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[Teiwaz]

I'd like to suggest that some of the eternal suggestions be implemented. Pick any of the top 12 or so, really.

I've taken quite a break from DF, and have come back to find... no hauling. No standing production orders. No improved pathfinding. No support for graphics sets that don't replace rivers with doors. But there are bees and moose now. I know, Toady gives the game away for free, makes it for fun, etc etc, but I can live without bees. Graphics support - the bare minimum: namely, separating the text, overland map and fortress view tilesets, could spark a DF renaissance. Heck, even fixing the military would be a pretty good step forward!  Instead... yeah.

[Zesty]

Eh. I'm not pushy.

A lot of your "problems" are things planned to coincide with related arcs... and some of them aren't even problems.

Besides, bees were part of a donation drive.

[Footkerchief]

The new development page is up.

[...] For dwarf mode, we've incorporated many of the eternal suggestion voting items [...] Regarding the two of the top ten ESV items not specifically addressed on the new page, sped-up pathfinding and graphics support, the idea with the first is an upcoming date with the linux profiler now that we've got DF running over there to address the low-hanging fruit on the main grievance behind the suggestion (large, slow forts).  In the case of supporting tiles for each game object, I need to figure out the deal with all the new SDL code before I can lay anything out in stark terms.  The textures are stored differently (in a single atlas if it still works that way), and I'm not sure if it'll be feasible to move to full item/map texture support without altering the way that works.

[Teiwaz]

The new development page is up.

Yep. As your quote indicates, that was about 9 months ago. It was a little longer ago than that that I stopped playing DF regularly - in no small part because the new military stuff was (and still is, from what I hear?) so buggy as to make the combat part of the game full of landmines of people not training, training forever, refusing to put down training weapons and using them in combat, etc.

And certainly, most of the big ticket items I mentioned in the OP are on that 9 month old list.

The problem is that they're all still in white. "Future goal." While there's been some stuff added to DF in that time, there's been very little that improves the playability of the core game. You have to expect some level of... odd priorities... in small, indie projects like this one. But going for a year or more pretty much messing about behind the scenes (i.e. world generation which is only accessible in legends mode) and not making improvements to the player-facing stuff (fixing broken systems - military. And god, how long has the economy been broken to the point that it's better to just turn it off? - new features, and improvements) is asking for trouble, I think.

I just look at Minecraft ($30 million + in sales so far) and think "damn it, Dwarf Fortress is better than that game, it deserves at least a fraction of that much," and I've got to say, I think bees are part of the problem. I wish the donation drive had have been for long-requested features, instead of more animals. I would have paid serious money for that!

[NW_Kohaku]

Yep. As your quote indicates, that was about 9 months ago. It was a little longer ago than that that I stopped playing DF regularly - in no small part because the new military stuff was (and still is, from what I hear?) so buggy as to make the combat part of the game full of landmines of people not training, training forever, refusing to put down training weapons and using them in combat, etc.

And certainly, most of the big ticket items I mentioned in the OP are on that 9 month old list.

The problem is that they're all still in white. "Future goal." While there's been some stuff added to DF in that time, there's been very little that improves the playability of the core game. You have to expect some level of... odd priorities... in small, indie projects like this one. But going for a year or more pretty much messing about behind the scenes (i.e. world generation which is only accessible in legends mode) and not making improvements to the player-facing stuff (fixing broken systems - military. And god, how long has the economy been broken to the point that it's better to just turn it off? - new features, and improvements) is asking for trouble, I think.

Toady recently went on a bug-squishing drive that ironed out most of the lingering military and hospital bugs.  It was actually somewhat surprising how many bugs he killed in such a short period of time.  31.25 is pretty stable, and most of the truly annoying bugs are dead.

The economy is not even there at all right now, but it is "soon" going to be put back into the game.  "Soon" being an entirely relative term. 

Release 6 is where that will all take place, and Toady is going to be switching between bug fixing and making those releases, so I would fairly roughly guess each release will take at least a month, and he's only getting close to making the first release... So see you in October, I guess.

[sockless]

The game is in early alpha, in all honesty I'd prefer that he keeps adding new features and then goes and fixes the old stuff. The one bug that really bugged me has just been fixed (plaster in hospitals), so I'm pretty happy with the current arrangement.

Since the game is in early alpha, we shouldn't really be complaining about bugs, I get rather annoyed when people do it here and when people do it with MC. With Garry's Mod however, I think that it's acceptable to complain, since it's in release and not an alpha or beta.

[Niseg]

I'd like to suggest that some of the eternal suggestions be implemented. Pick any of the top 12 or so, really.
.
 No improved pathfinding.
.

