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[G-Flex]

I don't know how your dwarves acquired the turn-of-the-20th-century technology necessary to get uranium, but sure, that would actually really suck. Goddamn that must be heavy.

[diefortheswarm]

Dwarfs would probably be able to effectively use heavier weapons then other races.  Their weapon designs should reflect this.

[SirPenguin]

Ha ha, I've actually had to correct multiple times that I didn't say anything absolute about releasing by the end of the year.  It's a goal, but one that doesn't seem particularly easy to reach, even if I cut what I can cut.

Er, well, I really don't wish to make a big issue out of this, but this is the quote of your's a lot of people have in their heads

I'm still planning to get the game out by the end of the year, even if I have to cut features. Of course any feature cut is just going to be put off for a few weeks or something, it's not like I'm cutting features and getting it out of the door so I can go and work on some new game or whatever. So no worries there: if I say something's out it's only out for a little while. We're in pretty good shape here, I should be able to make the little deadline I've set for myself.

And you're right, it's not a "definite" answer, as you're not guaranteeing anything. But I think people are very much expecting a version by Christmas based on this comment and ones like it. I know it might not show up on this forum very often (for perhaps obvious reasons), but people elsewhere are getting pretty upset at the delay. Upset enough to question the project, Toady, and whether or not DF can even be sustained on this current model.

I dunno, I'm sure this isn't anything new you're hearing, but I feel it needs to be addressed. It seems every time your correct your old quote you get a little bit closer to outright saying "It's not coming out this year", and that's a hard fact for a lot of people to swallow

I'm a longtime member here and I'm sure I don't need to qualify that above with the typical "but I support the project no matter what", 'cause I do, but I think this conversation is important.

[Rockphed]

I don't expect a new version by Christmas, I expect a new version by my sisters' birthday, 4 days after Christmas.  Yes, I am being benevolent and giving Toady 4 extra days to satisfy my whims.

[Footkerchief]

I'm a longtime member here and I'm sure I don't need to qualify that above with the typical "but I support the project no matter what", 'cause I do, but I think this conversation is important.

Are you expecting a substantially different conversation from the last time you had it?  At the end of the day, what possible answers are there besides "It'll be out when it's out" and "It won't be this bad again"?

Spoiler: long (click to show/hide)

Never have I thought Toady working alone was a problem. But we just had an entire month worth of simply putting things into the raws...and it's only about half done.

Oh, indeed, that's sort of exactly what I meant. The raw changes aren't really hard, just time consuming, if I'm to understand Toady. This, as opposed to coming out with new changes and dealing with the new challenges they bring about, is more or less data entry and cleaning out obsolete code.

It's definitely not easy, but at the same time would probably be a better task to give to a few low level employees, you know? I wish Toady had such a luxury.

It's a bit more involved than that and would be hard to delegate.  The data entry itself has been mostly done for a while.  Last month was sort of a hellish slog, but it's nearly all coding, and it all has to keep an eye on the future to avoid having to do these kinds of rewrites frequently.

In general, yeah, I'm not happy with how long the release is taking, though I'm not going to be too critical of myself since it's hard to see how these things are going to work out sometimes.  Save compat or not, the material rewrite had to come in at some point, and excluding the rest of the release, that's probably still six months (not even done yet), for little immediate return without additional features.  Picking off some of those low-hanging fruit that popped out of the definition rewrite like descriptions could have waited, but there are downsides to a dry six month release as well.  The entity rewrite was necessary for the military stuff, which is still the ostensible goal, so the several months going into that is also a chunk (you have to count time spent on entities prior to starting the material/underground stuff).  Then there's the underground update, which goes nicely with the military rewrite and also the material rewrite but could also have waited.  The combat rewrite was partially necessitated by the material change, since too much wouldn't make sense without it, but the specifics of the health-care rewrite might have waited (though I'm not sure what impact that would have on playability, since I'm not sure if the number of broken limbs won't increase somewhat).  Anyway, yeah, there are a few more dependencies in between them, so I'm not going to acknowledge the absolute exclusivity of the groups of changes for this release, but I do acknowledge that it definitely could have come in more than one giant section, but I think more than two or three parts would have had led to some heavy downsides caused by some very, very dry longish-wait releases.

