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[Kappas]

If related to SOPA I find the blank update pretty clever.

Oh yes. He managed to provoke some attention to the issue, regardless of if it was intentional or not.

[jockmo42]

So I know this gets asked constantly, but is there anyone who knows what Toady has left to sort out before release? I am so excited to play this beast. :]

[Caldfir]

So I know this gets asked constantly, but is there anyone who knows what Toady has left to sort out before release? I am so excited to play this beast. :]

Well, according to the bay12 report, and assuming that he is working trough tasks in the order listed there, all that's left after the animals is incorporating some SDL fixes. 

In any case, the list of new stuff in the upcoming version is enormous.  There will be a lot to check out.  I for one am most excited to see adventure mode finally looking like it will be more of a "game".  Places to explore, quests to be had, monsters to fight, dungeons to delve, and most importantly, lots and lots of pointless crap to buy (all points into misc object user -> beat goblins to death with an iron chair). 

[Yoink]

Imagine if one day we'll be able to place our spike/weapon traps at a specific (fraction of a z-level) height, thus targeting a specific area of the body... I could keep my dwarves healthy by filling the hall to and from the dining room with retracting wooden spikes and blocks at abdomen level, battering the satisfied diners into puking out their *crundle tallow roasts* and thus keeping their beer-bellies at a manageable level!
There would, of course, be one lonely, unhinged dwarf locked in an adjacent room clad only in stretchy exercise clothes and charged with repeatedly pulling the lever to activate the dwarven fitness machine. He would be rewarded for his efforts with a yearly, unsatisfying meal of -pig milk protein shake- and +rope reed salad+.

...Of course, you could utilize this ability in practical ways too, such as the efficient destruction of invaders, but where's the fun in that?! [/completely unrelated to the current discussion]

More on-topic, I am so very very very very excited for this release. I had an important question for Toady too, but then I forgot it. I hate it when that happens.

[tfaal]

You could also aim a hammer above a dwarf's head, so that your trade depot was safe for your citizens, but unsafe for elves and humans.

[Monkeyfacedprickleback]

Looking over the Devlog today the first thought I had was
Will there be Snow Shoveling In Dwarf/adventure mode eventually.
 I was originally going to make this into a joke, but it occurred to me that snow and sand building dunes and ramps could be interesting,But may be unrealistic or unfeasible.

[Footkerchief]

So I know this gets asked constantly, but is there anyone who knows what Toady has left to sort out before release? I am so excited to play this beast. :]

Well, according to the bay12 report, and assuming that he is working trough tasks in the order listed there, all that's left after the animals is incorporating some SDL fixes. 

My understanding is that optimization and map maintenance aren't done yet:

01/13/2012 Toady One While I continue to mull over map maintenance on paper, I undertook some general optimization today [...] There's still a large change that'll need to be made in how items are stored, since all of the auxiliary indexing structures that keep dwarf mode playable get hammered as you move around in item-heavy towns in adventure mode. Artwork generation has also become slow. Targeting too, in all modes, something to do with the werewolf/necromancer checks.

He hasn't mentioned completing those optimizations, or doing map maintenance on not-paper, so I wouldn't be shocked if there's a week's worth of work left on those sections combined.

Looking over the Devlog today the first thought I had was
Will there be Snow Shoveling In Dwarf/adventure mode eventually.
 I was originally going to make this into a joke, but it occurred to me that snow and sand building dunes and ramps could be interesting,But may be unrealistic or unfeasible.

This came up in DF Talk 4:

