I only recently returned to DF after a few months absence, having had my computer melt down. I love this game in all ways, as it sates a lot of my gaming needs at once.
Only tonight did I discover the development releases... Toady and all who have worked on this... I just want to tell you I'm amazed. I've not tested it very far yet, but *IMMEDIATELY* I went from 25 FPS on 40d, to 100+ FPS... a 4x increase. My dorfs are running around at breakneck speeds. I barely know what to DO! I'm half tempted to slow the game down as I'm not used to this pace.
I will continue to play and do the bug report thing... I used to think dorfs were slow and plodding... These buggers can MOVE! This game went from a leasurely 'ho hum' pace, to.. wow!
Rion Wulfe
(Almost in tears over this, I swear. Kudos to the speedup alone!)
EDIT:
I just updated to 40d16 from 40d15, and raised max framerate higher. It's bubbling out around 150fps on my crappyish computer. Some amazing improvements here. I played for an hour or two with a map I brought in from 40d, and had zero issues or problems. The zoom feature is great, not sure what other issues I should be looking for. Everything seems to be running peachy, to me, but I'm not as 'deep' into the game as some might be. Still tweeking around with where I want the framerate to want to be so *I* am comfortable, heh.
I also put my own text tileset in (I use VGA9x16, because it reminds me of an old vidcard I used to have, which I loved its font, with the little bit inside of the 0. Heh.)