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[WDDworf]

Dear fellow Dworfs,



I already had an account, which I've forgotten, so I'm posting under a new name.
Was familiar with the pre 2014 version and had quite a bit of fun and fun.

Seeing all the new additions I wanted to get in again and so I've genereated a few worlds.

Picked one world, which should be a large region.. with an embark size of 4x4 on a forest (high savagery), mountain and a brook in the corner. (a relatively small part of the water is on the embark site)
Contents wise it seems perfect, having some metals (no idea which), clay/soil.. mountain to dig in and (hopefully) a lot of animals to catch + running water.
My respected leader already punched a wolverine through the head. (was holding the critter in one arm and smashed its head in with the other)

It seems to run quite smoothly, although the saves take their time. (large region + 1050 years).
Dont care much about the saving time, but I do about the general FPS during runtime.

How much performance loss is to be expected when playing in a large region, 1050 years, 4x4 embark with running water (default cavern / z level settings). The mountain is just a small part of the embark and only has several z levels going up.

The other worlds I've genned are with other options / smaller, but I would like to play on a larger region with more years.. as it seems to contain more details & history.

Most older forts have had a FPS death and I wonder how likely and how fast this can happen on this one.

Got the tendency of planning everything beforehand and sometimes Ive hit this FPS death before I could finish, what I had intended.

If possible, I do not want to work with ehm.. quantum stockpiles, you call it? (I like seeing stockpiles getting filled out and not having a single tile contain almost everything).
Only times I use a quantum stockpile it is to able to quickly get rid of all equipment, worn by invaders.

I would work with atom smashers and such to get rid of unnecessary objects.

I do know how to more or less be efficient in making paths and to seal off largers areas.. (generally caverns are not to be traversed and often I also closed off the surface)

[Nevenrial]

Just so I understand this, you're asking what you can do besides quantum stockpiles and patching to increase your FPS?

[WDDworf]

Not really..

It's more a question on wether people expect me to run this 'smoothly' for a couple a years and having a 'normal' dwarf population (+- 100).
Smooth.. basically is.. atleast 20-30 fps?

Or can I safely assume it will crumble to FPS death within a few years having the settings, as described above.

I've been out of Dwarf Fortress for a while and can't really make an educated quess anymore what will and wont work. (generation / embark settings).

I'm not looking into preventing FPS loss. (a lot of posts have information about this)

I only talk about quantum stockpiles, because I will end up having multiple larger halls.. purely for storage.
This gives me a feeling of true Dwarven goodieness having large halls filled and filled in with barrels after barrels.
(so I wouldnt want to exchange larger stockpiles with quantum stockpiles)
My Dwarven Fortress wont have a pile of treasure in a big hall, but a large heap of booze in a big hall. (LOTR reference)

Last few times I think I ended up with either smaller embarks ; smaller worlds ; limited world generation settings.. in order to prevent a FPS death from the start.
This time I am trying to get most details, while remaining a somewhat smooth experience

[Nevenrial]

For me it dies before 5 years. On my Phenom 4, 3.4 it doesn't matter what I do. Mind you year one and two run like a dream. I use dwarf hack, do path optimization, quantum stockpiles, embark away from water, block off the caverns ... nothing makes a difference.

[wuphonsreach]

Make the world size 1-2 steps smaller then what you used in DF2012.  For me, that means "smaller" worlds which are 33x33 tiles.

Go with smaller embarks of 2x2 or 3x3.

Set your population limit to 25 to start, then gradually increase to about 100.

Quantum-stockpile where possible.

etc.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=144691.0
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Frames_per_second

[dwarf_reform]

I usually run 3x3/4x3/4x4 worlds of varied history length, but always generated using the small island setting.. I'm into my sixth or seventh year with 150+ dwarves on a 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo 4gb ram + awful 2007 Intel integrated graphics and am still managing to hold onto around 10fps..

I just started a new fort a couple days ago on a world with reduced z-levels and a single cavern layer, but zombies came early and now all that's left is 1 male and 1 female dwarf and two children (dwarven sisters who survived seeing their parents die..), but at least they're all happy and stable now (and probably cave adapted..) Anyway, the stress is nowhere near high enough for me to tell just how much fps is being saved by those changes..

[Thisfox]

It also depends on the system you're running. On a four year old mac, I'm having no trouble with 3x4 embarks, no quantum stockpiles, and 100+ dwarfs for four to five "years", but it's not the fps that's killing me. I use old worlds too   Presumably some people are running machines with less RAM etc, and thus are having to make some serious decisions about serious things . It helps that my machine isn't running anything else whilst I'm playing. I think that could be catastrophic XD  That said, I've already killed one machine (Motherboard delamination) whilst playing Dwarf Fort, so perhaps I'm a bit punishing on my laptops...

