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Author Topic: Steam Official Announcement Thread (50.11 Edition!)  (Read 438753 times)

Eric Blank

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #315 on: February 11, 2022, 06:01:17 pm »

It does look good. The isometric symbols look better than the front-oriented ones.

What looks weird is the Itty bitty hamlet and hillock hovels next to the huge monastery and fort symbols. And you can't tell right off the bat if a town has a keep. Including a little keep with the houses for human market towns would look great.
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I make Spellcrafts!
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scriver

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #316 on: February 14, 2022, 05:31:45 am »

Volcanoes and mountains look fantastic.  Will volcanoes always have the mountain appearance regardless of elevation?  (Context: Currently, flat volcanoes are possible, albeit rare.  They're essentially lava lakes.)

I can't tell what is a volcano, what to they look like?
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Ziusudra

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #317 on: February 14, 2022, 05:45:09 am »

I can't tell what is a volcano, what to they look like?
There's an island one on the right side, just below the legend on the latest image.
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scriver

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #318 on: February 14, 2022, 03:53:19 pm »

Ah I see it now. Thanks!
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kitfoxgames

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #319 on: February 23, 2022, 01:27:30 pm »

Steam Community Update 23 February 2022: Release Roadmap
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/975370/view/3099043827445055732

Full text:

Hello!

Work has now progressed to the point that we feel like we can share a plan for the next several months of development, all the way up to the release. It has been a long road of course, and I'm sorry it has taken so much time to get to this point, but as it turns out there was an awful lot of stuff to do ha ha. And there's still quite a bit left to go.

We need to maintain some flexibility to react to feedback or emerging circumstances, so the following can't be set in stone. But hopefully it offers something of an idea about what's up. I know there are various levels of patience out there. All we can do is keep at it and try to plan the next steps carefully.

Here's the rough roadmap:

1. Finish the menus that haven't been upgraded yet. These include the graphics and layout for justice, health, diplomacy, and hauling. These aren't small tasks; each will take weeks. I'll also be working with Jacob during this period on the sprites we need to update throughout the project. He submitted the new weapons recently, for instance, and I also got a new batch of music from the composer. It's important to get these things incorporated in a timely fashion so everybody can keep working.

2. As the menus are finished, and the graphics updates are completed, we'll move on to some important interface and usability improvements (tooltips everywhere, Xs to close windows, hotkey support, etc). Some of these can be done fairly quickly, but a few are chunky additions, and there are lots of them to do. After this part is done, the game should be much easier to get into. At the same time, we'll also be continuing to add graphics (flows, the ocean and beach, some more shadows, etc.)

3. All this time, of course, we've been fixing old bugs and making new bugs and fixing them, and here we'll need to focus and spend some quality time with them, so that we have as smooth a launch as possible.

4. We're not sure what level of Steam Workshop will be needed for modding support, and it needs investigation.

5. The old ASCII version has other game modes - Adventure mode, Legends mode, and Arena mode. We've made significant progress on Legends mode, but we haven't done anything with Adventure mode and Arena mode yet. We also have the Classic ASCII mode to support, and we are also working on Mac and Linux builds.

6. There's the matter of Steam achievements and the other various Steam features. We'd like to support whatever people are into here, eventually.

When we finish the first three points, we'll have the playable fort game on Windows. The path ahead is now shorter than the path behind, and looking at the amount of graphics left to produce and the amount of menus to update, it looks like our earliest possible launch date would be in the fall. Many of the things from #5 or #6 will delay the launch significantly, and this leads to some very hard questions indeed! I know most of you want us to launch the game as soon as it is feasible, so we've been thinking about what it might look like to do some of #5 or #6 post-launch.