Last month was particular bad, though.  Sometimes I just don't have a lot to talk about, because what I was doing was boring as hell for the most part.  I have fun writing up the dev log entries like the one I wrote for today, but now that I've talked about it, I have to do it, which is still cool, but there won't be that much more to say that hasn't been said (there's not even a lot that can go spectacularly-and-amusingly wrong during testing here, just plain wrong, which isn't fun).  I don't really have any ideas for how to make the log more exciting during these times, especially without seeming like I'm deflecting from the fact that we are in a boring stretch (as it would seem perhaps if it became a cat blog for those stretches).  The dreariness will happen again during this release cycle after squads as well, as there are still a lot of routine changes to make.

It would be better to make it faster than more exciting, but I don't know how to do that either, now that we are fully underway.

I'm still ambivalent about save compatibility preservation as I've been handling it.  It wasn't fully responsible for the decisions that led to the long release wait, but it was an encouraging factor in piling on a bit more than I needed to pile on.  On the other hand, world preservation is only going to become more important to people, especially when they are allowed to get out there themselves beyond running isolated sites, and I'll probably be happy in the long run to have made so many save-breaking changes now once the main elements of the army arc are complete, rather than wrecking worlds that people have invested in.  Nobody really cares now, but if people don't care later, we aren't doing this right.

In any case, we're well along now, and all I can do is try to be a little more careful with my scheduling for future releases.  For instance, we mentioned a while ago that we were thinking of doing improved sieges or sending out armies plus looking at the top ten on the voting thread plus one thing of our choosing.  I don't think that would take a year again if it were all done at once (as if I've ever been right), but after this process we'll probably still stick more or less with that sequence -- but definitely grouped into several releases.  There would be no reason not to do all of the voting items independently for example, if I'm remembering them correctly (it does represent a few lost days, since releases themselves take several hours to prepare, especially now that I'm on three partitions over two computers).

There are reasons not to break up improved sieges that much, since a too-incremental approach there, aside from lessening the impact, would also involve way more AI rewriting each time, and improved sieges require a lot of mechanics that aren't in the game yet.  My previous inclination would just be to do it all, but if I want to do more releases, I might have to backtrack and do things like the vehicle rewrite as a first goal, which is essentially wasted time until they are used, which leads to complaints and ill-will, just as many elements of this release garner complaints for their apparent lack of utility.  The material component of the release never had a chance, I think, in terms of public relations and expectations (broadly speaking, I know many of you were excited about it -- and I have no real way of telling how upset people are.  Donations have been okay so far.).  You either spend some months working on something with very few immediate benefits and do a release that changes nothing, saying it's good for the project in the long-term, or you explore some of the benefits, which leads to further delays and some new features.  It's not so clear-cut, as there are always short-term projects laying around that might be used to spruce up a dead-weight release without delaying it too much, but it is a conflict that's happening and which I have to think about when I'm planning what to do next, which is something that sucks personally, since it screws up the flow of the project, though I think it's good to keep you all happy as well.

In terms of my well-being and interest in the project, I do get irritated by those kind of considerations, but by my own self-observation, which isn't going to be perfect, I don't think any of the annoyances surrounding working on computer games are remotely close to burning me out or making me tired of trying to make a living this way.

I think the concept of playing the world is great, but from a practical standpoint, I feel the game needs to give the player strong incentives to do so before it becomes important to ensure saves are compatible for that reason. Artifacts from previous fortresses, your old dwarves from your last abandon coming in with an immigrant wave, releasing fortresses to the AI and then having caravans from them arrive bearing goods produced at your last fortress, things like that. The Army Arc may contribute to this, especially if you can interact with your previous sites (send a squad to scavenge your old ruins to recover artifacts or powerful weapons for your new fort?), but it could also make things worse it you end up killing off hostile sites, thereby making the world less interesting over time, rather than more interesting.

Having addressed the general sentiment above (ie, yeah, it's not so important now, but if it ever is, I'll be glad I did some of these basic projects now rather than in the future, for the time-consuming breaks at least), considering just the army arc, I think that yeah, it has often been a theme with us that unless the world is somehow designated to be marching toward some kind of apocalypse, it's always going to tend toward a more homogenous environemnt (lots of selection and no mutation, basically).  When the idea for DF was smaller, it was planned to be built around that process (the Age of Myth etc. names come out of that planning, when the ages were going to pass into strictly mundane modern times where you'd engage in some archeology for example on your old artifacts...  kind of an interesting game in the end, though we can capture a lot of that without having to push forward the timeline into the modern era).  However, killing off everyone in, say, a medium-sized world is also a fairly long-term enterprise, and in addition, even a dwarf-only or human-only world should be fun enough to play once there are enough diplomacy, factions, intrigue and world-wide power struggles, and there's always the monsters of the past to reference and resurrect.  I'm certainly not saying worlds are all that interesting now, except in certain specialized cases (legends reading, messing with adventure mode retirement, reclaiming/revisiting an old fort now and again, etc.).

