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[KirklandsQQ]

Hey guys! I read over the improvements for FPS on the wiki page but many of them were fairly vague or seemed to be intended for more seasoned users to intuit.. Also given the games age its difficult to tell what exactly is up to date information wise/version wise.

But I wanted to ask this, currently, is an island better for performance then regions? Also are their any other very obvious settings I should change to help improve performance? I was going to limit pop to 75-125 range and maybe generating a medium sized world. I have been employing DFhack to some success on my starter fortress.

Any other current accepted performance improvement things would be great! without detracting from the game at least.

I used to play this 10 years ago, and things have changed so much since then! Also I'am playing on the steam version. Would it be better to use the original version with a tileset?

[MonkeyHead]

Islands are generally worse than regions, linked to how islands tend to produce deeper maps.

FPS takes the biggest hit from two things: pathing, and number of things.

First, pathing. To lighten this load, avoid big open areas in forts. Aboveground this is unavoidable, but underground avoid huge open areas that need constant pathing calculations. Caverns are particularly bad here. You can reduce the number of caverns in the init files. I play with 1 with no ill effects - you just get things from all layers in one. Wall off areas you do not wish to use to help further. Pathing can be further helped with traffic designations to encourage units to follow certain routes and to not look along others. Pasturing or chaining animals can restrict pathing further.

Number of things can be kept low with smaller worlds and shorter histories. Limit your population, limit your visitors, and don't produce tons of crap. Butcher any unneeded animals.

Other good boosts can come from a smaller embark (3x3 should be plenty), or turning off weather and temperature in the inits, though both would remove game features.

[Ziusudra]

Pathfinding is not a major cause of FPS death

Source: I actually profiled the game, which is the only way to actually determine what is slow in a program.

Pathfinding is slow, yes. It's hilariously slow. The thing is, it doesn't happen often at all. When it does, fortresses drop to sub-single-digit FPS levels. This usually happens because you're using tightly closed doors. Don't do that.

Pathfinding happens so rarely that my profiling has shown it contributes to about 6% of an individual tick's processing time.

Cramming creatures together where they need to check if they should react to each other was a major cause they found. There's now experimental multi-threading you can enable in the game that can reduce that. But spreading your creatures out will prevent the entirely. Also the tightly closed doors hav been removed since then.

The way the path finding algorithm works, big open areas are not significantly slower, even when the pathfinding does need to run.

The tons of crap is more important, though in the past that's mostly been caused by people setting up repeating orders. The streamer Blind ran a fort for hundreds of years in part to prove this: 10 minute screenshot show case video in play list.

Turning off temperature can lead to inaccessible areas that should be accessible. And unless you've had some thing like a dragon visit that set every thing on fire, disabling it shouldn't make a noticeable difference. Similarly with weather.

[jecowa]

Smaller stockpiles are also better for performance. Mega stockpiles are bad.

[Salmeuk]

it seems to hold true that smaller worlds with less 'complex' history are more efficient to play on. Fewer populations interacting, fewer civs. You can accomplish this by generating shorter histories, turning down civ counts in adv gen, turning down sitecap limits in adv gen, or, alternatively, loading up your worlds with tons of megabeasts so they keep the civs populations in check. Though this often leads to extinction events . it can take a while to find such a world that is nicely balanced with this strategy but it can be a lot of fun.