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[Drakale]

In my opinion the combat stuff is in pretty good shape considering the complexity. There are some obvious bugs that need to be be fixed such as damage not adding up properly, but nothing huge. People are freaking out because they test the extremes of the combat system and its not quite where they would want it to be, but when you test out the more mundane stuff on regular creature it mostly make sense.

[Zruku]

If versions were given specific names, then this version would be Revenge of the Megabeasts considering megabeasts are much more powerful and actually survive world generation. I have high hopes that toady will be able to fix most of these bugs that effect gameplay like the military screen crashing, or the bronze colossus near-invincibility, though he may have intended them to be much more powerful.

[Maulrus]

Okay, some people have been a bit hostile towards my original post. In no way am I berating Toady for  not fixing the bugs, nor am I demanding he fixes them. As someone said, I haven't been around before 40d, so I haven't seen the development cycles before; I was just curious. This WAS in my original post, by the way:

Note: I do, of course, appreciate all the work Toady has put into this, and I'm perfectly willing to play and support DF even with the bugs it has today. I would, however, like to see them fixed in some sort of time shorter than 2 years, if possible, which is why I'm asking this.

Also I put the (serious topic) tag in so people wouldn't think this was just a "WHY ISN'T HE FIXING THE BUGS /WRISTS" topic.

[monk12]

For my money, i was expecting to come in and flame some impatient n00b, but the OP itself was rather civil. I'd suggest that this thread is unfortunately titled, and something along the lines of "Bug Fix Progression" would have been more appropriate, since reading that line doesn't seem to imply that Toady is churning out a series of buggy piles of crap, or in some way has no care for each DF version after release.

I was actually going to start a similar thread before release, but never got around to it. Glad to hear from the DF grognards out there!

[Maulrus]

For my money, i was expecting to come in and flame some impatient n00b, but the OP itself was rather civil. I'd suggest that this thread is unfortunately titled, and something along the lines of "Bug Fix Progression" would have been more appropriate, since reading that line doesn't seem to imply that Toady is churning out a series of buggy piles of crap, or in some way has no care for each DF version after release.

I was actually going to start a similar thread before release, but never got around to it. Glad to hear from the DF grognards out there!

Yeah, I can see that now; my original intention with the title was for it to not sound completely impatient, but looking at it now, that's exactly what it seems like.

[Urist McDepravity]

As for progress, it can be watched real-time in the bugtracker. Toady already fixed some bugs today.

[SirPenguin]

Though it is by no means fully comparable, I'd like to show what happened with 40.

08/18 - 40a released
08/20 - 40b release:
    *  stopped designation cursor from leaving a trail when the minimap is updating
    * added an init option for partial screen refreshes (defaults to off)
    * fixed lockup for glassmaker moods where the glassmaker doesn't like glass
    *  fixed reclaim crash from units holding multigrasp clothing
    * handled some other potential multigrasp inventory indexing issues
    * handled new forbid orders vs. butchery, severs and sever-drops
    * fixed problem with delay on up digging tasks
    * stopped dirt road construction at glacier/stone interface
    * fixed problem with map export and flashing job markers
    *  fixed problem potentially capping caravan wagon number at 2
    * fixed wagon occupancy problem leaving behind flags that stopped construction
    * fixed problem causing single tile mountain civs from using feature plants
    * stopped reclaim from creating a second site at the spot
    * added windowed/fullscreen grid sizes

08/21 - 40c released
    *  fixed a problem with the display

09/06 - 40d released
    *  fixed crash from human siege campfires
    * made combat-produced chunks respect forbid orders
    * made cats able to carry vermin properly again
    * stopped dwarves from taking their current hauled object off to bed when they schedule a rest due to injuries
    * stopped dwarves from choosing to sleep on top of traps
    * made sparring dwarves work on their selected weapon/unarmed skills rather than using their best skills
    * got rid of erroneous goblin siege announcement for elves
    * stopped custom profession names from obscuring recruitment announcements
    * made forbidden items count toward wealth properly
    * stopped fell moods from occurring if the fortress race does not drop a corpse
    * got rid of world gen crash during succession after death of prolific long-standing position holders with inbred descendants
    *  resolved shared item conflicts during map offloads
    * prevented units with shared items (eg stuckins/wrestles) from leaving the dwarf mode play area
    * made adventure mode store transactions respect containment
    *  stopped thrown tantrum items from causing dwarf to become site enemy


My point in all of this is that 40 was a rough release until the super stable and really well done 40d, which came out less than a month later (and inbetween we had 2 patches). And if 40 was bad, go back in time and look at 39. That took up to 39f, and was home to the infamous "dwarves sleep forever" bug.

I wouldn't be too worried about Toady's ability to fix bugs and push out releases. His development cycle seems to follow some pretty standard patterns.

[Cardinal]

I finally had a chance to start up a game last night, expecting all manner of bugginess that I would excuse for wild megabeasts and all-new HFS.  Instead, I found a really enjoyable game of DF, where the 1000 plant fiber cloth bug and the incredibly difficult "just-activate-one-dwarf-so-he-can-strangle-that-raccoon" feature were more than made up for by the removal of all that Microcline blockage.  I haven't even struck the caverns, yet.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure if my dorfs start melting in the rain, I'd be a little annoyed, but things seem to be good.

[thvaz]

The game is fully playable if you know how to avoid the more serious bugs . I had very ocassional crashes up to now.

The most annoying problem now it seems are a matter more of balance (the combat) than of bugs.

[Capntastic]

Maybe I just have a different perspective, having seen Toady agonize over masses of silly and powerful bugs both this release cycle, see him be pressured into releasing it when it's still unstable, and then see him scramble to get bug trackers and all that set up, as well as specifically post that he wants to work on making a more stable release- only to have several threads all pop up complaining about bugs and slowness when Toady has already acknowledged he's working on it.