We'd been hoping to have more of these later items done faster, of course, but a few things happened. Well, 2020 and 2021 happened, ha ha. Also, my original plan for how Classic mode might be implemented has only partially panned out. I made an ASCII friendly interface layer, which'll be a great help, but I underestimated how long it would take to retool all of the smaller clickable buttons into an ASCII-friendly state. A few menus will need to be redone from scratch, and my current thinking is that doing ASCII versions of the menus alone would take a few months. I'd mostly been accounting for keeping and adapting the ASCII glyphs we already had in place, with some alterations to support for example the ability to see multiple Z levels, but the menus have changed so much it's now a much larger project. The hard question then is do we want to delay the initial release to do this? Or launch, and then do the free update after.

Adventure mode is straightforward in its way. I don't expect it'll have many real development gotchas, but it does have dozens of menus, some of them quite complex. So similarly, that'll be months of work to complete. It's an important part of the game and has figured into some of the most well-known DF community stories, but it's also separate enough from Fortress mode that we can conceive of letting people get their hands on fort mode first. Again, delay or launch?

We'll be pondering this and considering feedback. We'll eventually get to everything; it's just a matter of the best order to do things, with a different right answer for different players, frustratingly enough! I'm grateful for how patient people have been in general, especially with everything going on, and thankful for the support we've gotten from the community and Kitfox as we try to get this initial release together.

We'll continue to keep you posted with regular news updates.

-Tarn
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ruiruirui

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #320 on: February 23, 2022, 03:40:19 pm »

EARLY ACCESS PLZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #321 on: February 23, 2022, 10:32:29 pm »

Oh well, a few years more to enjoy other hobbies before an actual Steam release of Dwarf Fortress with all it's parts attached then.

Can't be helped I suppose. But also can't help feeling that there will never be a "let's implement Adventurer" focused few months development period and it'll just be put off constantly.
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Eric Blank

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #322 on: February 23, 2022, 11:23:21 pm »

An early access sounds nice, but adventure mode is a must-have for me. and that's a lot of gameplay missing. I would personally like to see that at least playable without graphical support, but it sounds like it won't be possible to play it at all until the menus are done, so the graphics for them will come along with.
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I make Spellcrafts!
I have no idea where anything is. I have no idea what anything does. This is not merely a madhouse designed by a madman, but a madhouse designed by many madmen, each with an intense hatred for the previous madman's unique flavour of madness.

Mr Crabman

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #323 on: February 24, 2022, 04:03:14 am »

An early access sounds nice, but adventure mode is a must-have for me. and that's a lot of gameplay missing. I would personally like to see that at least playable without graphical support, but it sounds like it won't be possible to play it at all until the menus are done, so the graphics for them will come along with.

My guess from what we've seen before is actually that it would work exactly the same as it does now, just with the better graphics for the world/things in the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYS-kNvgXR8

You can see in that video the stockpile interface (and worldgen) was still there; it looks like Toady has to actually manually remove the old ASCII interface and keybinds and then re-implement them. That video, plus the fact that we've seen graphical screenshots of adventure mode before (there was a donkey with lots of stuff packed on its back in one), indicates that adventure mode will work as it does now, just with the different rendering for the world itself.

victor11

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #324 on: March 02, 2022, 11:21:47 pm »

Looks great! But I was wondering if it's still possible to select individual squad members instead of the whole squads?
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Kooky

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #325 on: March 03, 2022, 11:14:49 pm »

I’m Kooky and I’ve lurked on these forums for many years, but rarely if ever post.  Rather than reddit or other social media, I was told the Bay12 forums were the best place to comment if you want your post reviewed by Toady.  If there is a better thread or location to talk about the split between releasing early without adventure mode, or delayed, with adventure mode, please point me in that direction.

I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress on and off since about 2010.   It will hook me, let me go, and get me again later, just like many of you.  If you would have asked me the release question 4 weeks ago, I would have been firmly in the delay camp.  I haven’t been a long time supporter of Bay12, I sent Toady just a single $5 check what seems an eternity ago.

