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[Footkerchief]

Take your time, Toady. I'm as impatient as everyone else to get my hands on the game, but not so much that I want you to sacrifice quality or anything to get it.

Haha, I wouldn't mind a couple sacrifices.  I already mentioned formations, and I think the items at the bottom of Entity Positions ("Creature/mount prefs for leaders", "Remove demons as forced powers for goblins") are good candidates for postponing.  They'll be cool features later on, but I don't think they'd show up much in Fortress Mode gameplay yet.

[Dakk]

I don't get why people get so worried and/or angry because there's alot of time between each release. Hell, Toady actualy updates his devlog practically every week and sometimes everyday. I wish other indie developers would be like him. Love's developer talks like, once a month, and Noctis's dev barely even gives any clues that he is even still working on the project.
We have meetings, awesome interviews/podcasts, questions being answered, and more. We can't really complain alot here.

[Neonivek]

I don't get why people get so worried and/or angry because there's alot of time between each release. Hell, Toady actualy updates his devlog practically every week and sometimes everyday. I wish other indie developers would be like him. Love's developer talks like, once a month, and Noctis's dev barely even gives any clues that he is even still working on the project.
We have meetings, awesome interviews/podcasts, questions being answered, and more. We can't really complain alot here.

It was probably a LOT like this between the 2d and 3d updates

Though apperantly this took even longer.

[Stormrage]

Dunno about you guys, but waiting for the release became much easier with time.

On top of that, I started my academic studies a week ago in Technion and I'd like it to be released in late march, after the end-of-semester exams end so I don't get distracted.

Take your time Toady! By withholding the release for a few months, you'll save the future of some of us!

[Cruxador]

Take your time, Toady. I'm as impatient as everyone else to get my hands on the game, but not so much that I want you to sacrifice quality or anything to get it.

Haha, I wouldn't mind a couple sacrifices.  I already mentioned formations, and I think the items at the bottom of Entity Positions ("Creature/mount prefs for leaders", "Remove demons as forced powers for goblins") are good candidates for postponing.  They'll be cool features later on, but I don't think they'd show up much in Fortress Mode gameplay yet.

Formations You're probably right. The leader prefs likely take very little work to actually implement, and if that's the case they should go in. If not, they can be safely passed over for now. Removing Demons as a forced power is something I'd really like to see. It removes a lot of the weight of what we see in game. Instead of "OH SHIT THEY'VE GOT A FUCKEN DEMON!!" It's just like, "Oh, yeah, there's their leader".

[Cruxador]

I don't get why people get so worried and/or angry because there's alot of time between each release. Hell, Toady actualy updates his devlog practically every week and sometimes everyday. I wish other indie developers would be like him. Love's developer talks like, once a month, and Noctis's dev barely even gives any clues that he is even still working on the project.
We have meetings, awesome interviews/podcasts, questions being answered, and more. We can't really complain alot here.

I think it's mostly just one guy.

Dunno about you guys, but waiting for the release became much easier with time.

On top of that, I started my academic studies a week ago in Technion and I'd like it to be released in late march, after the end-of-semester exams end so I don't get distracted.

Take your time Toady! By withholding the release for a few months, you'll save the future of some of us!

This soes not mean that the Dwarf Fortress release will be considered an excuse for bad grades.

[Dame de la Licorne]

*snip*

It was probably a LOT like this between the 2d and 3d updates

Though apperantly this took even longer.

The break between 2d and 3d was almost a year (somewhere around the 10-11 month-mark, I think), and IIRC the only major feature that was added in that time was the 3d component.  This time there are a lot more features being added at once, and when you consider that this one is going to take at least 15 months, that's a lot of stuff to add in relatively less time per feature.  Toady's going at a pretty good pace to put it all together.  And yeah, people on the forums were just as impatient then as they are now.

[skaltum]

hey tarn(toady) any chance of the peotry generater you threatened us with on the dev pages?  in this release or the next one?

[G-Flex]

Also, according to Toady, the material changes and such are actually a LARGER rewrite than adding a third dimension was.

[Footkerchief]

Also, according to Toady, the material changes and such are actually a LARGER rewrite than adding a third dimension was.

