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Author Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items  (Read 3510740 times)

Vlynndar

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2265 on: June 02, 2009, 03:51:39 am »

You know. I'm just amazed I'm playing ths game and it almost magically keeps getting better and better.
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Drakale

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2266 on: June 02, 2009, 12:50:15 pm »

Cardinal sin time.  Forgive me oh lords, for my chest need unburdening.

So four months is the new nebulous everyone-nods-in-agreement time frame?  The last update was September 6, 2008.  If this last stretch of squads, sites, and finalization takes more that three months and a week, that would make an entire year between releases.

This development arc includes descriptive paragraphs, a vastly improved material and body system and damage thereof, an overhauled and expanded stat and skill system, a restructuring of squads and governance, an industrial scale healthcare system, and a slew of new map features.  Each of those bullet points is awesome, but none of them are directly dependent on each others' implementation.  Each could have been released in turn.

Now, I'm not threatening to stop playing or anything.  I'm not going anywhere, and as soon I pay some bills I'll be donating again.  But I'm a die-hard fan.  An entire year between 'updates' is getting silly, because a lot of people are just going to stop paying attention or caring.  I say again, screw save compatibility or whatever the need for bundling so much work into distinct releases, and let us play with it.

There are some pretty good reason appart from save compatibility for not releasing each new feature as an update. Creating a stable and (more or less) balanced release for every separate feature would take a LOT of work on Toady part. Right now he can just add features to the mess and then balance them all together at the end of the long developpement cycle without worrying about alienating players with broken/buggy features. Small incremental update would make sense with a proper team, but Toady work alone on this, he cannot let someone else take care of release and maintenance while he work on the new stuff.

I imagine getting sidetracked all the time by bug fixing, balancing and other things would make adding new feature even slower than it is now.
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Tormy

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2267 on: June 02, 2009, 01:40:56 pm »

I'm hoping to make a rig that could run Crysis at 4x the max settings, since I heard that u liek mudkips Crysis is some sort of worthiness test for a computer.

It's a good FPS actually. Btw Crysis 2. is in the making, so it's possible that your new comp won't be able to run that on max. settings. [In fact I am sure about this.. ;D]
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Jonathan S. Fox

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2268 on: June 02, 2009, 01:55:45 pm »

While I feel an instinctual revulsion to the very idea of complaining about the release schedule for Dwarf Fortress, on an intellectual level I must agree with Aqizzar's skepticism regarding the necessity of staggering releases so much. This sort of long delay made a lot of sense for the transition to 3D, as it's easy to imagine much of the game was broken by the transition and had to be rebuilt, often from the ground up, to support the new system. In this case however, I don't see the need.

It feels very ungrateful to complain, so I don't want to come across with that tone; I just want to emphasize that I don't think Aqizzar is wrong in his points.

Trying to get it out any faster than it needs to be seems to me to be risking lower quality and even more bugs than we already anticipate. So I don't see pushing for a quicker release to necessarily be very profitable, to be honest.

There are two separate issues here: Rushing development, and releasing features separately. Rushing development means you take shortcuts to get to the destination faster, thereby compromising quality control. Releasing features separately means take the time necessary to do everything right, but don't wait until you have five things done before releasing the first four. What you're saying here is a criticism of rushed development, but that's not really the issue at hand.

I agree with what you're saying for a commercial release structure, because if a feature set doesn't come out when the game is shipped, it's pushed back to an expansion pack or cancelled entirely. If a commercial game is delayed to pack more features into the big release, then let it be delayed. But for a game that is being incrementally released for free and is donation-supported, the model is quite different from this. In an incremental release structure, it's not necessary, and potentially counterproductive, to delay a release to add more features to it.

Creating a stable and (more or less) balanced release for every separate feature would take a LOT of work on Toady part. Right now he can just add features to the mess and then balance them all together at the end of the long developpement cycle without worrying about alienating players with broken/buggy features. Small incremental update would make sense with a proper team, but Toady work alone on this, he cannot let someone else take care of release and maintenance while he work on the new stuff.

In a free game like this, players generally appreciate new features more than they're concerned with strong quality control. That isn't to say quality control isn't important, but if it alienated players the way you say, nobody would play Dwarf Fortress for all the the overpowered elite bowmen, killer carp, mandates for things you don't have, and so on.

