Ah, actually doubly-ninjaed. That'll teach me to spend a long time editing. No... actually, I don't think it will. Anyway, here's what I did
write, you can check to see if it's anywhere near correct by looking at the suggested FAQ thread, if you wish. 
We'll have some better answers along in a moment, I'm sure, but I think the immediate reply is:
The game was never been designed for multi-threading, from the start, and Toady[1] is not currently inclined to totally re-write it the way it would need to be to make it multi-threaded (and, along the way, change a lot of things so that it can be
usefully parallelised). Actually there
is a separation of graphics from "the rest", I think, but right now you're stuck to one core. OTOH, this means that if you
have multiple cores, DF sat (mostly) on just one core would by default allow the rest of the running processes to spread around the other cores with minimal performance hit to
everything else that you want to run (in foreground or background). There's often a thread coming up about "how about just running the pathfinding as a parallel thread", or something, if you want to look up the community's own split of opinion about the practicalities.
Can't comment on the Linux root privileges thing, as the only way that I've run DF on Linux was (for reasons I can't recall) running the Windows version through Wine, which seemed to work perfectly Ok. As far as the Linux-specific version, might it need only some chowning and/or limited sudoing to work? If I were to make a guess as to why root is needed it might be to do with low-level hardware access, but that's a stab in the dark.
Source code: No way. For the foreseeable future[2] it will
not be Open Source. Toady wants to retain full IP over the development of all but
very selected elements by very trusted third-parties, and that's how he rolls.
BTW. your English is good. I can't point out any
particular errors (minor odd turns of phrases[3], but no odder than might come out of any given Anglophone dialect). You might have used the Unordered List forum tags/markup for your 'bullet' points, but that's a style issue.
[1] Who is, in case you've not previously heard him referenced, the "guy wot writes the game", but you probably already know that.
[2] To the extent that we know that Toady has put a codicil in his Last Will And Testament regarding how ownership of the source code transitions... Which doesn't mean he won't change his mind or be happy to do something different before then, but right now it's considered that it'll be pretty much his and his alone (legitimately, of course) for whatever the remaining duration of his life may be.
[3] Ok, so the "It's not my native" bit should have been "It's not my native language", or similar, but that could have been bad editing. Especially as you also used a lower-case 'i' in "and i don't practice it often". But that's better than a lot of natives seem to manage!
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress source code (Read 47214 times)