The problem here is that you want reassurance that something will be done, specifically with a nice timeline so that you feel your anxiety lessen.
You're not gonna get that.
No, I don't. I never said any of that or anything resembling it. I never requested "a nice timeline," and I don't want "reassurance" because I don't frankly care enough about playing the game. I don't play a ton of DF, but I follow it because I love what it represents and I would hate to see someone's life's work plagued with technical issues that are never resolved and possibly even worsen as complexity increases while some of the most vocal fans suggest FPS death doesn't really matter. I made this thread (I'm hardly the first) because the issue should be brought up frequently. Keep your straw-men in the closet next time.
What you are gonna get is "this is toady's baby, he'll inevitably work on fps issues as it starts bothering them". Does this mean that maybe he'll spend a whole year rewriting fps blockers? Probably. Will this kill player enthusiasm for Dwarf Fortress? Well, considering he's done 3 big updates that took a full year already, I somehow doubt this.
DF has been in development for a long time. The community is used to living the slow life and is not gonna topple over when toady isn't releasing new updates every week. (Maybe, this final update before speedup cleaning will finally allow Masterwork to catch up )
Now that we've established I don't care about "when" and am not seeking to quell my anxiety, only that eventually something is done for the good of the game, I think it's clear we agree on most of this--though I think if major improvements to performance are made, I don't think it will be solely Toady who is responsible.
As for player enthusiasm, I don't think it's likely to die regardless of the direction of development as there will always be die-hards who, as I mentioned before, consider FPS death a neat feature and not a problem. The sycophant doesn't always provide the best feedback, though, and it would be a shame if eventually they became the majority. They just might become the majority in this thread, though, and I'm not counting you among them.
It is a specialists job. Not every programmer can do everything equally well, especially not if one to a degree is self taught.
Thank you. Toady himself has said that multithreading is not his forte. I'm not suggesting he's stupid, or a bad programmer. (But of course we know that multithreading is not the only thing that could help.)
Given how much fun new stuff has come out in v42, I am doubtful that there will be much interest in Masterwork by the time Toady decides he needs to optimize. However, I've never used Masterwork so I might very well, much like OP, be talking about something I know nothing about.
I'm disappointed... You didn't even try to misrepresent my words--just an artless attack on my credibility without anything (real or imagined) to actually discredit me. Boring. I'm surprised you manage to even get through world generation.
To quote scripture, premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Toady could very easily optimize a lot of things right now on that front, that could give in principle enormous speed up benefits.. Like a factor of 10 or more. Pathing for instance is a major compute hog, and could be ameliorated considerably.
The problem is, these sorts of optimizations are so specific that it's unlikely they will continue giving the same benefits if something changes drastically (Pathing for instance will radically change if you implement a rail system) and in fact could make things worse.
Pathfinding is actually the sort of thing that wouldn't break as easily as the codebase expands, and overhauled pathfinding would indeed be a big improvement. You're right though that little performance hacks do tend to break over time. Those would not be the sort of improvements needed.
You really want the optimizations right before the final release.
Final release? Are you sure we're talking about the same game?