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[Caldfir]

So I've been snooping around lately, and it seems some people are complaining about bugfixes not happening at the rate they would like.  There have also been several threads in which the immensity of the open issues on the bug tracker (1800 or so) has been used as ammunition to claim that the game is extremely buggy. 

Anyone who has been playing the current version should know that there are in fact very few actual bugs* lurking about (however annoying those few might be).  Nonetheless I have been poking about the bug tracker, and it really is a big heap of...things.  The trouble is that the vast majority of the things on the tracker are likely not to be bugs at all.  What seems to have accumulated are a full year of people's conversations with tech-support, with a few actual bugs sprinkled in.  Even most of the (real) bugs are probably cases where something was broken, someone logged on the tracker to complain, and once it was fixed never reported the resolution.  It can hardly be expected that a team of only a few people can sift through something like that**. 

I am wondering if there are any plans on what to do with the bug tracker, since in its current state it looks to be hardly of use to anyone.  Anything between a very aggressive cull and an outright flush would be perfectly reasonable actions at this time, if for no other reason than that Dwarf Fortress is so very different from what it was a year ago, and a major release is on the horizon. 

Then again, I'm on the outside looking in on this, so perhaps I'm all wrong and there is some magical permutation of the search filters on the bug tracker that allow perfect summary of all actual bugs. 

(It was very hard not to turn this post into a rant against people being generally dumb when posting on the tracker, especially after a weekend of trying to make sense of it all.)

*A true "bug" is not an unfinished feature, nor a someone's opinion about how the game should work, nor users making mistakes and whining about it ('you had caps lock on'), nor program performance under excessive load ('your game did not crash - the ocean froze'). 
**Footkerchief is essentially omnipresent on the tracker, but even his magical powers have limits.

[Dae]

Not to forget that bugs are far easier to fix the closer its syndrome and cause are. If you don't fix a minor bug and add a few more features on top, the consequences might well be a game-crushing horror, horribly hard to track down.

Bugfixing is necessary, more even if you keep on adding new features.

[Cruxador]

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.

Sure, but how do you define what gives what? And how would it integrate with multitile trees when that happens, if it's done right away?
Better to hold off on it, and do all of the tree rewriting at once.

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

In practice it would be basically the same. Except that you wouldn't need to count individual bits of wood, and you'd get more out of your lumber.

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.

With thread, extremely small bits are considered refuse. The same would likely apply to wood.

[MrWiggles]

Spoiler: Caldfir Largish Post (click to show/hide)

So I've been snooping around lately, and it seems some people are complaining about bugfixes not happening at the rate they would like.  There have also been several threads in which the immensity of the open issues on the bug tracker (1800 or so) has been used as ammunition to claim that the game is extremely buggy. 

Anyone who has been playing the current version should know that there are in fact very few actual bugs* lurking about (however annoying those few might be).  Nonetheless I have been poking about the bug tracker, and it really is a big heap of...things.  The trouble is that the vast majority of the things on the tracker are likely not to be bugs at all.  What seems to have accumulated are a full year of people's conversations with tech-support, with a few actual bugs sprinkled in.  Even most of the (real) bugs are probably cases where something was broken, someone logged on the tracker to complain, and once it was fixed never reported the resolution.  It can hardly be expected that a team of only a few people can sift through something like that**. 

I am wondering if there are any plans on what to do with the bug tracker, since in its current state it looks to be hardly of use to anyone.  Anything between a very aggressive cull and an outright flush would be perfectly reasonable actions at this time, if for no other reason than that Dwarf Fortress is so very different from what it was a year ago, and a major release is on the horizon. 

Then again, I'm on the outside looking in on this, so perhaps I'm all wrong and there is some magical permutation of the search filters on the bug tracker that allow perfect summary of all actual bugs. 

(It was very hard not to turn this post into a rant against people being generally dumb when posting on the tracker, especially after a weekend of trying to make sense of it all.)

*A true "bug" is not an unfinished feature, nor a someone's opinion about how the game should work, nor users making mistakes and whining about it ('you had caps lock on'), nor program performance under excessive load ('your game did not crash - the ocean froze'). 
**Footkerchief is essentially omnipresent on the tracker, but even his magical powers have limits.

Fookercheif, has stated that he, and the other Modders of the bug trackers and Toady have a fair idea of what are the most "popular" bugs, that the community wants to be fixed. So, seems to be serving its purpose.
---
Also, I'm not sure if its a growing concern of the community that wants bugs to be fix above new content. For me, it seems closer to a loud minority.

[zwei]

Also, I'm not sure if its a growing concern of the community that wants bugs to be fix above new content. For me, it seems closer to a loud minority.

Well, there are patient but still concerned people...

As pointed out, new content has potential to make fixing bugs harder than it needs to be and there are quite serious bugs.

I would also like to point out that bugs usually *remove* bits of content - for example, lye/soap issues discourage soap making, crutch walking bug makes making crutches pointless, awol dungeon master and his ability to tame some creatures...

[MrWiggles]

Also, I'm not sure if its a growing concern of the community that wants bugs to be fix above new content. For me, it seems closer to a loud minority.

Well, there are patient but still concerned people...

As pointed out, new content has potential to make fixing bugs harder than it needs to be and there are quite serious bugs.

I would also like to point out that bugs usually *remove* bits of content - for example, lye/soap issues discourage soap making, crutch walking bug makes making crutches pointless, awol dungeon master and his ability to tame some creatures...

