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[corvvs]

I think your idea of ancient warfare is a little skewed.  Sieges and battle arrangements could last days, where for the most part troops would just stand around shouting at each other, and occasionally lobbing a volley of arrows, but not very often so as to not waste them.  The actual swinging-chopping-stabbing portions of battles would typically last about as long as one charge, until one side or the other lost it's nerve and retreated.  This could cycle and repeat itself several times, but it's not like people were actually out there swinging a sword for hours on end.  No one has that kind of stamina.

I'm well acquainted with ancient warfare, actually

Skirmishing forces can fight for hours on end without tiring. I myself have partaken in small-scale classical warfare and a lightly armoured (maille or less) fighter can quite easily fight for three or fours hours without stopping or even getting too fatigued. this sounds a little longer than the "one charge" you put forward. I agree that whole battles didn't consist of people properly getting up close, but they could quite easily last longer than the "blink and you'll miss it" DF combat.

Sorry to necro this part of the thread when the discussion has already moved on, but I think a lot of people forget that the game runs on a different timeframe than the real world. At 100 FPS you have three months go by in about an hour. "Blink and you miss it" combat usually lasts the better part of a day for small skirmishes, sometimes weeks or a month for a full siege. If you really want to see it happen in "realtime", pause the game and use the "." button to step frame by frame and look at the combat logs after each frame using Dwarf Companion or whatever the utility is that lets you do that. The next version will have the combat logs built into the announcement system, so you won't have to use the utility when that comes out.

It also amuses/irritates me when people complain about the "machine-gun crossbowdwarves" who are firing upwards of EIGHT bolts PER DAY. Super legendary +5 dwarves might get a bit over a dozen bolts. PER DAY. -- EDIT: I think the scale in my head is slightly off, legendary +5 is more like thirty or so. But I think I could fire thirty crossbow bolts in twenty-four hours, and I'm unskilled.

[Exponent]

It also amuses/irritates me when people complain about the "machine-gun crossbowdwarves" who are firing upwards of EIGHT bolts PER DAY. Super legendary +5 dwarves might get a bit over a dozen bolts. PER DAY.

Yeah, the true problem is not the firing rate, but the walking rate.  Entities in DF are absolutely sluggish when you consider the distance they can travel in a day, using any reasonable estimate for the size of a tile.  And this problem affects more than just combat.  It also is the source of many hauling woes and cancelled job woes, for example.

[corvvs]

...

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.

As a ADOM community member, I can assure you, it no longer has healthy fanbase. It has simply dissolved over years without updates and progress. Discussion used to number dozens of posts per day, now it is dozens per year.

I think JADE is to blame - or rather, the author's refusal to open the source of ADOM and insistence that bug reports are going to be fixed in JADE so he won't even bother fixing ADOM and JADE should be out "REAL SOON NOW" and when it comes out it'll cost 30 bucks, but it'll be so awesome you won't care. I know a couple months of that were enough to make me stop caring what happened with it.

[Baughn]

If something equivalent to [SEVERONBREAKS] is still around by then, I expect people to remove it, because the thought of a BC's arm breaking off and covering the breaker with molten metal is amazingly dangerous,

I think this has been mentioned before.

Aha! Found it:

SEVER_ON_BREAKS or whatever it was is gone.  Under the "Some other unfinished business" below "Squads", you'll find "update brittle flag".  At that point, I'll either find it easy to update or not, and then handle it however.  Ideally, yeah, BRITTLE should go too.

Presumably, limbs getting severed will work off of actual tissue and attack interactions now.

Yes indeed. Going by a recent dev_blog entry:

I had somebody shoot my toe off with a crossbow, which was cool, because it was after the slash vs. pierce merge. It just happened that the toe was narrow enough to be removed.

So, it's a physical simulation again. If you cut all the tissue, it falls off; if you don't, it doesn't, and while slashing weapons obviously do more tissue damage, piercing ones can do it too.

[Vester]

Will he be implementing more realistic sizes in the next version? It would be cool if a cage built to catch and restrain a size 20 dragon were completely inadequate for, say, a bunny.

[zwei]

...

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.

As a ADOM community member, I can assure you, it no longer has healthy fanbase. It has simply dissolved over years without updates and progress. Discussion used to number dozens of posts per day, now it is dozens per year.

