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Author Topic: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?  (Read 2439 times)

Salbrismind

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I was wondering, since there is a very large number of things to accomplish. How do you go about organizing all the tasks and goals you have for Dwarf Fortress?

I was wondering, if you write down absolutely everything? Is it all in dozens of books and journals? Spread sheets? Word Documents?

Maybe the community could answer as well?

-Thanks, Salbris
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Tormy

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #1 on: January 27, 2009, 08:25:25 am »

Well if I would be Toady, I would make word documents myself...but I wouldn't be surprised if Toady would use the "write down everything" method.  :)
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Karlito

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #2 on: January 27, 2009, 08:26:39 am »

I remember during the lead up to the 3D release, he put all of his tasks on notecards so that he could easily shuffle them around as needed.
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Salbrismind

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #3 on: January 27, 2009, 09:43:20 am »

I remember during the lead up to the 3D release, he put all of his tasks on notecards so that he could easily shuffle them around as needed.

Thanks, for the tidbit. That sounds like a great idea actually.

FYI: I'm asking as I'm starting to write down some information for a few personal projects of mine one of which I plan to be just as big as Dwarf Fortress. I was wondering if I could get some advice from the pro!
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AlienChickenPie

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #4 on: January 27, 2009, 10:14:53 am »

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
Check out the core components, bloats, power goals and the other category.
Also, this.
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Salbrismind

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #5 on: January 27, 2009, 10:25:05 am »

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
Check out the core components, bloats, power goals and the other category.
Also, this.

Thanks for the link!

I did already know he had a lot of his goals posted online, but obviously html isn't the best way to organize. I'm wondering what kind of personal resources he uses.
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Fieari

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #6 on: January 27, 2009, 11:17:07 am »

He also has a pretty cool visualizer the organizes groups of Cores, Reqs, and Bloats together in an interface that looks vaguely like it's straight out of Wargames.

He posted an image of it back when he was doing the transition from 2D to 3D.  Can anyone find it?  It was a pretty cool image... but it seems to be gone from the dev archives.
« Last Edit: January 27, 2009, 11:19:28 am by Fieari »
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RadioCarbon

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #7 on: January 28, 2009, 08:46:44 am »

Autistics just have a knack for organizing things, it's a symptom of the illness.
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qwertyuiopas

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #8 on: January 28, 2009, 08:55:53 am »

Maybe, but why are you implying such a thing about Toady?

You do understand that it is entirely possible for a regular human to make something like DF, all they need is a goal.
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Mel_Vixen

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #9 on: January 28, 2009, 09:14:54 am »

Not everyone whos good in an field is autistic or an savvant. Toady was Mathprof iirc so it comes with his former job to be more organisized and it also helps keeping track of all those numbers and calculations.

The 40dx series of df also shows that toady isnt an superhuman Programmer (But still a very good one) cause Baughn, veroule etc. had made toadys code more effecient.
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Christes

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #10 on: January 28, 2009, 12:57:00 pm »

Having degrees in math != being organized.  The desks of most math profs I've seen would demonstrate this fact.  Hell, mine does too.

I have noticed a rough correlation between math skills and coding skills, however.  Maybe it comes down to creative problem solving.
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Elshar

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #11 on: January 28, 2009, 01:01:33 pm »

I have noticed a rough correlation between math skills and coding skills, however.  Maybe it comes down to creative problem solving.

Alot of the skills for either are cross-applicable. And in quite a few cases, directly applicable. Just think of all the math that goes into everything the dwarves do. And, most math disciplines read alot like an obsfucated chunk of perl code anyways. :)
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Capntastic

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #12 on: January 28, 2009, 05:03:39 pm »

Carbon's just a very unskilled troll; all three of his posts on the board are about Toady having autism.
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Belteshazzar

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #13 on: January 28, 2009, 05:45:51 pm »

Indeed, Obvious Troll is Obvious!

Anyhow, notecards seems like the most likely route as properly used those thing are a godsend. In my own notes I find that nessescary information can get lost in a page of irrelevant words but notecards have the benefit of allowing each though to be analyzed individually or even reorganized or discarded based or relevance to the whole data pool.
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Toady One

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Re: To Toady: How do you handle the organization of all the tasks for DF?
« Reply #14 on: January 28, 2009, 10:25:15 pm »

The stuff that isn't online is just in txt files or in the source files themselves.  After the project is started, it's often easier to leave notes with tags on specific additions in the source, with the tag in the planning txt files as well (there are a few of those...  the main workshop file that I use every day that I'm working and which also has unsorted dev items at the bottom, the planning file which has some dev item notes, the dev item txts themselves that get processed into html often have extra notes, the bug list txt has notes).  So I've got "//Req<x>" tags throughout the code for instance, so that any source notes relevant to the dev items are simple to enumerate with a find-in-files command.

All of the dev items are also in a little database program where they have categories attached, and it can do a few things like output lists of all the dev items related to the category.  The systems are often novelties to keep me going (like the countdown was for a while), rather than indispensable parts of the process.   There are a ton of paper notes, but those are generally from planning sessions, and they get put into the computer eventually before I work on them, unless it's just something I'm trying to visualize while I'm working or whatever.

Yeah, RadioCarbon seems like a troll.  There was also another post I deleted earlier because it was gunning for a fight more clearly than any of the remaining three posts.  So, banned now.  Obviously not here to contribute anything.
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