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[thepodger]

I am eagerly anticipating the release of the newest version of DF, but even the current program taxes my box when I have more than 100 dwarves.  I shudder to thin about what several Z layers will do to it.  Toady, is the new version going to significantly increase the processing requirements for DF?

[Faces of Mu]

You'd think not assuming it's really the units it tracks that causes the most strain. In this case, most of the units are not even going to be on screen - they'll be on other levels, so hopefully that means less processing needed for graphical displays.

[Core Xii]

quote:Originally posted by Faces of Mu:
<STRONG>so hopefully that means less processing needed for graphical displays.</STRONG>

Which is nonexistent to begin with.

All the Z layers won't be loaded when you start, they are loaded gradually as you dig up/down. Also, you can resize the site, so you can pick a much smaller plane to work with.

Generally speaking, yes, it's going to increase performance requirements. Mostly memory consumption, I imagine. Oh yea, fluids could eat away the CPU time though.

[ravensword227]

I expect a rather large decrease in performance,particularly since there will such a large, varied-biome to start with in Fortress mode.  

The game never was graphics intensive.  Its memory and processor intensive and those things that are related to it can't be culled (as in occlusion culling).

[thepodger]

I guess I'm more worried about flows/waves/etc being calculated.

[Fieari]

I seem to remember Toady mentioning on a couple of occasions that he did a bit of optimizing of the code... which might mean that the new version will run faster than the current one.

At any rate, if you have performance trouble, you can also shrink the size of your map.

[Sowelu]

I expect it to be faster than the current game for small fortresses, and slower for big ones.  Which is...kind of obvious, but, meh.

Temperature should not be as brutal, simply because there's not as many tiles to check (and I think it's one of the things that got optimized).  Even if the temperature code is now more complex.

Pathfinding should be at least somewhat more brutal, because it's now 10-way instead of 4-way.  Thankfully that part alone should still less than double the cost of pathfinding.  However I hope that being able to zone traffic regions will let you improve the pathfinding speed (even just low traffic regions may prune a lot of stuff).  It won't fix animal pathfinding problems though which is a big issue anyway.  Here's hoping animals got optimized.

Water calculations should be a pretty small contribution.  The algorithm looks pretty simple.  Still, there was almost no water calculation at all in the current version (the trouble came from pathfinding).  Don't know how much that'll change.

In other words...Keep your population low, and keep cats out of your fortress, and I bet you'll do as good as you do already.  Eh.

[Toady One]

It is kind of all over the place right now.  If you do experience slowdowns, try a smaller map.  The smallest maps seem to run much faster than the current version of DF, and ultimately you have more tunnel space in them than you do in the current maps (but they aren't as feature rich).  The largest maps have serious lag problems at the moment.  I think the chasm critter AI and the town critter AI in adv mode are causing the worst problems, and I'm hoping to have that cleaned up before it's out.  There are also some melt/freeze situations that can be messy, but those should be hard to reproduce (assuming I fix the magma pipes in glaciers).  If you do get a bad configuration of liquid it can really slow down a lot, but it would (hopefully) take a lot of directed digging to do that.  There will likely be some uncomfortable lags and a few people that feel left out in the cold, but try smaller maps and let me know what's going on and should be able to fix it.  Some of the slowdowns that exist in the current version, like the lags that come from having 100000 stone on the ground and so on, should be significantly lessened.