Just to make sure we're all on the same page, I'm speaking of save compatibility being opposed to frequent releases in terms of how my maintenance of save compatibility between versions leads to a piling up of save-break features and then a large messier delay, as happened here and with the Z-axis (the Z-axis wasn't the only save-compat change saved up there).

[Outcast Orange]

I'm not sure weapon decorations should be included in damage at the moment,
since basically every piece of rock in my fortress larger than a rat's eye menaces with spikes of something.

[Aqizzar]

Do the decorative spikes count for damage from a weapon?

Not yet (I don't have a quote for that, but it sounds like item improvements have been left alone as much as possible for this release).  He's historically been positive about the idea though.

What the...  Holy crap you're good.  What, do you keep an indexed database of everything Toady's ever posted?

[SirPenguin]

I'm a longtime member here and I'm sure I don't need to qualify that above with the typical "but I support the project no matter what", 'cause I do, but I think this conversation is important.

Are you expecting a substantially different conversation from the last time you had it?  At the end of the day, what possible answers are there besides "It'll be out when it's out" and "It won't be this bad again"?

Spoiler: long (click to show/hide)

Never have I thought Toady working alone was a problem. But we just had an entire month worth of simply putting things into the raws...and it's only about half done.

Oh, indeed, that's sort of exactly what I meant. The raw changes aren't really hard, just time consuming, if I'm to understand Toady. This, as opposed to coming out with new changes and dealing with the new challenges they bring about, is more or less data entry and cleaning out obsolete code.

It's definitely not easy, but at the same time would probably be a better task to give to a few low level employees, you know? I wish Toady had such a luxury.

It's a bit more involved than that and would be hard to delegate.  The data entry itself has been mostly done for a while.  Last month was sort of a hellish slog, but it's nearly all coding, and it all has to keep an eye on the future to avoid having to do these kinds of rewrites frequently.

In general, yeah, I'm not happy with how long the release is taking, though I'm not going to be too critical of myself since it's hard to see how these things are going to work out sometimes.  Save compat or not, the material rewrite had to come in at some point, and excluding the rest of the release, that's probably still six months (not even done yet), for little immediate return without additional features.  Picking off some of those low-hanging fruit that popped out of the definition rewrite like descriptions could have waited, but there are downsides to a dry six month release as well.  The entity rewrite was necessary for the military stuff, which is still the ostensible goal, so the several months going into that is also a chunk (you have to count time spent on entities prior to starting the material/underground stuff).  Then there's the underground update, which goes nicely with the military rewrite and also the material rewrite but could also have waited.  The combat rewrite was partially necessitated by the material change, since too much wouldn't make sense without it, but the specifics of the health-care rewrite might have waited (though I'm not sure what impact that would have on playability, since I'm not sure if the number of broken limbs won't increase somewhat).  Anyway, yeah, there are a few more dependencies in between them, so I'm not going to acknowledge the absolute exclusivity of the groups of changes for this release, but I do acknowledge that it definitely could have come in more than one giant section, but I think more than two or three parts would have had led to some heavy downsides caused by some very, very dry longish-wait releases.

Last month was particular bad, though.  Sometimes I just don't have a lot to talk about, because what I was doing was boring as hell for the most part.  I have fun writing up the dev log entries like the one I wrote for today, but now that I've talked about it, I have to do it, which is still cool, but there won't be that much more to say that hasn't been said (there's not even a lot that can go spectacularly-and-amusingly wrong during testing here, just plain wrong, which isn't fun).  I don't really have any ideas for how to make the log more exciting during these times, especially without seeming like I'm deflecting from the fact that we are in a boring stretch (as it would seem perhaps if it became a cat blog for those stretches).  The dreariness will happen again during this release cycle after squads as well, as there are still a lot of routine changes to make.

It would be better to make it faster than more exciting, but I don't know how to do that either, now that we are fully underway.

