Print

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

[therahedwig]

Yes, but he'll also fix bugs in the meantime.

It's like this:
Toady codes stuff into the game, does some bugfixing and releases it. Repeat x 9. Then army-arc & adventure mode and then eternal suggestion voting top 10. After that what else there's mentioned on the dev-list.

Hm... They have added the top 10 suggestion stuff to the dev-list while I wasn't looking?

Farming Improvements

Soil moisture tracking and ability to moisten soil (buckets or other irrigation)
Soil nutrient requirements for plants and nutrient tracking to the extent the farming interface can provide decent feedback for you, fertilizers can reflect this
Harvestable flowers and fruit growing on plants, ability to plant trees
Weeds
More pests

I have the feeling that someone who has been writing novels on the subject will be happy.

[NW_Kohaku]

I didn't really get seriously involved with the debate until that was up there.  The novels were on how they could be done most effectively, with that phrase being defined as giving the people who were interested in the subject the most complex and deep experience possible for them to enjoy, while not overloading those who were not interested with a burden they would find unwelcome.

I actually didn't even really support the NPK system (supporting a more abstract system, instead) until I read a Toady response in this thread saying he was considering NPK, if only he could find a "reasonable way to convey that information to the player."  The rest just sort of spiraled out from there.  (Which reminds me, I need to stop getting distracted, and finish up on my Interface section that's been sitting in my Word editor for a couple days, now.)

[drvoke]

I thought the point of the new release cycle was just so we had something to play with, rather than waiting ages for a release?

Max 2 weeks between minor releases is "ages"?  lol.  That, my friend, is a goddamn addiction!

[The Merchant Of Menace]

I was talking about the several month long waits as he added tons of stuff, this means that as soon as a particular aspect is playable he can release it.

[nenjin]

This is nothing compared to the delay from the last major release.

Toady's issue is when he decides to do something, he commits to the idea far and beyond what almost anyone expects. That naturally increases the amount of time between releases, but we reap the benefits all the same. (Not that I really had much interest in beekeeping, but hey, now it's the best damn bee-keeping simulator on the net, as well!)

[Shoku]

Would it be so bad for a workshop to have a hidden "wooden planks" type counter that just goes up by something like 8 when a log is brought in? Right now you've got your 60,000 units of string and such but a messy workshop might not need quite so much precision. The dwarf working in it would know he had some extra scrap wood hither and thither but if you actually deconstructed it the dwarves wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it and would just have a lump of garbage materials to toss in the rubbish heap.

[NW_Kohaku]

This is nothing compared to the delay from the last major release.

Toady's issue is when he decides to do something, he commits to the idea far and beyond what almost anyone expects. That naturally increases the amount of time between releases, but we reap the benefits all the same. (Not that I really had much interest in beekeeping, but hey, now it's the best damn bee-keeping simulator on the net, as well!)

The thing is, this is pretty much mandatory for being able to perform good coding.  You need to be able to write out a plan that expects where you will need to be a hundred steps further down the road than where you are right now, so that you don't have to rewrite your entire code to add on each new thing.  It really should be what more people expect.

It is, however, also not as exciting as getting some little treat now.  The amount of money Toady got in his donation drive by just offering to add in things like penguins, which only take raw modifications that you could mod in yourself proves that a good portion of the fanbase really like the excitement of opening up that new toy more than they enjoy really sitting down and exploring every facet of a more complex system like the new military or hospital systems...  Not that the overall opacity of interface and density of bugs really helped that too much.

[madciol]

*shrug* Most of players here wants new features more than bugfixs (except crashes). And they get what they wish for. Oh, so much.

I can only weep.

[freeformschooler]

*shrug* Most of players here wants new features more than bugfixs (except crashes). And they get what they wish for. Oh, so much.

I can only weep.

I think you'd be surprised. A larger majority of the "veteran" fan base and a sizeable portion of the mid-to-new fans seem to think that bugfixes should take priority, or at least as much as new features.

Really, though, I think I can compare it to architecture for Toady. He's not contractually bound to do anything. Keep this in mind as I say that an architect enjoys building and designing a new construction -- setting down shop on a fresh slate, if you will -- more than pulling weeds from the garden recently placed on the grounds of the half- or completely-finished construction itself. Similarly, putting things into your program can be a lot more exciting and interesting than spending several hours scouring for the perfect way to find precisely where the bug is and eliminate it, which may or may not require reworking other code in the process.

Not that you shouldn't do it, of course; you have to as a programmer. If you didn't do a lot of bugfixing, you'd be crazy, and I think it should take high priority in DF along with many others on these forums. But when you're spending hours playtesting your own game, wouldn't you rather be playtesting new features rather than searching for that one telltale error report?

EDIT: Nevermind, I don't see why I offered a counterpoint in the first place. Looking through a few dozen of your posts, you seem like either a very embittered player who will complain about this same topic no matter what, or a troll. Pardon me/sorry if I'm wrong on that, but I'm gonna pretend I never posted this because it makes no difference in the long run.

[Dante]

Would it be so bad for a workshop to have a hidden "wooden planks" type counter that just goes up by something like 8 when a log is brought in? Right now you've got your 60,000 units of string and such but a messy workshop might not need quite so much precision. The dwarf working in it would know he had some extra scrap wood hither and thither but if you actually deconstructed it the dwarves wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it and would just have a lump of garbage materials to toss in the rubbish heap.

Like the smelter currently works? It'd be a step in the right direction, but seems like a bit of a stopgap measure.
Nothing says a log needs to be split into as huge a number of units as thread is. Toady might add a size counter to each log going up to, say, 256; a wooden cup could then use 1 unit and a door 100 or whatever.

[NW_Kohaku]

Why stop there? We can have trees that give more than a fixed amount of wood when cut down, after all. Why should all trees be exactly the same size, whether a saguaro or an oak or a tunnel tube?  Why should all trees of the same kind be the same size, regardless of age?

[Cruxador]

Why stop there? We can have trees that give more than a fixed amount of wood when cut down, after all. Why should all trees be exactly the same size, whether a saguaro or an oak or a tunnel tube?  Why should all trees of the same kind be the same size, regardless of age?

If the change is to include that, it will have to wait until we have multitile trees.

Which is probably for the better anyway.

[NW_Kohaku]

We do need multi-tile trees, but even with everything fitting in one tile, you can make one tree give more wood than another.  One tree gives 50 liters of wood, another gives 57 liters of wood, another gives 82 liters of wood.

[Untelligent]

That sounds too complicated. I like the one-log system we have now better.

[Morrigi]

Oh god, if that were implemented wrong we'd end up with Wurm Online's WOOD SCRAPS EVERYWHERE problem, and that's bad enough in a 1st person game. And we'd probably end up with some silliness with dwarves needing 10 almost totally used up logs to make one bed anyway.