Toady, I have a couple of questions. Basically, personally I've stopped playing DF because it just runs too slow on my lappy given the limited amount of time I actually have to play it. I also have some time on my hands right now and started doing some research about various things (see below).
1. I just wondered, do you know what currently is the biggest resource hog in DF in advanced games? Is it the pathfinding or maybe the management of all the items?
2. I think you hinted at a possible Linux port. Do you have an idea about what would be used to manage the window, keyboard etc. Maybe SDL?
3. I looked a little bit at multithreading. I know it's something you're wary of, and I don't want to start big general and thus useless discussions again, but rather report on some concrete findings based on which you could decide whether it's an useful idea or not. I've looked into OpenMP right now, which can be used to parallelise for-loops. I think I'll look into Boost.Thread next. OpenMP is simple to play around with, but has some non-avoidable caveats. I've got a working minimal example here on my disk, but I wanted to ask first, does it even make sense to report about it, or is this threading business something you want to avoid right now altogether?
Cheers!