In practice, the fastest way to do quality control is to get the game in the hands of players and collect the most common feedback then quickly iterate on it. When fifty, a hundred, a thousand, or more people are all playing a game, you very quickly are able to determine where it's working best and where it needs work. You are essentially outsourcing half of the bugfixing and balancing process, thus getting the polished product into the hands of players faster than it would otherwise. I'm speaking from experience with Liberal Crime Squad releases here; there are times I've pushed a release out specifically because I wanted to balance a feature, or because I've done some substantial amount of work and I know there's going to be a handful of game-breaking bugs that I just haven't been able to track down. This draws players into the development process, and if you make no bones about the prediction that there are going to be issues and are quick to work on problems that arise, people tend to be very receptive to it.

I imagine getting sidetracked all the time by bug fixing, balancing and other things would make adding new feature even slower than it is now.

The saying "It's not the destination, but the journey that counts" applies to this kind of development. Even if it's true that feature X is released two months later if feature Y is released four months earlier, the net result is that players get to play an intermediate feature set for six months instead of an early feature set for four months. If we were to create an enjoyment calculus to weigh these options, then unless feature X was far more awesome than feature Y, the incremental release schedule would come out as the more powerful of the two options.

Also, for save compat, I know many of you don't care, but I still like to break it the fewest times possible.  If I'm ultimately encouraging people to "play the world" or to play many games in the same world, it's important for me not to get in a pattern of tossing saves each time I update.

I can understand this, but I feel that Dwarf Fortress doesn't yet give players a very compelling reason to keep their world across many games. The game as it stands now plays essentially the same if you generate a new world rather than continuing to play the old one, and in fact there are several reasons a player might prefer generating new worlds on a regular basis, whether it be wanting to redo a particularly juicy site from scratch, trying particularly extreme environments, or wanting to restock the world with megabeasts for their dwarves or adventurers to battle.

I think the concept of playing the world is great, but from a practical standpoint, I feel the game needs to give the player strong incentives to do so before it becomes important to ensure saves are compatible for that reason. Artifacts from previous fortresses, your old dwarves from your last abandon coming in with an immigrant wave, releasing fortresses to the AI and then having caravans from them arrive bearing goods produced at your last fortress, things like that. The Army Arc may contribute to this, especially if you can interact with your previous sites (send a squad to scavenge your old ruins to recover artifacts or powerful weapons for your new fort?), but it could also make things worse it you end up killing off hostile sites, thereby making the world less interesting over time, rather than more interesting.
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Bunny

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2269 on: June 02, 2009, 02:19:18 pm »

I have to admit, sometimes when I look at the list of lovely things Toady has planned, and I think of how long we have to wait, it can get painful.  But to be honest, I would much rather wait even if it is until the end of this year, and receive an update banquet full of delicious tidbits, than get the odd DF "snack" once in a while.

In the meantime, I'll just keep playing the latest version, and bawwwing at all the new pictures of Scamps.

Either way, Toady has a hell of a lot to do for the latest update; it is very ambitious, and honestly I don't think he's exactly being lazy about working on it!  The updates come pretty regularly, and he seems to get a lot done in between each one.
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Pruvan

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2270 on: June 02, 2009, 02:58:10 pm »

If only we were 4-dimensional creatures. We wouldn't have this problem then.
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Mondark

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2271 on: June 02, 2009, 03:44:38 pm »

If only we were 4-dimensional creatures. We wouldn't have this problem then.

We are.  How would you like to be stuck in the same moment for all eternity?

J. Fox, I appreciate your wall of text, as it pretty much sums up my feelings on the issue, but I do have to say that the whole 'play the world not the fort' concept is even now a pretty big deal for me, at least. 

I love seeing the histories and legends building up from my previous forts/adventurers even when there's not that much I can do on a large scale.  Even just wiping out whatever creatures the current Age is named after is quite an incentive for me, and I'd imagine, at least a few other players.  Loosing all that is a bit disappointing, especially if it happens frequently.
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Fefeshnelmargalip

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2272 on: June 02, 2009, 03:56:03 pm »

While I understand what Jonathan S. Fox and Aquizzar are saying (and I kind of feel the same way), IIRC Toady said at some point (several months ago?) that he was trying to lay the foundations for both the Army Arc (mainly) and (perhaps?) to a lesser extent the Caravan Arc, so that there wouldn't be as long of a wait between releases later.