I wonder if there'll be any future rewrites of this magnitude that don't allow incremental releases.  Pathfinding will obviously take a while, if that happens, and I could see the separating-graphics-from-text thing (and other graphics updates) being really tedious.

[G-Flex]

Separating graphics from text doesn't seem difficult to me at all. All you need to do is segregate the font graphic from the everything-else graphic (if that, really), and change how the raws interpret tile (and probably color, if he'd change that too) code. The implementation in the game's graphics code and such would be fairly minimal too, I would think. Updating a lot of that stuff might be sort of tedious by our standards, but he IS working on this pretty much full time. It's probably not a huge undertaking, programming-wise. Just a few design considerations would need to be answered and decisions made.

Pathfinding is a good example, though. That's more a classical-style programming problem that probably would rely on a lot of subtleties (and not-so-subtleties) about how this specific game works, especially if he ever wants to incorporate things like creatures jumping across gaps, or multitile creatures.

[Cruxador]

Also, according to Toady, the material changes and such are actually a LARGER rewrite than adding a third dimension was.

I wonder if there'll be any future rewrites of this magnitude that don't allow incremental releases.  Pathfinding will obviously take a while, if that happens, and I could see the separating-graphics-from-text thing (and other graphics updates) being really tedious.

I find it likely that there will be, though I'm hopeful to the contrary. The presence of a Pathfinding project on the forums makes it seem likely to me that it will happen in a manner similar to the 40dX series, though.

Separating graphics from text doesn't seem difficult to me at all. All you need to do is segregate the font graphic from the everything-else graphic (if that, really), and change how the raws interpret tile (and probably color, if he'd change that too) code. The implementation in the game's graphics code and such would be fairly minimal too, I would think. Updating a lot of that stuff might be sort of tedious by our standards, but he IS working on this pretty much full time. It's probably not a huge undertaking, programming-wise. Just a few design considerations would need to be answered and decisions made.

Seperating graphics from text is not super difficult. However, Ideally, when it is done, everything would want to be given its own tile - text, the icons on the overworld map and minimap, all those different things currently using X... and on and on. There's the idea of giving workshops their own tiles, as well as siege weapons and multitile enemies. Sure, a partial solution - seperating out text - would be possible and only moderately tedious, but why bother when it's not a big deal and the whole thing needs to be dealt with in the Presentation Arc anyway?

[G-Flex]

Even that wouldn't be a huge deal, it's just more tedious busywork deciding which tiles should be what, and deciding what kinds of tiles to use for the default.

[Footkerchief]

Separating graphics from text doesn't seem difficult to me at all. All you need to do is segregate the font graphic from the everything-else graphic (if that, really), and change how the raws interpret tile (and probably color, if he'd change that too) code. The implementation in the game's graphics code and such would be fairly minimal too, I would think. Updating a lot of that stuff might be sort of tedious by our standards, but he IS working on this pretty much full time. It's probably not a huge undertaking, programming-wise. Just a few design considerations would need to be answered and decisions made.

Yeah, I hope you're right and the current tile assignment for terrain/items isn't a tangled mess.

There will definitely be some design considerations for full tile graphics, like how to handle item types that have multiple tiles depending on the material.  I was imagining a two-stage system where 1) materials get assigned to a "material graphics class" (outside their normal raws definitions, so that graphics packs can be swapped out easily) and 2) items get assigned a tile based on what set of MGCs they best match.  So a graphics pack maker decides to assign the SHINY class (among others) to iron, and then, in the graphics entry for the BAR item type, says that any item of a SHINY material should use such-and-such tile, unless it's SHINY and BUMPY, in which case it uses another, etc.  I think a similar approach could be used for terrain, although it's probably not a future-proof solution for trees etc.

[Cruxador]

Even that wouldn't be a huge deal, it's just more tedious busywork deciding which tiles should be what, and deciding what kinds of tiles to use for the default.

Right, it's tedious busywork. Tons of it. Weeks, possibly, without anything fun. Just busywork, nothing diverting and nothing to tell the players. For a relatively small benefit. Seems reasonable to me that it's not one of Toady's first priorities.