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[James009]

I'd love to see a new release, however, I JUST got into Dwarf Fortress and I'm still learning and exploring it. I just like the sound of everything Toady talks about Future of the Fortress

Anyways, my 5 cents, Notch will spend four to six months implementing ONE or two features where as it seems like Toady will release a grand expansion. Wish he'd do more frequent and smaller bug fixing or small feature updates but he's up to his eyeballs in code. Also, I haven't yet paid for Dwarf Fortress.

On that note, I bet if EVERYONE here were to donate $15 to $40 bucks we'd start seeing some real progress, feedback, and results.

[Greiger]

Yea Toady kind of works in cycles.  A long dry spell with a large number of features upcoming and then a bunch of rapidfire bugfixes and small features.  It's actually possible to look at the dates on the old versions download page to get a feel for the pattern.

Believe it or not, not so long ago there were people sticking to only one version because they were waiting for the big storm of 2 or 3 releases a week to calm down.  And there are a few versions of DF that DFHack does not function with because another release came out before the DFHack folks found all the memory addresses for the previous version.

...At least this isn't another big 19 month cycle like before...  What was that again, the materiel rewrite?  And even that was worth every day.   

P.S. Well except maybe those days Toady had Swine Flu.  But I'm sure he would agree there.  I think he was still working on the game at least a little bit during that too, judging from an old comment about how he doesn't remember writing some of the stuff that was in the code after he got better.

[Cruxador]

Well this thread sure got shitty.

Anyway, with the latest dev post, it seems like Toady's adding more, so the release will be a longer ways off. Although I'd really only tack on a week for books, because it doesn't sound like he's putting in much depth beyond what he's already done with it.

[Tharwen]

Notch: Millions on his bank account, staff of people helping him.
Toady: His brother and around 3k a month.

Minecraft - Adventure Update: Three new critters, experience system that does nothing, some cosmetic changes, villages without NPCs, Dungeons.

Dwarf Fortress, next update: Vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies and skeletons are back, necromancers, 8 new animals from the donation drive, each one of them completely different from each other. Whole cities, complete with NPCs, furniture traceable on the world gen, sewers, catacombs, dungeons, interactions as an adventurer...

Can you really compare them?

Minecraft - 3D graphics. Game balancing required during development.

[Jacob/Lee]

Here's a compilation of confirmed features for the next release: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1u8jibE1TV7BAwAI2b4TzRkWFlBboLiXMrVBhYmDYPhI&pli=1

Glorious, thanks for posting that. Also,

Creatures can now be weak or strong against certain materials

Legendary werewolf hunter, anyone?

[thvaz]

Notch: Millions on his bank account, staff of people helping him.
Toady: His brother and around 3k a month.

Minecraft - Adventure Update: Three new critters, experience system that does nothing, some cosmetic changes, villages without NPCs, Dungeons.

Dwarf Fortress, next update: Vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies and skeletons are back, necromancers, 8 new animals from the donation drive, each one of them completely different from each other. Whole cities, complete with NPCs, furniture traceable on the world gen, sewers, catacombs, dungeons, interactions as an adventurer...

Can you really compare them?

Minecraft - 3D graphics. Game balancing required during development.

Sure. Minecraft's top-notch 3D graphics must be really difficult to update. Each model is breaking record after record of polygon-counting.

[Mickey Blue]

Its just balancing the "Want it now!1!" part of us with the "Well it will be better in the end if we wait.." part of us.

To use minecraft in an actual positive example (cause hey, its an awesome game) when Notch was working on the multiplayer part of it people were chomping at the bit for him to release, ultimately he caved to the pressure and released earlier then he intended to after discussing (and I think making a poll) asking people if they'd prefer a quicker version that was likely to still have some significant bugs in it or wait for them to be hammered out.  They opted for quicker and got it.. And then almost immediately started bitching about the bugs.. You just cannot please some people.

Now yes, generally every major release of DF has bugs in it, but hey major releases of AAA games have bugs too and they have millions of dollars worth of budget and entire buildings full of staff (and aside from graphics many AAA games are less complicated then your odd DF release). 

Toady will do what he does, get the game updated.  I'll do what I do, be annoyed that it takes so long with one half of my brain and with the other half understand that quality (or perhaps.. Beyond quality? HA!) takes time, particularly when you have two people working on it who also no doubt have lives. 

But the waaaiit is the hardest part..

By comparison, I'm basically doing the same thing with Diablo III right now.  Blizzard has this habit of releasing tons of info on games they are years out of completing and then almost always end up missing whatever release date they do say by months anyways.  That said, (YMMV), Blizzard rarely releases 'bad' games (ok I heard some rough things about Starcraft II but I haven't played that one) where as companies who rush titles out often have games that are missing tons of features or flat out don't work.

This one will come out before too long, then we'll get another half dozen or so that fix bugs like having vampires burst into flame when they come into contact with cats or plump helmets gain the ability to rain fire and brimstone down onto a map and by the end we'll all be waiting for whatever the next one is.

[Jake]

Well this thread sure got shitty.

Anyway, with the latest dev post, it seems like Toady's adding more, so the release will be a longer ways off. Although I'd really only tack on a week for books, because it doesn't sound like he's putting in much depth beyond what he's already done with it.

