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[Little]

What really depresses me is looking at Dev Next. According to that, he's done six out of fifty. The Army Arc is going to be in development for at least three more years. Still, more constant updates will alleviate the wait, but I've begun to wonder: Is Toady attempting to do too much with DF? It's great what he's managed to do so far, but will he be able to finish it?

[Glowcat]

It's great what he's managed to do so far, but will he be able to finish it?

That's what children are for

[RedKing]

What really depresses me is looking at Dev Next. According to that, he's done six out of fifty. The Army Arc is going to be in development for at least three more years. Still, more constant updates will alleviate the wait, but I've begun to wonder: Is Toady attempting to do too much with DF? It's great what he's managed to do so far, but will he be able to finish it?

I think that misses the point. Dev Next is sort of the pie-in-the-sky version of DF. Which if completed, would be the most awesome game EVER. And then would become sentient and we'd all wind up living in underground bunkers while stubby, axe-wielding, booze-powered Terminators hunted us. But I digress.

All the concern trolling is just amusing. I'll agree that a year is a long time, but I've seen other indie games/mods go a long time between releases and still have a healthy fanbase, such as Mount & Blade, ADOM, FFH2 (Civ4) and RTR (Rome: Total War). If the product released so far is good, people will maintain an interest. Doubly so when there's almost daily updates from the developer, letting people know that it's not dying on the vine.

[Hyndis]

I wonder where this worry about save game compatibility changes comes from? I'd be as happy as another other DF player to hop into a new version of DF, even if it broke save games every month. Versions that don't break compatibility is just a bonus, that is all, it isn't a gift to be taken for granted. DF is still alpha and will be for a long time to come. I just gen a new world and get over it.

My average fortress only lasts maybe 3-4 years before some magma-related disaster or tantrum spiral happens. 

So its not like there are any long term concerns.

[ILikePie]

Wow, this year has gone by pretty quickly. I remember thinking a release is coming soon about a month after 40d. I checked the development page every few hours.

[Saeldanya]

I stopped playing Dwarf Fortress about 8 months ago because the current state of food and insta-champions makes the game utterly trivial to play, and I got bored with making glass and ice towers on terrifying tundra maps just to have a challenge.jaybud4
if you're too impatient to wait for a new release
find a different game.

The new release might or might not make the game more challenging. But, seriously... have you tried any of the hardcore mode mods? Some of them might cause you to eat your keyboard rather than be bored. 

[The13thRonin]

I stopped playing Dwarf Fortress about 8 months ago because the current state of food and insta-champions makes the game utterly trivial to play, and I got bored with making glass and ice towers on terrifying tundra maps just to have a challenge.jaybud4
if you're too impatient to wait for a new release
find a different game.

The new release might or might not make the game more challenging. But, seriously... have you tried any of the hardcore mode mods? Some of them might cause you to eat your keyboard rather than be bored. 

*Coughs* and *wildly points at signature*.

Sorry, couldn't resist  .

[tigrex]

Every day, before I look at my emails, I click to the developments page eager for a glimpse of whatever's just been coded.

While the page is loading, there's always a tiny lump in my throat as I imagine an announcement that it's ready and being shipped out for playtesters.

But while I often wish that it was ready and I had my greedy little hands on it, I'm always glad that work continues, and progress is made.  I can wait for good things to happen.

[Eagleon]

Every day, before I look at my emails, I click to the developments page eager for a glimpse of whatever's just been coded.

While the page is loading, there's always a tiny lump in my throat as I imagine an announcement that it's ready and being shipped out for playtesters.

But while I often wish that it was ready and I had my greedy little hands on it, I'm always glad that work continues, and progress is made.  I can wait for good things to happen.

