Just submitted my responses there, but wanted to expand on one of the questions found there.
For me, performance is one of the top priorities in any game. No extra cool feature justifies a game becoming a slog to play with or, in extreme cases, for it to become unplayable. Although I’ve made suggestions around here that would inevitably have a negative impact on performance, I’d be happy to not have any of them if implementing them would mean that we’d go back to, say, the horrible performance after 0.6 pre-SDL (for Windows).
Also, and maybe I’m wrong here but this is my impression, I don’t think that trying to simulate virtually everything (with all the calculations and keeping track of things required) is that important. Creating a world that gives the illusion that it simulates everything is more than enough. In my opinion, that is. So, persistence, for instance, shouldn’t be mandatory for all the features (such as NPCs or critters), as long as they are there and behave properly when the player is around. Etc. Basically, and as far as I’m concerned, feel free to “cheat” with some features for the sake of performance.
As I view it, CataDDA should always be the light on resources but heavy on entertainment game that has been (mostly) so far.
