Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[piecewise]

Now I know alot of us are minecraft players and that you probably already know what I mean, but let me explain to those that don't. Minecraft is a game in alpha that currently has a mode which allows people to test out it's still indev version of the game to let players find bugs and experience the new things.

Now obviously I'm not saying that toady should do this now, its much to late to make something like that worth while. I'm also not saying he should have done it sooner, because a great deal of the stuff he was working on would make the game nearly unplayable or just plain unplayable before it was finalized. I'm just wondering this : If toady decided to release a similar "indev" version sometime during the next development period, would you be too put off by the bugs to play it or would you not mind?

I'm curious because, while I know I wouldn't mind, I'm sure there are those people who would rather wait till the game is completely finished. What is your opinion?

[Dabi]

I'm sure he's doing a good job and I think he has his own way of doing it.

Also, if there was to say be an "indev" mode there would be say ALOT of people reporting bugs, making him go through a large amount of spam. Also he probably does a large amount of updates, to do these for each little bug will be stupid wasting time. And i'm pretty sure I read some things about this somewhere with a reason why it wont happen.

[Capntastic]

Indev mode works for Minecraft because Minecraft is designed to be a paid game at the end of its devcycle.

[Dasleah]

Every release of DF is an 'indev' version.

[GRead]

It's also worth noting that the current 1.5 years dev cycle is anomalous. Toady intended to cram in as many save-compatibility breaking features as he could, and underestimated how long it would take. Once we're back to normal we should be seeing releases much more frequently, and at that point indev releases would be less desireable.

[Grimlocke]

From what I read in the devlogs and heard from DF talk, the unfinished version of the game are pretty much unplayable. Toady seems to have made most of the upcomming version without immediatelly incorporating it in the main game, he only started stitching it all together recentelly. Hence all the quirky bugs in the devlog.

Probably it would cost a fair amouth of time to put every unfinished feature in an 'indev' version. I think the way Toady plans to do releases after the next one is just fine.

[piecewise]

Apparently no one actually read what I posted

I didn't ask if there should be one, I asked IF there magically was one would you play it? 

[Arucard]

I think everyone here would probably play it, or at least try it. And aren't the d16-d19 versions basically this?

[piecewise]

I think everyone here would probably play it, or at least try it. And aren't the d16-d19 versions basically this?

Not really. I was asking because toady seemed to say there were people on here who were really rather put off by bugs and such, so I was curious as to why they were.

[uberubert]

I would much rather play the playable versions as they are released than pour many hours into forts that will bug out in 20 gamebreaking ways ever season.

But, like mentioned previously, every release of dwarf fortress IS an inDev-version. We are already playing inDev versions Before the last version release, there were frequent updates (except for the 2d->3d version wait. That was a hard one xP ), and there probably will be frequent updates after this release.

[LordNagash]

The thing is, people say "Oh go on go ahead, we don't mind the gamebreaking bugs!" but I wonder how many of them have actually /encountered/ these bugs, rather than just hearing about them.

The civil war bug and the one where people who went to sleep and never woke up are hilarious in hindsight, but watching all your dwarves brutally slaughter each other because someone had a tantrum or watching all your dwarves starve to death in their sleep is not quite so funny when it is actually happening to you.

tl;dr I think too many people confuse the quirky little bugs that are funny to experience with the ones that actually break the game

[piecewise]

The thing is, people say "Oh go on go ahead, we don't mind the gamebreaking bugs!" but I wonder how many of them have actually /encountered/ these bugs, rather than just hearing about them.

The civil war bug and the one where people who went to sleep and never woke up are hilarious in hindsight, but watching all your dwarves brutally slaughter each other because someone had a tantrum or watching all your dwarves starve to death in their sleep is not quite so funny when it is actually happening to you.

tl;dr I think too many people confuse the quirky little bugs that are funny to experience with the ones that actually break the game

I mostly play adventure so I never have these problems. Also, "losing is fun" remember? It would be a dick if it happened a few dozen years into a fortress, but it usually happens a few months in so its not THAT terrible.

[calrogman]

I propose a cron job to create daily builds and leave them on a FTP server!

I can't wait to ftp pub.bay12games.com and get df_linux_05082010.tar.bz2 

The thing is, people say "Oh go on go ahead, we don't mind the gamebreaking bugs!" but I wonder how many of them have actually /encountered/ these bugs, rather than just hearing about them.

The civil war bug and the one where people who went to sleep and never woke up are hilarious in hindsight, but watching all your dwarves brutally slaughter each other because someone had a tantrum or watching all your dwarves starve to death in their sleep is not quite so funny when it is actually happening to you.

tl;dr I think too many people confuse the quirky little bugs that are funny to experience with the ones that actually break the game

So put a warning that game breaking bugs may be present in the MOTD.

[Footkerchief]

The civil war bug and the one where people who went to sleep and never woke up are hilarious in hindsight, but watching all your dwarves brutally slaughter each other because someone had a tantrum or watching all your dwarves starve to death in their sleep is not quite so funny when it is actually happening to you.

Or just a regular old crash that obliterates whatever you did since last saving.

[Pathos]

The thing is, people say "Oh go on go ahead, we don't mind the gamebreaking bugs!" but I wonder how many of them have actually /encountered/ these bugs, rather than just hearing about them.

The civil war bug and the one where people who went to sleep and never woke up are hilarious in hindsight, but watching all your dwarves brutally slaughter each other because someone had a tantrum or watching all your dwarves starve to death in their sleep is not quite so funny when it is actually happening to you.

tl;dr I think too many people confuse the quirky little bugs that are funny to experience with the ones that actually break the game

Been there, done that. And, honestly, I have no real problem with it. I mean, you REGULARLY got world corruption on the 2D version, and that was perfectly alright. People complain too much about bugs.

I mean, each fort itself is pretty ephemeral, and you contribute to the community if you get a very obscure bug that causes your fort to die off, so you might as well play extremely buggy versions for FUN.