March 6, 2024: Dwarf Fortress 50.12 has been released.
News: February 3, 2024: The February '24 Report is up.
News: February 4, 2021: Dwarf Fortress Talk #28 has been posted.
News: November 21, 2018: A new Threetoe story has been posted.
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c-evo development pattern is similar to dwarf fortress, where a single programmer works for years perfecting his game engine and shares it for free. Steffen ended up open sourcing it after he got a real job, though 
The hard part is keeping a lean set of outputs from the main code to the client. The even harder part is writing the client!
Civ Evolution (http://www.c-evo.org/) uses the server with client DLL method to great effect. Instead of writing new user interfaces, players wrote AI modules for each DLL. The same could be done here, write a player AI without a UI, but that's a task for the possessed. I've written an AI DLL, and a network interface DLL for c-evo, it was a lot of work and I never had much of a remote client interface. But it would be nice to have as a theoretical possibility for DF. Again, because the game will always be evolving, we can't get a complete interface for a long time... and you really need a complete interface to do it right.
I'd like multiplayer also, but I don't think Toady could hack it in a reasonable amount of time. Changing to a client/server setup would be good for the game long term, because people could run the client on slower computers and connect to fast servers. After we get a lot of cool stuff in the todo list, it would be nice to get 
I would think the humans would be good at producing a lot of food, more than they consume. They probably consume more weapons and armor than they produce.
Consumption is really the driving force, if nobody is buying crafts would you bother making them? What things do dwarves consume a lot of? Mostly wood and ale. Nobles are the only ones collecting expensive jewelry and statues, you'd need more advanced civilizations to demand that (elves). Wars would increase the demand for weapons and armor, peaceful groups would not have much demand... good thing these worlds aren't very peaceful.
Humans probably produce a lot of wood, ale, and food. But if nobody is buying they won't make as much.
That was a really long post!I thought their descriptions were pretty cool, though a lot of that applied to very very deep underground. Dwarves are usually close to the surface, and their caves aren't so isolated. I don't think I'd want to have to do too much work to get underground farms going... it might be interesting if rotting organic material left behind fertilizer that could be used instead of potash.
"mass build": building planning, architecture design. Something to put construction at the same level as mining and engraving. Optional "construction recorder" that lets you reuse constructions.
Standing production orders: With the manager, pick a product and a desired stocking level. If your usable stocks (as counted by the guy who counts) drop below the stocking level, automatically create a new job to make more.
Job priorities: For every task a dwarf can do, let us set a priority (1-99?). When they are asked to do a job, have them check if there are any higher priority jobs outstanding that they could be doing instead.
It's a good judge of what people want the most