I do apologize for coming off as overly hostile, though.  Consider it me being more mocking of the situation in general more than any specific people.

[Dakk]

I haven't had a single crash yet, and I've done alot of stuff so far on my 3 year fort. In fact I'm only eager for the merge so I can get all that extra FPS I had with the 40dX versions. DF accelerator will cover it up for me till then. In fact I've spotted very few bugs so far, rain so far is harmless, and crops grow normaly on muddied floor.

The bugs I've witnessed are:

*The arsenal dwarf position didn't appear after I got 20 dwarves, it showed up randomly later.
*The sheriff remained after I got 6X dwarves for a while, and only became captain of the guard some time after I got my first squad up and running. The mayor position showed up at the same time, so maybe this isn't a bug at all, it may be just that the captain of the guard only appears after you have a mayor.
*I have multiple militia captain positions on my noble screen, this may not be a bug at all. One showed up after I appointed a commander, the other showed up randomly.
*Dwarves will make artifacts out of iron without ever actualy collecting iron for its contruction.
*I got an artifact in which the dwarf used a steel bar in its production, but it doesn't show anything made of steel on its description at all.
*Maybe its not a bug at all, but sometimes I get migrants with high master level on a single and sometimes several skills.

[G-Flex]

and crops grow normaly on muddied floor.

Crops not growing on muddied floor isn't the problem. The problem is crops not growing on soil that isn't muddy and also has a full z-level of soil below it, which is supposed to be possible but isn't.

[ZeroGravitas]

Maybe I just have a different perspective, having seen Toady agonize over masses of silly and powerful bugs both this release cycle, see him be pressured into releasing it when it's still unstable, and then see him scramble to get bug trackers and all that set up, as well as specifically post that he wants to work on making a more stable release- only to have several threads all pop up complaining about bugs and slowness when Toady has already acknowledged he's working on it.

I do apologize for coming off as overly hostile, though.  Consider it me being more mocking of the situation in general more than any specific people.

I consider it nothing better than worthless "internet sheriffing". Who cares if someone makes a thread complaining about a problem they have? Who cares if they're even hostile about it? Leave them alone. You're not going to achieve anything by arguing with them. You're basically going to someone who's mad and saying "hey you shouldn't be mad". That is probably the worst course of action you could take. If you really disagree with someone's emotional reaction to something, JUST IGNORE THEM.

And the people who keep saying "the game is in alpha" are the biggest laugh. As if "alpha" and "beta" aren't 100% arbitrary distinctions here. Toady could announce today that the game has passed to "quadruple gamma banana" stage and it would mean just as much.

[TheDarkJay]

Bug fixing in games and programs, take this from a programmer is painfully agonising at best. It is slow, horrible, and often very unrewarding work, trying to figure out the causes of some bizarre behaviour that isn't always even repeatable...it's hell.

Unrewarding you say? Very much so. You track down some obscure problem, something it may have took weeks to identify the cause of, get to repeat, figure out the exact problem, and via some trial and error patch. You feel absolutely chuffed, all that work and finally you fixed it. You want to scream to the heavens the wonders of your success. Hell, you may even play some victory music and dance around the room. You release the bug-fix. Most peoples responses are nothing more than a cynical, condescending "It's about time". You want to cry.

When fixing bugs, you have to prioritise (something that in itself can take time), and after a certain point the "time vs pay-off" ratio just doesn't justify fixing the problems. Also, some are so obscure and ingrained in the system to essentially be unfixable. Why do you think so many bugs in modern games wind up labelled as features?

At the end of the day, no program is bugless. None. It's a law of programming, if you think you've fixed every single bug, a new one will be discovered. Why do you think the Bugzilla tracking program deliberately reports Zarro Boogs instead of Zero bugs?

Hell, I once saw a quantum bug which actually didn't take effect until it was fixed (a freak occurrence where one change actually managed to hide the problems caused by the other change).

Not only that, but some bugs just aren't worth fixing.

And for one person to be expected to fix bugs that could take a whole team weeks to isolate the cause of and track down? Perhaps my programming experience has made me softer on other programmers when it comes to such things, but that's just unreasonable. Hell, that one person alone managed to make DF as it is now is mind-blowing at minimum...

[Dakk]

Maybe I just have a different perspective, having seen Toady agonize over masses of silly and powerful bugs both this release cycle, see him be pressured into releasing it when it's still unstable, and then see him scramble to get bug trackers and all that set up, as well as specifically post that he wants to work on making a more stable release- only to have several threads all pop up complaining about bugs and slowness when Toady has already acknowledged he's working on it.

I do apologize for coming off as overly hostile, though.  Consider it me being more mocking of the situation in general more than any specific people.

I consider it nothing better than worthless "internet sheriffing". Who cares if someone makes a thread complaining about a problem they have? Who cares if they're even hostile about it? Leave them alone. You're not going to achieve anything by arguing with them. You're basically going to someone who's mad and saying "hey you shouldn't be mad". That is probably the worst course of action you could take. If you really disagree with someone's emotional reaction to something, JUST IGNORE THEM.

And the people who keep saying "the game is in alpha" are the biggest laugh. As if "alpha" and "beta" aren't 100% arbitrary distinctions here. Toady could announce today that the game has passed to "quadruple gamma banana" stage and it would mean just as much.

Who cares if someone makes a does a bit of forum sheriffing? Who cares if they're even hostile about it? Leave them alone. You're not going to achieve anything by arguing with them. You're basically going to someone who's mad and saying "hey you shouldn't be mad". That is probably the worst course of action you could take. If you really disagree with someone's emotional reaction to something, JUST IGNORE THEM.

Lol, had to.