I think JADE is to blame - or rather, the author's refusal to open the source of ADOM and insistence that bug reports are going to be fixed in JADE so he won't even bother fixing ADOM and JADE should be out "REAL SOON NOW" and when it comes out it'll cost 30 bucks, but it'll be so awesome you won't care. I know a couple months of that were enough to make me stop caring what happened with it.

That is .... very jaded. But excellent sample what happens when players no longer see progress.

Just fyi: Close-sourcing ADOM is not different from DF. Authors choice and frankly, ADOM not having forks only helped it. Single author, single vision.

JADE was not going to be commercial game, and developmental did not died because of it but because of Creator having life and stopping to dev all of it..

[Neruz]

I think your idea of ancient warfare is a little skewed.  Sieges and battle arrangements could last days, where for the most part troops would just stand around shouting at each other, and occasionally lobbing a volley of arrows, but not very often so as to not waste them.  The actual swinging-chopping-stabbing portions of battles would typically last about as long as one charge, until one side or the other lost it's nerve and retreated.  This could cycle and repeat itself several times, but it's not like people were actually out there swinging a sword for hours on end.  No one has that kind of stamina.

I'm well acquainted with ancient warfare, actually

Skirmishing forces can fight for hours on end without tiring. I myself have partaken in small-scale classical warfare and a lightly armoured (maille or less) fighter can quite easily fight for three or fours hours without stopping or even getting too fatigued. this sounds a little longer than the "one charge" you put forward. I agree that whole battles didn't consist of people properly getting up close, but they could quite easily last longer than the "blink and you'll miss it" DF combat.

Sorry to necro this part of the thread when the discussion has already moved on, but I think a lot of people forget that the game runs on a different timeframe than the real world. At 100 FPS you have three months go by in about an hour. "Blink and you miss it" combat usually lasts the better part of a day for small skirmishes, sometimes weeks or a month for a full siege. If you really want to see it happen in "realtime", pause the game and use the "." button to step frame by frame and look at the combat logs after each frame using Dwarf Companion or whatever the utility is that lets you do that. The next version will have the combat logs built into the announcement system, so you won't have to use the utility when that comes out.

It also amuses/irritates me when people complain about the "machine-gun crossbowdwarves" who are firing upwards of EIGHT bolts PER DAY. Super legendary +5 dwarves might get a bit over a dozen bolts. PER DAY. -- EDIT: I think the scale in my head is slightly off, legendary +5 is more like thirty or so. But I think I could fire thirty crossbow bolts in twenty-four hours, and I'm unskilled.

You assume that Dwarf Fortress days last 24 hours.

Given the speed at which creatures move and the fact that it states in the init file that a healthy average dwarf takes one step every 10 frames, this is clearly not the case.

[Outcast Orange]

Toady, if you're reading this...please consider the effects on community morale if there continues to be no new releases. Yes, at the moment there's still plenty of enthusiasm. But from my own experience with projects of this sort, it won't last forever if development stops. Also keep in mind that with an entire year of waiting...we've had an awfully long time to build up expectations. It sets you up to need something amazing. If you were to release a small bugfix release now it would probably annoy a lot of people because they've been waiting an entire year and expect something huge. Maybe you're going to deliver it, but again, a year is a long time to wait, and I doubt I'm the only person to wonder why it's been so long. Even the move to 3d did not take this long.

Look at the release history. In the year prior to the current release, there were twenty releases. In the past year we've had one.

Do you understand why I'm concerned?

Don't talk to my god that way.
Let it be known that I officially hate you.
I mandate that you read through the dev-log at least once a week. Fearmonger.

Really? Are there so few of us that enjoy the dev process?
I wake up every morning, check each of my favorite developers:
http://mattmakesgames.com/blog/index.html
http://wherecouldtom.be/
http://experimentalgameplay.com/
(And a few others)
Then I check the independent game reports:
http://tigsource.com/
http://www.gamesetwatch.com/
Then http://jayisgames.com/ for a decent review...

And after about twenty minutes of wading through other updates, the last place on my list...

DWARF FORTRESS DEV LOG!!!! (I always get this feeling in my heart that everything is going to be all right)
And on most days a tasty new update is posted and a small part of me giggles like a Japanese schoolgirl...

I love the developement of this game!
 It really keeps life interesting day to day...

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

[...]giggles like a Japanese schoolgirl

Don't let the tentacles caught you on the exit!


__________________________________

Well, I don't think Toady is going to give up any soon... And, DF would certainly open-source'd if Toady really did gave up, eh.