This last week I was diagnosed with Stage IV bile duct cancer, with a very poor prognosis.  Obviously anything can happen, and willpower and new treatments can change things.  Even still, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to see graphical DF on the ‘also includes adventure mode’ timetable.  So, I will go ahead and say that I choose the earlier ‘Fortress + Legends’ release.   And, it’s not just that I want to play it (and I do), but I want the chance to get to watch the gaming world fall in love with this thing Tarn and Zach made that’s just been hiding in plain sight from everyone.  Toady, know that I purchased today on Itch.io, so now I’m in for $25.  Toady, please know that this is the greatest value deal I’ve ever gotten in my whole life as a gamer.

Thank You
-Kooky
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King Mir

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #326 on: March 04, 2022, 02:00:18 am »

IMO adventure mode sucks, so releasing earlier without it is better. It's that simple.

Or to put it more politely, most DF players are drawn to DF for fort mode, not adventure mode. Releasing a product that includes only the best parts of DF currently, earlier, is a sound business decision.

Libertine Angel

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #327 on: March 04, 2022, 06:32:18 pm »

I think launching and then adding Adventure Mode later is reasonable. A whole lot of people only play for Fort mode, I think a lot of the new audience that'd be waiting for this release has probably only heard of the game as a management one and doesn't even know there's a whole other way to play, I can't think of any serious downside to releasing without it.
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Rumrusher

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #328 on: March 06, 2022, 05:42:50 am »

Kinda for not releasing it early, like I don't know if new folks would pick up adventure mode later on as a patch vs it being there at the start.

Though I don't know if this is 'adv mode not going to be in premium if launched early' or 'adv mode would be stuck in an 47.05 era-like state if launched early.'
The latter seems more reasonable for me but I can see folks getting slightly upset, the former might burn some folks completely who been waiting to play Premium adventure mode and getting to hear the premium adventure mode music at launch(which now thinking about it probably might be true with the latter on the music side of things).

Oh wait this isn't just adventure mode but also linux and mac builds of dwarf fortress being set to 'patch in later' so window fort mode only players get a chance at the game early.
So yeah I'm for delaying the release.
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Starver

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Re: Steam Official Announcement Thread (0.47.05 Edition!)
« Reply #329 on: March 06, 2022, 02:33:45 pm »

I'm in the otherwise dissinterested position of thinking it should be done 'properly', as much as possible[1], for the game's sake.

For the players' sakes, those who are actually chomping at the bit for whatever reason[2] I'm appreciative that there's also good reasons for getting something out without too much delay. If it's something that fails to work well, that would be the worst of all worlds, so I hope the right balance is chosen in such a case.

Future players..? I'm less bothered about early-release for them. Anyone who doesn't know what they're missing can probably be better astounded by the more fully-formed game, than enticed in with a retro-featured compromise that underwhelms.


But there are far more concerns. The general passage of time rapidly erodes all potential futures. Such is life. If any of the parties involved disappears/becomes uninterested then there are major hiccoughs to overcome (already seen with the recent artist switch-over, though that itself seems to not be doing much to the schedule). But releasing early might miss out on going with a 'killer app' paradigm (literally a "game changer") that could be advantageous.

Squaring that circle is not easy. I'm inclined to let Tarn decide what works for him. Without his commitment, there's nothing. Adding further external demands isn't going to help, and there are probably far more than enough suggestions. Especially from someone like me, who probably isn't in the primary Steam-release market, though I hope I can still become a later-adopter. (It's for this reason that I thought long and hard about saying anything - hence why I've apparently said everything, to nullify any usefulness at all!)



[1] There will always be incomplete and incompletely-tuned bits. Not a comment about Tarn's approach, it's an issue pretty much universal to any development. At least we know we're likely to get an "Ooops, I'll fix that!" from this developer, wherever possible... Others have been known to patch things up, at best, then call it a day.

[2] @Kooky: All my best wishes for you, BTW. Sincerely so.
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