I've been paying attention to the Steam reviews and the exception reports flowing into my inbox, and have been compiling a list of crashes and related stability issues to address. I haven't been able to get to them yet because I'm a leettle bit desperate to get multithreading out of the way, but upon my oath: as soon as 0.12.0 is released, there will be a reckoning.
Ever seen The Purge? I haven't, but it's like that, except with a lot more bugfixing and slightly less murder.
Part of said reckoning will be a change to more robust coding practices. Currently, when the game encounters a bug it fails immediately. Great for me as a coder trying to identify problems: terrible for you as someone trying to play a game.
Instead of doing that awful thing, I will adjust the code to absorb the error, log it to the bug report and kill off the creature responsible out of spite before attempting to continue. This will give us the best of both worlds, at the cost of creatures dying instead of losing their anchor to the third dimension and ascending into the space between worlds, or whatever actually happens to you when your position become NaN ("Not A Number"). Thinking about it now, killing them when that happens is probably a mercy.
As far as Multithreading 0.12.0 goes...it's aliiiive! (by specific definitions of the word "alive") The Species development build now has a "Multithreaded mode" and it doesn't crash when you switch to it! All my evil schemes are coming to fruition. Except the one with the dinosaur soldiers. I'm thinking it's probably best to cut my losses on that one at this point.
Multithreaded mode currently utilizes quite a bit more of the CPU than before (up to ~40% from ~15% on my laptop, which has a quad core processor) and provides a very noticeable performance boost at high creature counts. There's still a combination of refactoring, optimizing and bugfixing to do (if I can get that percentage up to 80% or more I'll be very happy), and I've somehow managed to turn delicious meat into an inedible object (whoops), but we're definitely getting there.
For science!
Quasar