I'm glad to see Toady making some progress fixing crashes and correcting various typo errors, and don't get me wrong; it seems to me he took on the easy stuff this week, and the man deserved the break (honestly the man could have hopped off to California for the week).
He he, there hasn't been a break yet! I'm still swamped. The amount of non-programming work just handling correspondence and so on is unprecedented for us... it's good, but it's a lot of work. In the two programming half-days I've been able to find so far, I fixed the three crash bugs there, and tested some others that I couldn't get to happen. The long list of raw changes is mostly just stuff from rickvoid's thread that I did during a compile. I'm hoping the other stuff will settle down at some point so I can really have some serious bug fixing days, but we're not there yet. I'll be able to do more fixes per release when I have more time, although the merge is like one large fix that will also lead to some dry spells in the general bug fixing. It will also add bugs of its own, mostly related to a necessary interface reworking for every screen and particularly in adventure mode.
I don't remember where it was that people expressed some concerns about when I'm moving on to new features and whether or not a lot of serious bugs and combat balance issues etc. will be left behind and whether or not I'm actually aware that there are problems etc., but I'll address that here too. Of course I'm not going to empty out the bug tracker. Some things just aren't going to play out right or they'll be really obscure and hard to handle. On the other hand, I plan to handle every major impediment to play related to problems with the new features, though this very likely won't include the addition of other new features like aiming or whatever. I can't say whether or not a given player will be satisfied, and I'm sure some won't be. I understand that there are serious issues and have said as much, and if I'm still sorting them out two months from now, that is what it is. There will have been many releases improving the game in that time, and I'm not feeling any kind of urge to jump over to new features at this point when things aren't working very well.