I'm still ambivalent about save compatibility preservation as I've been handling it.  It wasn't fully responsible for the decisions that led to the long release wait, but it was an encouraging factor in piling on a bit more than I needed to pile on.  On the other hand, world preservation is only going to become more important to people, especially when they are allowed to get out there themselves beyond running isolated sites, and I'll probably be happy in the long run to have made so many save-breaking changes now once the main elements of the army arc are complete, rather than wrecking worlds that people have invested in.  Nobody really cares now, but if people don't care later, we aren't doing this right.

In any case, we're well along now, and all I can do is try to be a little more careful with my scheduling for future releases.  For instance, we mentioned a while ago that we were thinking of doing improved sieges or sending out armies plus looking at the top ten on the voting thread plus one thing of our choosing.  I don't think that would take a year again if it were all done at once (as if I've ever been right), but after this process we'll probably still stick more or less with that sequence -- but definitely grouped into several releases.  There would be no reason not to do all of the voting items independently for example, if I'm remembering them correctly (it does represent a few lost days, since releases themselves take several hours to prepare, especially now that I'm on three partitions over two computers).

There are reasons not to break up improved sieges that much, since a too-incremental approach there, aside from lessening the impact, would also involve way more AI rewriting each time, and improved sieges require a lot of mechanics that aren't in the game yet.  My previous inclination would just be to do it all, but if I want to do more releases, I might have to backtrack and do things like the vehicle rewrite as a first goal, which is essentially wasted time until they are used, which leads to complaints and ill-will, just as many elements of this release garner complaints for their apparent lack of utility.  The material component of the release never had a chance, I think, in terms of public relations and expectations (broadly speaking, I know many of you were excited about it -- and I have no real way of telling how upset people are.  Donations have been okay so far.).  You either spend some months working on something with very few immediate benefits and do a release that changes nothing, saying it's good for the project in the long-term, or you explore some of the benefits, which leads to further delays and some new features.  It's not so clear-cut, as there are always short-term projects laying around that might be used to spruce up a dead-weight release without delaying it too much, but it is a conflict that's happening and which I have to think about when I'm planning what to do next, which is something that sucks personally, since it screws up the flow of the project, though I think it's good to keep you all happy as well.

In terms of my well-being and interest in the project, I do get irritated by those kind of considerations, but by my own self-observation, which isn't going to be perfect, I don't think any of the annoyances surrounding working on computer games are remotely close to burning me out or making me tired of trying to make a living this way.

I think the concept of playing the world is great, but from a practical standpoint, I feel the game needs to give the player strong incentives to do so before it becomes important to ensure saves are compatible for that reason. Artifacts from previous fortresses, your old dwarves from your last abandon coming in with an immigrant wave, releasing fortresses to the AI and then having caravans from them arrive bearing goods produced at your last fortress, things like that. The Army Arc may contribute to this, especially if you can interact with your previous sites (send a squad to scavenge your old ruins to recover artifacts or powerful weapons for your new fort?), but it could also make things worse it you end up killing off hostile sites, thereby making the world less interesting over time, rather than more interesting.

Having addressed the general sentiment above (ie, yeah, it's not so important now, but if it ever is, I'll be glad I did some of these basic projects now rather than in the future, for the time-consuming breaks at least), considering just the army arc, I think that yeah, it has often been a theme with us that unless the world is somehow designated to be marching toward some kind of apocalypse, it's always going to tend toward a more homogenous environemnt (lots of selection and no mutation, basically).  When the idea for DF was smaller, it was planned to be built around that process (the Age of Myth etc. names come out of that planning, when the ages were going to pass into strictly mundane modern times where you'd engage in some archeology for example on your old artifacts...  kind of an interesting game in the end, though we can capture a lot of that without having to push forward the timeline into the modern era).  However, killing off everyone in, say, a medium-sized world is also a fairly long-term enterprise, and in addition, even a dwarf-only or human-only world should be fun enough to play once there are enough diplomacy, factions, intrigue and world-wide power struggles, and there's always the monsters of the past to reference and resurrect.  I'm certainly not saying worlds are all that interesting now, except in certain specialized cases (legends reading, messing with adventure mode retirement, reclaiming/revisiting an old fort now and again, etc.).

Just to make sure we're all on the same page, I'm speaking of save compatibility being opposed to frequent releases in terms of how my maintenance of save compatibility between versions leads to a piling up of save-break features and then a large messier delay, as happened here and with the Z-axis (the Z-axis wasn't the only save-compat change saved up there).