Dropping your population cap and keeping it that way could help a great deal, I've only just started doing that.

[Nevenrial]

It also depends on the system you're running. On a four year old mac, I'm having no trouble with 3x4 embarks, no quantum stockpiles, and 100+ dwarfs for four to five "years", but it's not the fps that's killing me. I use old worlds too   Presumably some people are running machines with less RAM etc, and thus are having to make some serious decisions about serious things . It helps that my machine isn't running anything else whilst I'm playing. I think that could be catastrophic XD  That said, I've already killed one machine (Motherboard delamination) whilst playing Dwarf Fort, so perhaps I'm a bit punishing on my laptops...

Dropping your population cap and keeping it that way could help a great deal, I've only just started doing that.

Interesting... with 8gz of ram and 3x3 embark, I still hit the same wall. Are you playing 2014? Are you using any mods?

[Thisfox]

2014, no mods, although as I've mentioned somewhere, I've started capping to about 150 or so dwarves, a different number each time, and capping children to near zero.

I just looked up my system: 8gig, 2.5GHz Intel, OS 10.9.5.

I save, quit, and reboot the entire machine at least once a dwarf year, and I don't bother to savescum, but I do play onward when it crashes, which means a backward step occasionally.

The fort dies due to my own incompetance, or I get bored and start a new fort, but I have died of what might be called fps death: It was due to a wereattack killing off enough dwarfs that the chickens and peahens we were keeping as egg producers all took the opportunity to breed at once. No dwarf thought to collect the eggs while they were busy attending hospital, you see. There was a massive population explosion, and I got bored from the slow behaviour of everyone, there was blood everywhere anyway, so I ended that and went and built somewhere else.

[Max™]

I got down to 60~80 FPS from 180 starting in a 2x2 on a 33x33 world (I think, might have been 17x17 but I think it was bigger than that as I found serene+terrifying side by side in several places) with 100 years of revealed history, three cavern layers, an aquifer, short river (about 30 squares up from the bottom right corner and ends about 15 left of the bottom right corner, about 6 squares wide), temperature/weather/spatter turned on, goblin blood rain constantly, reanimating biome in the bottom left embark square, I think 110 dorfs, and a massive crundle/FB/draltha/etc zombie party going on the caverns.

Was running with two 12 square wide waterfalls dropping down the sides of the happythoughtsroom, and up-ramped four entire levels out from just under the aquifer to the lower level of the full engraved two-story living area before filling the bottom level around the freshly sealed bedrooms with magma, all with multilevel 3 active so I can see down into the living area hallways from the top of the waterfall levels. It did drop down to 30~40 at one point but I realized my dead/missing list was 750 units long and did the dfhack fix which put me back up at 50, and finally getting sick of the "let's paint the caverns red and then have a big zombie party" going on in the basement so I did exterminate undead and went back up to around 75~80.

[Wumpi]

#1 suggestion for increasing FPS is to mod out all [flyer] tags. I7 2700k, 16 dwarves, 3x3 embark, small map with 300 year history. 1 raven drops from a capped 250 fps to about 160-180 fps. A full swarm of about 8 flyers drops it to about 70-90 fps.
After about 25 years, fps dropped to a natural 180, 16 dwarves, no flyers.

[WDDworf]

Thanks for all your replies.. I asked this question, because I dont have much time and I spend the bigger part planning out nice designs.
Wanted to go for a stylish dwarven appartment on this world, where the main corridor is outlined with fountains. (pressured water rather than making it fall from the top)

I think it might be safe to try this on a different world / settings than this larger region world.
Only managed to dig out the start and working on the initial farms / bridge to block the outside.

Kinda fell in love with the embark already.. but it would be a safe bet to try it on another world.

Don't know my specs by heart.. but I got 8gb memory and a i7 processor.. (something tells me that having more (and slower?) cores does not help Dwarf Fortress)..

Would it help trying to get an older machine running, which might just use a dual core?

[wuphonsreach]

We were trying to figure out what good things to look for in CPU/RAM speeds were in this thread:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=143637.0

[Max™]

Eh, I'm using 8 GB of ddr-1333 ram and an i3-3220 with a dinky GT-440 card and there are certain things I avoid out of habit, 4x4 embarks just aren't worth the trouble, nano forts are fun, and 2x2 is a really nice balance of space and speed. Massive worlds can be interesting but I'm so used to generating medium or small worlds that I can't get the type of results I'm used to finding* in larger ones anyways. Pockets tend to run into problems with civilizations dying out.

I've had mixed results with history ranges, still trying to find the right length to give a chance for civs to get established somewhat without them being wiped out by goblins before I start playing...

*Haven't been able to replicate my string of caverns dumping water into empty volcano tubes or the one that actually began to erupt shortly after embark...