I'm thinking we'll see a release some time around Christmas. Enough bugfixes for it to become somewhat playable should have happened by around Febuary.

[FearfulJesuit]

Christmas does sound like a more reasonable release date. I'm perfectly fine with it, mainly because I don't play Adventure Mode (which will be most influenced by the new release), and the current version is actually really stable. Most of the bugs that do exist are ones such as the Dungeon Master that have been around for so long that I don't notice them as bugs at all; they're just part of the game- not features, but not perceived as a gaping hole. It helps that I started playing DF about a year ago, when many of those bugs still existed.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Notch: Millions on his bank account, staff of people helping him.
Toady: His brother and around 3k a month.

Minecraft - Adventure Update: Three new critters, experience system that does nothing, some cosmetic changes, villages without NPCs, Dungeons.

Dwarf Fortress, next update: Vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies and skeletons are back, necromancers, 8 new animals from the donation drive, each one of them completely different from each other. Whole cities, complete with NPCs, furniture traceable on the world gen, sewers, catacombs, dungeons, interactions as an adventurer...

Can you really compare them?

Minecraft - 3D graphics. Game balancing required during development.

3D graphics were an awesome selling point when first invented, say Doom or Tomb Raider I era. Now, you need REALLY good graphics to sell a game on that. Minecraft's graphics are, by what I assume is stylistic choice, not ground-breaking. Therefore, Minecraft sells on gameplay, which, as thvaz noted, are less diverse (if also a bit less...perverse?) than DF's.

Personally, I'm fine with whatever Toady can do, but hope for a finish on what he's doing now and a few loose ends so he can release it. After all, DF players are much better bugtesters than Toady due to our numbers and twisted intellects.

[Tharwen]

Notch: Millions on his bank account, staff of people helping him.
Toady: His brother and around 3k a month.

Minecraft - Adventure Update: Three new critters, experience system that does nothing, some cosmetic changes, villages without NPCs, Dungeons.

Dwarf Fortress, next update: Vampires, werewolves, mummies, zombies and skeletons are back, necromancers, 8 new animals from the donation drive, each one of them completely different from each other. Whole cities, complete with NPCs, furniture traceable on the world gen, sewers, catacombs, dungeons, interactions as an adventurer...

Can you really compare them?

Minecraft - 3D graphics. Game balancing required during development.

Sure. Minecraft's top-notch 3D graphics must be really difficult to update. Each model is breaking record after record of polygon-counting.

Every object and creature in Minecraft has to directly interact with the 3D environment so it and its effects can be rendered in it correctly, whereas in Dwarf Fortress they rarely do beyond simple gravity and temperature calculations.

Also, like I said, Minecraft requires game balancing. The Adams' seems to prefer to apply lots of interesting rules to the world, see what comes out, and cull the things that aren't fun to play.

3D graphics were an awesome selling point when first invented, say Doom or Tomb Raider I era. Now, you need REALLY good graphics to sell a game on that. Minecraft's graphics are, by what I assume is stylistic choice, not ground-breaking. Therefore, Minecraft sells on gameplay, which, as thvaz noted, are less diverse (if also a bit less...perverse?) than DF's.

Similarly, it's not that Minecraft's graphics are good, it's that it has 3D graphics at all. Dwarf Fortress is essentially lots of individual 2D layers which perform checks against each other when required, whereas a 3D environment is constantly interacting with objects in all directions.

[NobodyPro]

Minecraft - 3D graphics. Game balancing required during development.

I never before noticed that Dwarf Fortress is largely unbalanced. It's just so... fun.

[Darkweave]

Minecraft - 3D graphics. Game balancing required during development.

I never before noticed that Dwarf Fortress is largely unbalanced. It's just so... Fun.

It doesn't matter in a massive way as the game is open enough to allow players to apply their own rules to themselves to achieve the desired level of difficulty. If you want to embark to a terrifying glacier with peasants and no equipment you can. If you want to embark to a calm forest with 4000 points of food and some steel armour and weapons you can. And that's before any actual gameplay is considered. The reason I love DF so much is that rather than being a more traditional game that's designed entirely around the user experience it is instead a world simulator that takes you along for the ride.

As for the thread title I'd estimate three to four months. Toady has a bunch of major bugs and issues to fix but no massive features to implement or rewrite. I'd love to see taverns make their way in to the upcoming version but I'm guessing we'll be waiting another year or so for taverns, hill dwarves and a load of economy and trade related features and rewrites to be ready for us to exploit, weaponise and generally wreak havoc upon. I doubt it will take more than a week for someone to have any patrons that engage in a bar fight be fed to a forgotten beast in a similar fashion to Jabba feeding those who displease him to the Rancor.

[Neonivek]

8 new animals from the donation drive, each one of them completely different from each other

Only Eight? Toady actually made quite a bit of headway and plans to have the entire list done before december.

[thvaz]

Every object and creature in Minecraft has to directly interact with the 3D environment so it and its effects can be rendered in it correctly, whereas in Dwarf Fortress they rarely do beyond simple gravity and temperature calculations.

Also, like I said, Minecraft requires game balancing. The Adams' seems to prefer to apply lots of interesting rules to the world, see what comes out, and cull the things that aren't fun to play.

Minecraft may have 3d graphics, but it is tile based as DF. It is not so different. The engine of the game is more or less done, adding content should be really easy.