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[Jacob/Lee]

The Toad hops in mysterious ways.

FTFY

Lol, this has got to be the weirdest thing I've ever heard someone say about Toady.

[Dae]

Please take a few days of vacation. Go somewhere nice, for example, somewhere without telephone or internet.

Do you really think that covering ears and singing "LALA I can't hear you" will cause bugs to vanish?

Yes, Dae literally thinks that.  Also, this is literally you.

Well, not THAT litterally. But I assume Toady has fixed the most severe bugs already, and I can cope with finding the tomb of a ruler near to the tomb of his doppelganger.
Point is, we KNOW there will be bugs. The release won't be perfect, and the aim is not for it to be perfect but to be releasable. And my craving makes me think it is.
Now, I understand why Toady wants to fix the bugs he already knows are there beforehand, if only not to have them reported uselessly.

HOWEVER, if ThreeToe stops reporting bugs, Toady will fill confident enough in the version he has that he can release it.
Then we'll all be happy.
I'm doing this for all of you !

But mostly for me.

[Caldfir]

ohwaitwhat?

If I'm not mistaken, that's the first word from Baughn in like, a year.  I guess that makes sense if updates to the SDL can only been done near to a (major?) release. 

OR

Baughn is only summonable once a year, on Scamps' birthday. 

[monk12]

ohwaitwhat?

If I'm not mistaken, that's the first word from Baughn in like, a year.  I guess that makes sense if updates to the SDL can only been done near to a (major?) release. 

OR

Baughn is only summonable once a year, on Scamps' birthday.

OR

Baughn IS Scamps!

[Totaku]

ohwaitwhat?

If I'm not mistaken, that's the first word from Baughn in like, a year.  I guess that makes sense if updates to the SDL can only been done near to a (major?) release. 

OR

Baughn is only summonable once a year, on Scamps' birthday.

OR

Baughn IS Scamps!

And if that's so, how on earth does a cat learn to do SDL to the extent that it does it good enough for Toady to depend upon? And in 3 years no doubt?

The mysteries of the universe are always amazing.

(and remember this: scamps would of been coding SDL since a few month old to make things even MORE interesting.)

[Kriby]

Toady likes dwarves, fortresses and cats for their coding ability.

[scriver]

Toady's economical situation must be worse than we thought if his kitten has to take a job at Google to support him. To the donation mobile!

[Cruxador]

Do we know how extensive the SDL fixes are? Should we expect TrueType fonts to work perfectly in all situations now?

Not sure if this information is known to the general forum population, so I'll leave it un-green now and change it if nobody knows.

By "work perfectly in all situations" do you mean "be usable for all text in the game," or "not cause the game to crash"?

Well, "perfectly" would entail both of those. I'm somewhat hoping that tilesets won't need to support text rendering in the nearish future.

I haven't found a font that fits well into the default 8x12 textbox; the text gets too small to be easy to see.

So, status: The TTF support isn't flawless yet, but it's a lot closer than it used to be.

Unfortunately I can do a strictly limited number of improvements between DF versions, since I don't have the source code to DF as such and it starts crashing if it gets too much out of sync, so this release will also mark the point where I can start working again.

I don't really remember everything I did, but going by the commit list..
- Some improvements/bugfixes to macro functionality. Meh.
- The TTF code has been.. rewritten? That's terribly vague.. well, never mind. I'm sure it's good.
- TTF has acquired a notion of tab-stops, otherwise known as colons, which makes the menus look much better.
- You can toggle TTF on and off in-game with F12.
- Strings are abbreviated in a TTF-aware manner, so they don't get truncated when the TTF usage would leave a big blank space on the right.
- TTF has acquired an 'auto' mode in addition to on/off, where it'll turn itself on if the tileset is large enough. 14 vertical pixels, by default.

Tileset creators can of course ignore the text if they want and request that users set TRUETYPE:YES.

Thanks for letting us know what the deal is! Sounds like it should work decently in most cases, and the F12 thing is sure to be extremely handy.

Please take a few days of vacation. Go somewhere nice, for example, somewhere without telephone or internet.

Do you really think that covering ears and singing "LALA I can't hear you" will cause bugs to vanish?

Wanting the game even while some bugs remain isn't the same thing as saying that all bugs should be ignored forever. He just said that ThreeToe need not find more bugs to fix before release, because it would be nice to have that release soon, even if it still has some flaws.

[Niccolo]

And if that's so, how on earth does a cat learn to do SDL to the extent that it does it good enough for Toady to depend upon? And in 3 years no doubt?

It's simple: Open up the RAWs and add [CAN_LEARN] and [PERMITTED_JOB:CODER] to Scamps' entry.

[bombzero]

Is there any chance of several of the worst long standing bugs getting fixed in the update storm that will follow the new release?

Also, why not implement some of the player made fixes for certain bugs? some are as simple as small changes to the raws.

specifically referring to the ones that are sufficiently gamebreaking or render an entire feature section unusable.

i know these is a rather pointless questions, but for a while the worse long standing bugs have been communal jokes of sorts, but its been years since some of the bugs started.


also am i correct that we may actually expect more regular, small dwarf fortress updates from now on?

[Footkerchief]

Is there any chance of several of the worst long standing bugs getting fixed in the update storm that will follow the new release?

Yes, those types of bugs will get looked at.

Also, why not implement some of the player made fixes for certain bugs? some are as simple as small changes to the raws.

Simple raws fixes have been specially tagged for Toady's benefit, and he has historically tended include batches of those in bugfix releases.  Quietust's binary patches will also get some special attention.

also am i correct that we may actually expect more regular, small dwarf fortress updates from now on?

At least for a while, yes.

[Untelligent]

Yeah, the current release cycle for a while is:


-Huge release with lots of new features
-Series of small releases to fix new bugs
-One or more medium-sized releases mostly focused on fixing long-standing bugs, each followed by more quick-fixes
-Soap, drown, and repeat

[bombzero]

Yeah, the current release cycle for a while is:


-Huge release with lots of new features
-Series of small releases to fix new bugs
-One or more medium-sized releases mostly focused on fixing long-standing bugs, each followed by more quick-fixes
-Soap, drown, and repeat

I more meant that i had heard that with the new style of splitting the 'arcs' into smaller releases that we may actually expect major releases on a more frequent basis, but they wont be as huge of changes.

[MrWiggles]

I more meant that i had heard that with the new style of splitting the 'arcs' into smaller releases that we may actually expect major releases on a more frequent basis, but they wont be as huge of changes.

That was the goal. The release for the caravan arc were suppose to be short term release... Part one of release One, was a short term release. Part, the larger bulk of release one, ballon into the lovely thing we're going to get.

We're then probablying going to get about 4-6 months of bug fixes and move onto Release 2. In where, Toady might try to go back to the shorter release cycle.

[O11O1]

Hasn't he been trying to switch to a shorter code cycle the entire lifespan of this game?