I do the exact same thing. I don't play dwarf fortress much at the moment (too much other crap on my plate), but I do think about it, and I'd definitely donate if I had more than a few dollars at the end of each week. Toady is an inspiration for me - I've gotten over my frustration at incremental rather than immediate success, because I can see directly what it can accomplish :3

[Footkerchief]

Toady has already stated that he bit off more than he should have when he started this update, and has said he does not intend to do such a long term project in the future for many of the same reasons listed above. This is just something we all have to wait out, and then things will be back on track.

Just to hammer this home and help people realize that all the complaints here have already been voiced and acknowledged:

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.

[sneakey pete]

My average fortress only lasts maybe 3-4 years before some magma-related disaster or tantrum spiral happens. 

So its not like there are any long term concerns.

Tell that to all the people who've made huge community games that have spanned over decades of ingame time and multiple versions.

[Timst]

What really depresses me is looking at Dev Next. According to that, he's done six out of fifty. The Army Arc is going to be in development for at least three more years. Still, more constant updates will alleviate the wait, but I've begun to wonder: Is Toady attempting to do too much with DF? It's great what he's managed to do so far, but will he be able to finish it?

I think that misses the point. Dev Next is sort of the pie-in-the-sky version of DF. Which if completed, would be the most awesome game EVER. And then would become sentient and we'd all wind up living in underground bunkers while stubby, axe-wielding, booze-powered Terminators hunted us. But I digress.

Well, no. Dev_single is the pie-in-the-sky version of DF, the thing we'll never see in our lifetime. But Dev_Next is simply the things Toady is currently working on, so I understand that Little is a bit depressed about that. How many "Dev_Next" can fit in the whole Dev_single ? And in each Dev_Next, how many lists like the one in Future of the Fortress thread can fit ?

[Lord Snow]

Well, no. Dev_single is the pie-in-the-sky version of DF, the thing we'll never see in our lifetime. But Dev_Next is simply the things Toady is currently working on, so I understand that Little is a bit depressed about that. How many "Dev_Next" can fit in the whole Dev_single ? And in each Dev_Next, how many lists like the one in Future of the Fortress thread can fit ?

I say Dev_single is just an extended version of dev_next.

Dev_next lists core components, dev_single lists core components groups with adjacent reqs, bloats, powergoals and provides a little more text to it.

[Timst]

Nope. Dev_Next are the things that Toady is currently working on. Dev_single is a consolidated list of Dev_V1 ("next year or two") and Dev_Future (far future goal), and of course it encompass Dev_Next.

I think it works a bit like this :

Code: [Select]

|====================================Dev_single===============================|
|=====================Dev_V1=====================|==========Dev_Future========|
|================Dev_Next=================|
|===Update1===|===Update2===|===Update3===|
|=Dev_Now=|
Dev_single regroup every ideas and plans for DF's development on a single web page.
It's divided between middle-term goals (Dev_V1), which are supposed to be done (or at least begun) in the next year or two (but IMO it'll probably take several years, unless the current update feature a major structural rewriting which we'll speed up further updates), and long-term goals (Dev_Future), that we'll probably not see implemented until there are several cities on the moon and we're all utilizing teleportation to go to the mall.
Inside Dev_V1, Toady selected some arcs and things he want to start working on this year : It's Dev_Next, which describe the additions coming in the next months (well, more likely in the next year). It's divided into updates (or releases), and the progress in the current update is related in Dev_Now.

I may be wrong, but by reading the dev pages, it's how I see things.

[budapi]

For some seconds I was a little pissed half a year ago, but having time with a stable release and lots of people to share saves with this is kinda fulfilling, too. Knowing the next release will take some more time, bugs are features and a source of laughter, and one still keeps the motivation to finish that one more goddamn community fortress this time for good. If the game seems boring, connect with people you don't know yet and play with them. There's always something new.

Also, the new release will change so much it won't really be the old shoddy DF again, but a whole new game. Be it squad management, squad customization, regions, RAW modability, all of the fighting system, the underground, healthcare, daycare, or being awesome in general.

DF is dead. Long live DF!