- The graphics overhaul will provide differently sized grids, which means world tiles will be 16*16 pixels, in-game tiles 32*32, and text elements (such as the UI), will be 8*12 (I think). I would expect DF to support different tile sizes as well, but those are the ones it will be shipped with.
<The parts above is what's being worked on currently, with the grid sizes being implemented. The parts below are still to be started. The order below is not any attempt to guess the order in which it will be implemented>
- The UI is to be overhauled, with more logical, or at least consistent, key bindings, plus consistent mouse click support.
- The stress system will be tweaked and re-balanced. I have some hope this will actually be release as updates to the current DF version to get feedback and allow for several passes. The development process is going to be changed to support development of a new version in parallel with support for the current version, and this is a clear candidate for using that process.
- Apart from purely UI related key reshuffling/mouse support, there's also been talk of actual functionality changes, with the military management menu system and stockpiles being among the leading candidates of an enormous list of possible candidates. Time constraints will probably determine how much gets done.
Once the Premium release has been released, there will be the usual set of bug fix releases, starting with game breaking ones and continuing on to less critical ones. Whether Toady will perform more bug fixing than usual remains to be seen, however.
After that it's time to finish the Villains release, and after that there's Improved Sieges. Then, assuming things doesn't change, it's time for the Big Wait where a lot of backwards compatibility breaking changes are made followed by the first Myth & Magic release.
Hopefully, the parallel development support will be employed to make reasonably regular bug fix/minor improvement releases for the (then) current release while the "real" development continues behind the scenes.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress 0.47.04 Released (Read 256837 times)