[Footkerchief]

Will he be implementing more realistic sizes in the next version? It would be cool if a cage built to catch and restrain a size 20 dragon were completely inadequate for, say, a bunny.

Probably not.  Size of creatures will be closely tracked, but they'll still take up exactly one tile, and the size of items won't even be tracked that closely, I don't think.  As he's said in a couple recent interviews, it's a can of worms he isn't ready to open up yet.

Let it be known that I officially hate you.

Hey be nice.

[Rowanas]

I wonder how much confusion and flaming I can generate with a single word.

Gandhi.

If that doesn't work...

Hentai

Ok, that's me done. I need to find something else to occupy my time. Wait, I have DF. I'm an idiot.

[corvvs]

...

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.

As a ADOM community member, I can assure you, it no longer has healthy fanbase. It has simply dissolved over years without updates and progress. Discussion used to number dozens of posts per day, now it is dozens per year.

I think JADE is to blame - or rather, the author's refusal to open the source of ADOM and insistence that bug reports are going to be fixed in JADE so he won't even bother fixing ADOM and JADE should be out "REAL SOON NOW" and when it comes out it'll cost 30 bucks, but it'll be so awesome you won't care. I know a couple months of that were enough to make me stop caring what happened with it.

That is .... very jaded. But excellent sample what happens when players no longer see progress.

Just fyi: Close-sourcing ADOM is not different from DF. Authors choice and frankly, ADOM not having forks only helped it. Single author, single vision.

JADE was not going to be commercial game, and developmental did not died because of it but because of Creator having life and stopping to dev all of it..

Yeah, that probably is pretty cynical of me. And don't get me wrong, I wasn't ragging for the decision to not open the source - I was ragging for the decision to close the source AND STOP UPDATING. Way different than DF.

But JADE was not going to be commercial? I totally remember differently... of course, the last time I really looked at it was circa 2000 or so. 2001 maybe... possibly 1999. and it's still not out even in a beta form, is it? I think the last time I looked into it he had decided to change it into some sort of roguelike framework library instead of an actual game, but I could be totally misremembering there.

EDIT: probably it was 2002, as I seem to recall the guy saying there weren't going to be any more updates to ADOM ever and the last version was apparently released in... 2002.

[Outcast Orange]

Hey be nice.

How else am I supposed to respond to heresy?
Fine.
LordBucket,
I greatly disagree with everything you stand for.

[Hyndis]

Hentai

Urist McDwarf admires tentacle demons for their corrupt intentions.

[RedKing]

...

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.

As a ADOM community member, I can assure you, it no longer has healthy fanbase. It has simply dissolved over years without updates and progress. Discussion used to number dozens of posts per day, now it is dozens per year.

I think JADE is to blame - or rather, the author's refusal to open the source of ADOM and insistence that bug reports are going to be fixed in JADE so he won't even bother fixing ADOM and JADE should be out "REAL SOON NOW" and when it comes out it'll cost 30 bucks, but it'll be so awesome you won't care. I know a couple months of that were enough to make me stop caring what happened with it.

That is .... very jaded. But excellent sample what happens when players no longer see progress.

Just fyi: Close-sourcing ADOM is not different from DF. Authors choice and frankly, ADOM not having forks only helped it. Single author, single vision.

JADE was not going to be commercial game, and developmental did not died because of it but because of Creator having life and stopping to dev all of it..

Yeah, that probably is pretty cynical of me. And don't get me wrong, I wasn't ragging for the decision to not open the source - I was ragging for the decision to close the source AND STOP UPDATING. Way different than DF.

But JADE was not going to be commercial? I totally remember differently... of course, the last time I really looked at it was circa 2000 or so. 2001 maybe... possibly 1999. and it's still not out even in a beta form, is it? I think the last time I looked into it he had decided to change it into some sort of roguelike framework library instead of an actual game, but I could be totally misremembering there.

EDIT: probably it was 2002, as I seem to recall the guy saying there weren't going to be any more updates to ADOM ever and the last version was apparently released in... 2002.

Okay, okay...in retrospect, ADOM wasn't the best example, especially after Thomas started posting "Hey, hoping to get some work done on ADOM soon" every six months or so.

But I stand by initial assertion: if the version already out there are solid, and there's some regular indication of development proceeding apace, people will stay interested. I love reading the devlog updates and considering all the ways that I could play with new feature X.