Yes, I am expecting a different conversation. Believe me, I hate to be a broken record as much as anyone. But it seems something or several somethings have changed between then and now. That post is dated from June. He mentions how the previous month was a "bad month" but seemed optimistic that he was well along his way. Then in August was the first DF Talk where he said he was pretty sure he could get it out by the end of the year. Now he's saying that he didn't gurrantee anything and that even releasing a cut version would be hard by the end of the year. That's a very different outlook and message then he was giving us back then

[Footkerchief]

Yes, things have changed -- time went by, work got done, and the outlook changed as new information became available.  Again, what are you expecting him to say?  He's already eaten a couple thousand words' worth of crow about how long it's taking.  I would understand if you were saying "Hurry up and release it already" because we are all ingrates who occasionally harbor that sentiment, but you want a conversation?

slightly edited in light of good advice below

[Puzzlemaker]

Easy now children.

[Puzzlemaker]

So I am assuming that underground features can take place at those extra allocated Z-Levels, right?

Presumably it'll try to space out the underground "layers" among the available Z-levels.

I hope not... Or at least, I hope I have an option to just add more underground layers instead of spreading them out.

[SirPenguin]

Well what else can we do, as "consumers" here? We have a dev that's willing to talk with us which seems a lot more productive than simply making silly demands like that. I understand the point you're making, but it's better than waiting around twiddling my thumbs.

Here's the deal. Toady seems to be slowing down. The last time he's answered any FotF questions was close to 3 weeks ago. It took halfway through October to even green out some items on the dev list. Donations are only going to get slimmer as we get farther away. People are only going to get more frustrated and abandon the project as well, and not all of them are going to come back even when it's eventually released.

These things are important, and I'm wondering how Toady plans on dealing with those issues and others now and in the future.

Honestly, this story is VERY similar to what happened (and his happening) to Killing Floor, a game available on Steam. I'll spoiler tag it as it's not 100% relevant to the greater topic at hand.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It was a cheap and pretty unpolished game, but a lot of people enjoyed it. It had a few fatal flaws that held it back that Tripwire, the developer, promised it planned on fixing. There was one patch, a free DLC patch with new weapons and perks and the like, that had a release date very similar to this one. The devs kept dancing around an actual release date and instead made vague goals they never lived up to. Eventually people just stopped playing. The update eventually released, some came back for a few days...then left again.

I was in love with KF, as were my friends. None of us play it anymore. We've moved on. We were tired of waiting.

KF is releasing another big update just this weekend. They really want to push it and are planning to actually offer the game for FREE this weekend to entice people to buy it. But my friends? They don't really care, and a lot of people were really annoyed at the developers which tainted their view of the game. I doubt any of them will play KF again.

edit: I swear my posts are going through some sort of "hate filter" before people are reading them, as this is the second time in as many days that someone has thought I was getting worked up on this forum. People can have disagreements, discussions, whatever you want to call them, online (and in real life!) without being angry or upset. I don't think I or Footkerchief, even with his original post (which was 100% fine) are upset with one another or bickering. Yeah, we probably disagree or he thinks I'm being silly or whatever, but that's alright. People are allowed to disagree with each other, and I think we're all doing it in a calm, rational way!

[G-Flex]

Keep in mind, though, that not only is Toady now doing the DF Talk things (which he wasn't doing before!), which answer some questions, as well as that recent interview, he also just greened out nearly an entire section of the list that had previously been (almost?) ENTIRELY blank before. Also, one of the thing he recently worked (or has been) working on is the new HFS, which he decidedly isn't telling us anything about.

[SirPenguin]

Indeed! And I don't mean to discount any of the strides he's already made. They've been huge and glorious. But, despite all of that, he's still saying (as recently as a few hours ago!) that...well...

Ha ha, I've actually had to correct multiple times that I didn't say anything absolute about releasing by the end of the year.  It's a goal, but one that doesn't seem particularly easy to reach, even if I cut what I can cut.

And that's what I am specifically referencing. Though I understand you're probably responding to my "Toady is slowing down" comment. Even still...I recently went through all of the dev posts and FotF posts this past year and compiled a list of the new stuff Toady is working on. I was amazed how frequent he used to update compared to these days

[G-Flex]

He probably updated more about things earlier because there was simply more to update about. Most of what he's currently working on, he's already mentioned in detail before, so it's not as necessary, especially since he spent a long period going through pretty much all the lists and starting them. Finishing them could easily take just as long, but with much, much less to say about any of them.