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Author Topic: FPS Problems  (Read 489 times)

urist mcnecromancer

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FPS Problems
« on: March 23, 2012, 12:26:20 am »

I have a fortress of only 22 dwarves atm and everytime I unpause my game the FPS counters drop down to around 30 (14) and everything gets choppy, any advice as to why this is happening and how I can fix it?
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More ridiculous than reindeer?  Where you think you supercool and is you things the girls where I honestly like I is then why are humans on their as my people or what would you?

FuzzyZergling

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Re: FPS Problems
« Reply #1 on: March 23, 2012, 12:28:35 am »

It's possible that you have an underground lake/the magma sea draining constantly, which would cause FPS issues.
Or possibly several unrevealed enemy ambushes.
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MarcAFK

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Re: FPS Problems
« Reply #2 on: March 23, 2012, 12:37:50 am »

Various !science! threads have shown that Running dwarf fortress is basically an exercise in stress testing your ram.
If it's being choppy maybe you should try disabling your antivirus and seeing if anything else is lagging your memory also.
Apart from that FPS lag is generally caused by:
Pathfinding, stockpiles (empty or full), Magma flow, water flow, and  having lots of objects lieing about (don't magma dump them, you'll still have a melted item lieing about making lag).
However a newly starting fort with only 22 dorfs probably shouldn't have horrible problems like that unless i dunno, hell is broken or something.
You could try using DF hack to reveal the map then while keeping the game paused look to see if there's magma leaking around deep underground, when that happens usually your fps goes way lower than 30 though.
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They're nearly as bad as badgers. Build a couple of anti-buzzard SAM sites marksdwarf towers and your fortress will look like Baghdad in 2003 from all the aerial bolt spam. You waste a lot of ammo and everything is covered in unslightly exploded buzzard bits and broken bolts.

knutor

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Re: FPS Problems
« Reply #3 on: March 23, 2012, 12:53:40 am »

Trim windows processes.  Try game without Graphics and Tilesets, to test changes.  Change your power profiles and set windows to Best Performance.  Do same with Graphics Card driver app, the app on my PC is called AMD Engine VISION control center.  Run one display.  Try a desktop that matches the resolution of your Monitor.  Stay in windowed play - less pixels drawn.  End Justsched.exe, and any other useless patching program and system monitoring program, that hogs memory and does absolutely nothing but waste cpu cycles.

Open Task Manager, add the column for Memory, and User.  Sort it by User, and look at the apps hogging most of your memory.  Decide if they are helping or hurting your Gaming performance.  Then End Process them.  There are good sites that translate all those Image Names in Task Manager.  Use one to tweak your PCs best performance.  I cannot recall one at the moment, but I did this sometime ago, and it GREATLY helped the performance in the MMO I was playing.  I could barely walk thru town, then after I removed some memory hogging windows crappola, I could get my moneys worth out of the game.  Let me know how your doing.  Good luck, Knutor
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"I don't often drink Mead, but when I do... I prefer Dee Eef's.  -The most interesting Dwarf in the World.  Stay thirsty, my friend.
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GhostDwemer

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Re: FPS Problems
« Reply #4 on: March 23, 2012, 01:15:09 am »

Seconding the underground lake or magma problem. I've seen it several times. You got a leak somewhere down there, it happens. Flowing liquids are FPS killers. You can use dfhack to peek down there and even damn up the flow if you want to try that.
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urist mcnecromancer

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Re: FPS Problems
« Reply #5 on: March 23, 2012, 04:27:31 pm »

thanks a lot for the help everyone, but due to my relative inability to find anything on a computer, i just decided to abandon and find a more !!fun!! place to embark! I think that the slow play was because of all the stuff lying around, hopefully i'll get this fortress right  :P
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More ridiculous than reindeer?  Where you think you supercool and is you things the girls where I honestly like I is then why are humans on their as my people or what would you?