Toady:   There's this notion of sand as a fluid I think, that's kind of intriguing. Like if you have a bunch of sand leaning up against a rock wall and you remove the rock wall, the sand doesn't retain its shape, it'll just flow into the cavern. So it would be really cool if it could be made into a fluid like that, that behaves kind of like lava does now; because lava makes more slopes, it doesn't worry about fluid pressure and all that kind of thing. And it would be cool if the sand could move like that, but at the same time you could still walk or even build on it, or whatever you need to do. And in that way it would become a limited resource because when you scoop up some it would just remove a unit of sand from the square. Snow has a similar thing. Right now though it depends not just on the fluid rewrite - which is going to allow us to support more fluid types at once - but also the notion that this is a very special fluid that can be walked on and all that. So you'd be pathfinding over it, and at the same time it would be able to flow. It's one of those things like; is this an insurmountable problem? It might be, it might be one of those things that's very very difficult to do.
Rainseeker:   Well [it] would make it actually very difficult to build; especially if someone decided to build on a sand dune.
Toady:   That should be hard, but you could still pitch a tent there or something; and then that tent should just fall over if you drain the sand into a giant sinkhole or something.
Rainseeker:   Well I'm thinking people build pillars to support things, so if someone built a pillar on a sand dune which then shifted that thing should fall over and that should be really interesting to do.
Toady:   That's one of those things that's very difficult but you'd ideally want sand to have those additional properties.

Also DF Talk 8:

Rainseeker:   If I could ask briefly about gravity and cave-ins. I had a dwarf once ... I had an entrance that was over some soil and then I had seven layers hollowed out beneath, just individual layers and at one point one of my dwarves fell through the soil - I'm not sure how this happened - and fell seven layers, through each floor, and they proceeded to be rock. I got a message that 'so and so had died' and I looked at the top and found a hole going seven layers deep so I was just curious, is that a random event that happens occasionally if enough people run over something?
Toady:   Oh no, no. That shouldn't have happened at all. There's nothing like quicksand or sinkholes or soil disappearing or anything like that.
Capntastic:   There should be ...
Toady:   Well it's quite a weird thing right now, like especially when you're in a sandy desert, you can dig out a room underneath the sand and the sand is just pretending to be sandstone or something, and it's one of those things where you have the fluid model and the cave-in model should intersect in some way. We wanted sand to be a fluid that acts like magma does but it's a difficult problem to have the path finding and building structures - or at least certain kinds of structures - and dropping items on it that stand on top of it, and then having it also interact with other fluids; it's a difficult problem. It's one we haven't completely given up on but it's tricky. Just in general if soil collapsed all the time that might be fine but one of the problems with cave-ins is if you don't have a simple model like that - like either it collapses all the time or it's a seven by seven or something like that - you can model all the complicated statics and arches and all the things that you want; you can work really hard on getting a system that's accurate but then communicating with the player about when something is going to collapse, when is it not collapsing, when is it close to collapsing, how far you can go, becomes very difficult. You want people to be able to build a statue like the Crazy Horse monument or something where the arm is outstretched and not just going to collapse, but at the same time if you took the Crazy Horse monument and then built a giant building and put giant golden status in there and stuff you might want the arm to give at some point and collapse and fall down into the plains or whatever. But how do you communicate that to the player? So right now we're stuck in this almost no cave-in system where the player is clear when things are going to collapse because they actually have to be disconnected and if we step away from that then communication becomes actually the largest problem. There's a bit of infrastructure already; it keeps track of columns up and down of solid stone and could communicate information between those columns: how they are shearing against each other and transmitting forces downward to try and find a place to anchor to, and if the forces got too high maybe something could shear off and fall. But if your model is really complicated then you're leaving the player hanging - or not hanging as the case may be - and this is a big problem I think with trying to do a really accurate model; bothering investing the time in that when it's just going to lead to a ton of confusion.

[Footkerchief]

accidental double-post

vvvv yeah I suck :[

[MrWiggles]

For shame Footkerchief.

For shame.

[Owlbread]

So I know this gets asked constantly, but is there anyone who knows what Toady has left to sort out before release? I am so excited to play this beast. :]

Well, according to the bay12 report, and assuming that he is working trough tasks in the order listed there, all that's left after the animals is incorporating some SDL fixes. 

In any case, the list of new stuff in the upcoming version is enormous.  There will be a lot to check out.  I for one am most excited to see adventure mode finally looking like it will be more of a "game".  Places to explore, quests to be had, monsters to fight, dungeons to delve, and most importantly, lots and lots of pointless crap to buy (all points into misc object user -> beat goblins to death with an iron chair).

I've got to be honest in saying that I don't really like it when Toady makes these massive releases. When I hear "The list of new stuff in the upcoming version is enormous", I hear "The upcoming version is going to be buggier than a rotten tree in the Amazon".