We are making  great progress in that field . I think the main problem with any algorithm optimization suggestion is that without a working system I doubt Toady would  adopt any of them.

Recently I manged to converted one of the suggestions ,path caching, into a working system.  It's very simple to implement , memory costs are very acceptable (~num_waypoints²*longest_path*step_representation) . With path smoothing it gives good paths with much lower complexity compared to simple A*. I'm still ironing out the bugs and getting it to a more optimal state.

There is at least one more separate system,node grouping , that's ready to be implemented.I haven't figured out how to get "nav meshes" done though I think it can be done .

[NW_Kohaku]

We are making  great progress in that field . I think the main problem with any algorithm optimization suggestion is that without a working system I doubt Toady would  adopt any of them.

The problem with that is that it only matters if Toady reads it and is open to the suggestion.  He won't just take your code and put it in the game, and there have been dozens of other people with suggestions that work better than the current A*, but whose ideas have not been implemented.  As far as we can tell, they haven't even been read.

This whole thread is about the Eternal Suggestions not being implemented - and one of those ESV winners was better pathfinding.  This has been suggested for years, and it's not something Toady has really delved into, yet, and it's not for a lack of giant threads on the subject.

[tps12]

Maybe he already improved pathfinding...he did something in the last version or so that sped things up significantly for old fortresses.

[Footkerchief]

Maybe he already improved pathfinding...he did something in the last version or so that sped things up significantly for old fortresses.

That was temperature-related.  Which just goes to show that pathfinding isn't necessarily the most important target for optimizations.

[Kogut]

To be serious I can accept ignoring ESV[1] - but maybe it will be better to unsticky it?

[1]Even things done "by accident" were not removed from the list

[greenskye]

The game is in early alpha, in all honesty I'd prefer that he keeps adding new features and then goes and fixes the old stuff. The one bug that really bugged me has just been fixed (plaster in hospitals), so I'm pretty happy with the current arrangement.

Since the game is in early alpha, we shouldn't really be complaining about bugs, I get rather annoyed when people do it here and when people do it with MC. With Garry's Mod however, I think that it's acceptable to complain, since it's in release and not an alpha or beta.

I can't say I agree with the OP, but I do disagree with attitude that "the game is in alpha and therefore take what you can get". If the game has been developed "consistently" since 2006 that is ~5 years of "alpha". That "alpha" tag is about as useful as Google's "beta" tags.

If you have donated and have been actively supporting the game I say you have a right to push for playability enhancements rather than new features. I think its fair to want the developer to focus on keeping the game playable right now rather than pushing ahead with new features. How many people will donate if Toady can't appease them with a working game in the mean time?

Of course there is a fine line here. Path finding from what I've read is a very complex problem that involves major rewrites. Toady has explained this before. There should be a balance between new features and playability enhancements. That said many people were more happy with the bug fixes than the new features that were recently added.

I guess the bottom line is that the game should have a more "beta" feel in general. It's been long enough in development that it should (and has lately) focus on improving the playability as well as new features.

[Aquillion]

Remember that ultimately, Dwarf Fortress' success depends on Toady having fun making it.  Its predecessor, Armok 1, eventually halted because Toady kept making himself work on things he didn't enjoy -- fancy 3D graphics, especially.

I'd rather have Toady working on whatever is most fun for him.  It's worked so far, really, and in the long run the game will probably get more additions and more work put into it overall if he does that.

[Michael]

I'd like to suggest that some of the eternal suggestions be implemented. Pick any of the top 12 or so, really.

Arrogance aside, this relates to one meta-problem with Eternal Suggestions that I've been meaning to bring up.  With over three hundred suggestions and a three vote limit, the typical voter has to pass over many suggestions that he may think, in themselves, to be quite good.

If Eternal Suggestions really did control Toady, this wouldn't be a problem, and would provide useful relative priority information.  The good-but-not-priority items would get their time in the sun as the priority items get completed and fall off the list.

But since it doesn't control him, and moreover there are a lot of badly wanted changes he doesn't want to do, the result is that the system clots up, with an unchanging top ten.  There are probably suggestions in there that would be implemented quickly if they were spotlighted, but they get no votes because most of the people who want them have three "clot" suggestions they want even more badly.

[Aquillion]

Yeah.  An additional major problem with it is that since you only get three votes, people tend to not vote for anything that's low on the list, because it's "throwing your vote away".  Also, since there's no way to vote against things, very controversial stuff can rise very quickly, while uncontroversial things tend to attract less attention and drift down to the bottom.

People have been talking about setting up a better system forever, but...