Don't quote me on that, though, I can't recall exactly.
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SirHoneyBadger

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2273 on: June 02, 2009, 04:12:06 pm »

Jonathan S. Fox: You make a good point, but I suspect that if Toady felt it was the right decision to release separate components, separately, he would have done so. So, there may be reasons for him not doing that (issues with the code, maybe? Or just wanting to keep everything straight), that we just can't see.
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Jonathan S. Fox

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2274 on: June 02, 2009, 05:36:29 pm »

Jonathan S. Fox: You make a good point, but I suspect that if Toady felt it was the right decision to release separate components, separately, he would have done so. So, there may be reasons for him not doing that (issues with the code, maybe? Or just wanting to keep everything straight), that we just can't see.

I know that when I'm working on a game or other project, the outside opinions of others on aspects of the development process sometimes seem naïve, as they don't have a complete understanding of what I'm doing, or they lack certain experience and knowledge, or simply have ideas that clash with my vision for the project. So yes, I agree that there may be extremely good reasons for doing it the current way. I wouldn't want to arrogantly presume I know best on something that I'm not intimately familiar with, and this isn't something I'm intimately familiar with.

But on the other hand, my work is far from perfect; I often make mistakes, do things in ways that can be improved, and have much to learn. Even if sometimes people give crazy suggestions or completely miss the point, I crave that kind of feedback, because suggestions and outside criticism is often extremely helpful in this regard. For this reason, I tend to avoid the somewhat fatalist assumption that my opinion has no value or insight to provide to others. Indeed, sometimes a polite explanation of what isn't working for you is extraordinarily helpful to creative developers.

Toady One and ThreeToe have a system that works very well. I've learned some useful insights into the creative process and game development by observing how Dwarf Fortress has been developed. I have tremendous respect for Toady's work ethic and development process, and it seems, as Aqizzar put it, like a "cardinal sin" to complain about this. But I don't think it would be helpful to them to say nothing when I think they may be able to improve their process, whether it be through more frequent and incremental releases, or in any other way.
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SirHoneyBadger

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2275 on: June 02, 2009, 06:08:40 pm »

Oh yeah, I don't have a problem with telling them that they're doing something that I think could be done better, that's what the whole Suggestion thread is for.

In a case like this though, as a creative person, I know it can be a little daunting to be faced with impatience-or worse, preemptiveness-when you've got an overall scheme in mind, that simply requires time and effort to get it right.

Not that it's a bad thing for people to want the update-any update-right now. We're all very excited about it, and eager, and there are parts of my mods that I can't continue with until I know what's going to change. But I also know-again, as a modder-that there's a time and place to break things up, and a time and place to keep things together.
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CobaltKobold

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2276 on: June 02, 2009, 07:51:33 pm »

You know. I'm just amazed I'm playing ths game and it almost magically keeps getting better and better.
Happy customers are quieter? It deserves repeating.

And that four-months figure appears because of the list, I'd guess. *waves blue flag* Go Toady!
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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2277 on: June 02, 2009, 11:47:58 pm »

And that four-months figure appears because of the list, I'd guess. *waves blue flag* Go Toady!

Personally, my guess is five months, based solely on the current speed at which Toady goes through  list categories, of which there are 4 so far untouched, plus a month to wrap up everything that isn't finished yet.  It would probably take 6 months if it actually took him a month for each feature.
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Neonivek

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2278 on: June 03, 2009, 02:06:15 am »

Right now I am actually starting to get concerned that Toady actually may be burning out.

"It feels very ungrateful to complain"

It really depends how your complaining. Lets try not pack up the complaints department all together.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2009, 02:12:49 am by Neonivek »
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Vlynndar

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Re: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items
« Reply #2279 on: June 03, 2009, 02:13:21 am »

Right now I am actually starting to get concerned that Toady actually may be burning out.

But that's only 'cause you're waiting. Of course, unless you aren't. Instead, pretend this was a !!Toady One!! joke.
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