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[wendigo]

Ahh, the joys of a semi-stable fortress.  Thanks to the help of these forums and the wiki, my very second fortress ever is trucking along quite nicely.  Good times, plenty of booze.

However, I do want to play adventure mode as well, without abandoning my fort-in-progress.  I *know* that I can just backup the save/data folder, abandon the fortress, and re-copy later to continue playing it... but what I'd RATHER do is have a couple of independent installs so that I never "lose" any legendary accomplishments I might make in adventure mode. I wouldn't mind the convenience of two launch shortcuts, either-- just fire up the game I'm in the mood for, no muss, fuss, or annoying batch files necessary.

My question is:  Is it *safe* to have multiple installs of DF going on?  Does DF stash any info in the registry or somesuch that would make having a separate fortress install/adventure install problematic?  Also, how about running multiple instances of DF? (crazy, I know, but still curious...) I've searched these forums a bit but haven't had any luck finding info on this-- sorry if it's been covered in the past.

[Poil]

You can just create a new world and run your adventures in that one.

[Kylaer]

Yes, it's safe to have multiple installs, I've got two. I've also copied the whole DF folder from one computer to another, and it works just fine, so there's nothing in the registry. Multi-game away.

As for running two copies of Dwarf Fortress at the same time, you'd need a supercomputer to do it, but it is possible to the best of my knowledge.

[Slartibartfast]

quote:Originally posted by Kylaer:
<STRONG>As for running two copies of Dwarf Fortress at the same time, you'd need a supercomputer to do it, but it is possible to the best of my knowledge.</STRONG>

If you had a dualcore computer and the ability to assign one "core" to each instance of the game you'd probably be able to handle it. As far as running it goes. I'd be interested to know how you can physically play two games at once. (Leaving out the technical difficulties of sending input to two different programs simultaenously, and keeping focus(the "os term") on both windows)

[Tylui]

quote:Originally posted by Kylaer:
<STRONG>As for running two copies of Dwarf Fortress at the same time, you'd need a supercomputer to do it, but it is possible to the best of my knowledge.</STRONG>

quote:Originally posted by Slartibartfast:
<STRONG>If you had a dualcore computer...</STRONG>

Oddly enough, I've got AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core processor, and DF runs better when I run two instances...  How weird is that?

It works for wxSand of Falling Sand Game, too!

[ March 06, 2007: Message edited by: Tylui ]

[ March 06, 2007: Message edited by: Tylui ]

[Slartibartfast]

quote:Originally posted by Tylui:
<STRONG>
Oddly enough, I've got AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core processor, and DF runs better when I run two instances...  How weird is that?

It works for wxSand of Falling Sand Game, too!</STRONG>

I wouldn't know about that, I have a singlecore CPU.
I was merely refering to someone else finding out that DF does not have support for dual core (that is, it only uses one "core", ignoring the other).

Also, the falling sand thing is cool  

[wendigo]

Good news!  Thanks for the info and saving me some time.  The DF-playing community continues to rock my world.

My only interest in running multiple instances is to compare the speed/efficiency of different construction strategies for the same fortress.   The experiment would just run for a few minutes, so abominable framerate is no prob. If the little dwarven mobs have any random elements in their labor-selection AI, it may be a pointless exercise, but I'm gonna go try it now anyway.  Cheers!

[Jaqie Fox]

Yeah, Demia (my main workstation) is dualcore as well. Ive contemplated running two instances at once as well, guess I will now.

Easy to tell when a game isn't SMP capable, just run one instance of something and watch the CPU usage when the program in question is in the middle of a CPU intensive operation (like, say generation of a fractal world...) both cores aren't pegged at 100%, then it's not SMP arware. if they are, it is.  Keep in mind there are always other things taking up bits of the CPU time (like say I/O operations to video and hard drive, offloaded networking tasks, etc) so it will go over 50%. Even non SMP games can benefeit from SMP machines (SMP means symmetric multiprocessor, which in laymen's terms means two or more CPUs even if they are on the same chip {dual core}).

Anyways.

[schnobs]

quote:Dual Core processor, and DF runs better when I run two instances...

Simple explanation: if there's only one process creating load, the OS will switch it from one CPU to the other every now and then. The purpose being to prevent that one CPU runs unecessarily hot while the other is idle.

Now, this may no longer be as necessary today when both processors sit in the same die and under the same heatsink. But as is often the case in computing: things are how they are not because it's prudent, but because it has always been done thus.

At any rate, despite all the progress made with shared cache and whatnot, the swapping still generates some overhead. Although I'm surprised that you can actually *feel* it.

[Jaqie Fox]

uhm...
change afffinity. I do that with every high cpu usage non SMP aware program I run.