Perhaps I'm just traumatised by DF2010's release.

[Knight Otu]

My understanding is that optimization and map maintenance aren't done yet:

01/13/2012 Toady One While I continue to mull over map maintenance on paper, I undertook some general optimization today [...] There's still a large change that'll need to be made in how items are stored, since all of the auxiliary indexing structures that keep dwarf mode playable get hammered as you move around in item-heavy towns in adventure mode. Artwork generation has also become slow. Targeting too, in all modes, something to do with the werewolf/necromancer checks.

He hasn't mentioned completing those optimizations, or doing map maintenance on not-paper, so I wouldn't be shocked if there's a week's worth of work left on those sections combined.

Yeah, the bulk of the optimizations are probably still coming. Likely as the very last step, after everything else is in place.

Also regarding the sponsorship animals - there are 127 animals on the list of sponsored animals. Seven of them (and the hedgehog, but I guess it shouldn't count if it's been reworked, as well as leechmen, snailmen, and slugmen, but they're probably also reworked, or at least marked for any new features for their base creatures) are in the game already, leaving 120 for the next version. That means that the next version contains nearly 360 new (non-random) stock creatures (base, giant, person). With the released sponsorship creatures, Toady occasionally added other relatives (penguin types, honey badger), so there could be a few more (unless other relatives count as features).

[Karlito]

I've got to be honest in saying that I don't really like it when Toady makes these massive releases. When I hear "The list of new stuff in the upcoming version is enormous", I hear "The upcoming version is going to be buggier than a rotten tree in the Amazon".

Perhaps I'm just traumatised by DF2010's release.

This has been the pattern of DF's release schedule since the very beginning: Long wait for version with many new features followed by several months of bugfix releases, repeat.

[Footkerchief]

I've got to be honest in saying that I don't really like it when Toady makes these massive releases. When I hear "The list of new stuff in the upcoming version is enormous", I hear "The upcoming version is going to be buggier than a rotten tree in the Amazon".

Perhaps I'm just traumatised by DF2010's release.

I agree.  A while back, I looked at the past big releases (32a, 31.01) and found a pattern: for every 4.75 months of pre-release work, it takes 1 month of bugfixing to get the game playable after release.

This has been the pattern of DF's release schedule since the very beginning: Long wait for version with many new features followed by several months of bugfix releases, repeat.

Well, it's been one of the two patterns.  The other pattern is relatively lightweight releases containing new features in addition to bug fixes.

Let's assume a Feb 1 release.  Together, the long cycles (32a, 31.01, and the upcoming version) will have taken up 800 days, out of the 1638 total days since the first public release.  So it's fair to say that Toady does this about half the time.

[nil]

Agreed with the observation that long release cycles are less-than-ideal (as is, I'm almost positive, Toady--I'm pretty sure I've heard him say more than once in DF Talks and the like that it's something he'd rather avoid).  That said, I'm loving the brown recluse spidermen

[Caldfir]

Well, I do try to play the game despite bugginess during the early releases.  The more issues can be correctly identified and nailed down on the tracker, the faster Toady can fix them.  The best thing that can be done is to figure out exactly the steps that reproduce an issue, because typically, to the programmer who wrote it, that gives very clear directions to finding where the problem is in the code. 

I do wish though that people would try to do a search for their bugs before posting a new one - I'm certain Foot is going to be run ragged trying to figure out what the root bugs are and linking things intelligently. 

So yeah, we aren't anywhere near a 'stable' release, however in general the place bugs are most crippling is fort mode, since the typical player puts a significant investment into their fortress, and having, I dunno, all your dwarves' skeletons melt in the summer heat can be pretty disheartening.  That's why I mentioned I was looking forward to adventure mode - not only is that where the new features are most evident, but the adventurer is kind of an expendable guy.  Game crashes and deletes your adventurer? Unfortunate, but not as soul-crushing as having a 20-year fort getting a corrupted savefile and becoming unusable. 

I guess my main point is that yeah, bugs are proportional to the number of new/changed features, but I'll be playing a lot of adventure mode, so I'm not gonna let them bring me down