The measure of complication for prior bug quashing is speculative. We can't say by adding Y makes Z harder to fix, only Toady can make that call. And simply fixing bugs will also add new bugs, though hopefully at a depreciated rate. We also don't know that the lingering prominent bugs havent been addressed; they maybe lingering because they've been quite hard to quash, or they have been completely ignored. Those extremes are fairly different.

We do know that Toady does do some measure and effort of continue bug fixing with each release. The only person who really knows how to best handle the bugs, where & when to fix them, is Toady.

Maybe we're facing something like, bug X will be depreciated or disappear with addition of Y, because it changes Z and Z was the source of X.

[thvaz]

I'm a DF veteran and I am satisfied with the current rate of bug-fixing. The current version isn't less playable than 40d, for example.

[therahedwig]

Same here.

I guess the problem is partially that while in 40d we had the broken economy, but people could always ignore it and go with a military fort. Now we have a buggy military(and to similar extend a buggy hospital) and besides that you can play architect, if you don't want that there's no non-buggy specialisation options. So people try using the buggy military and get confronted with these bugs, unlike in 40d where they could avoid them.

So untill one of the specialisations is fully-functional (So, a bugless economy, a bugless military or others) People will keep clamouring for bug-fixes because they have to choose for bugs if they want to get further then 3 years into a fort without mega-projecting.

Also, Caldfir, I agree completely with you, but a bug is officially defined as any kind of flaw in the game, this can also mean design-flaws. However, you are right, considering that DF is in alpha, we should be focussing on flaws within the programming when it comes to bug reporting and have fixes in the design relegated to the suggestions forum(and I guess in the case of raw-fixes to the modding forum).

[Sizik]

Economy and military aren't mutually exclusive.

[therahedwig]

Economy and military aren't mutually exclusive.

Well, I guess in a way they aren't, but that doesn't change the fact that people could have a military fort without turning on economy. I would expect that once both are fully functional, there will be players who specialise in military, people who specialise in economy and ofcourse people who do a fort that focusses on both.

Unless you were meaning something entirely different, because then I have no clue what you exactly meant to say.

[fartron]

We won't get candles or torches until the general lighting improvements.  Vegetable oil in general isn't super-flammable compared to other gassy/oily things, as far as I know, but we'll use whatever numbers we can find.

While we're on livestock and feeding, can we get manure? I've been imagining a pig-methane-powered fortress for a while.

[Areyar]

We won't get candles or torches until the general lighting improvements.  Vegetable oil in general isn't super-flammable compared to other gassy/oily things, as far as I know, but we'll use whatever numbers we can find.

While we're on livestock and feeding, can we get manure? I've been imagining a pig-methane-powered fortress for a while.

Your first post since registering in 08 and you waste it by posting a suggestion for steampunk technology in the development questions thread?

[caknuck]

You're asking this from a guy named "fartron"?

[Beardless]

WARNING: Off-topic ranting! (Back on topic below the break.)

While we're on livestock and feeding, can we get manure? I've been imagining a pig-methane-powered fortress for a while.

Your first post since registering in 08 and you waste it by posting a suggestion for steampunk technology in the development questions thread?

Way to welcome a new poster, Areyar. [/sarc] I know the suggestions in the development thread thing is annoying, but it's not hard to be less scornful about it. Remember, the atmosphere on this board is what we make of it--whether Bay12 remains an oasis of civility on the Internet is up to us.

Also, this is not steampunk technology. Steampunk is 99% pure BS (if you'll pardon the pun) that runs on the Rule of Cool. Manure power is actual real technology. Modern mostly, but the Chinese were using manure to produce power as early as the 1300s (brief Wikipedia reference). While I believe that's in the appropriate time period, it's not from the right geographic area. Regardless, it's not in the plan for DF.

As an aside, manure being used for heating does date to the appropriate time and region for DF. Of course, that won't matter until indoor/underground temperatures are no longer universally dwarf-comfortable.


Back on topic, I'm part of the generally-silent portion of the fan-base that is only semi-patiently awaiting bugfixing. I love me some new features, but it's kind of hard to get excited about them while I'm still waiting for old features that worked well to get fixed. Old broken features being ignored feel like something was given to you, and has now been taken away. Irrational, it's true, but that's how it feels. It's particularly discouraging when they've been ignored for the better part of a full year.

I know bugfixing isn't fun, but I'd like to request some attention to old bugs as well as the new ones during the upcoming debugging cycles. Or, since you're probably doing that already, just letting us know how it's going. Personally, knowing you're looking at why wagons don't appear would make my day, even if the final conclusion was "Damned if I know."

Having said that, I'm still very much enjoying the most recent version my computer can run, and look forward to seeing what comes next no matter what it is. Please don't allow people like me to discourage you!

[Camden1990]

Hear Hear!
I'm not much of a poster either, but there have been a few complaints around bug fixing vs. new features.
Sure, I'd like crutches, hospitals, economies and wagons to work. But what I like much MUCH more than that is that this game is founded and developed by essentially one guy, who asks for nothing from his fanbase in terms of money.
We aren't entitled to complain, and have no reason to! The game is awesome, playable and regularly being improved. Bug fixes happen, quite frequently considering there is a SINGLE PROGRAMMER.
It is less game breakingly buggy than many mass developed beta games, and it is in alpha.
For those of you who donate and feel that it should give you some say in what Toady does with his game, for us fans, really aren't donating for the right reasons!

So really, I'm saying what Beardless is saying, ideally make the game perfect, but until then don't let any of the complaining get you down Toady! Keep up the awesome work.

Just my 2 cents, well, 2 pennies, being from England. And I mean no offense to anyone here, I just wanted to show solidarity for Toady.