Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bas Cost Budde]

Would it be feasible to have a lets-call-it a DF lite, writing true ASCII, greatly boosting fps?

The root for this question basically is my son again. Now he's getting used to the game, the low speed on his machine is starting to bother him: "Dad, can't those miners dig faster? You said they were experienced!" and I hesitate to explain what an older video card has to do with miner experience.

Of course I can upgrade the hardware, my question is more in the region of application design. Could you 'plug in' an ASCII outputter?

[Captain Mayday]

Well, most of the issue is to do with path finding, which isn't really clean yet, and all those calculations going on in the background.

[Bas Cost Budde]

I understand that (toady, care for a trajectory obstacle clearance discussion?), yet the difference between the old and the new video card is dramatic--8 against 96. That must be caused by something else than pathfinding, as it concerns the same first-week savegame.

[Slartibartfast]

Are you sure its the different graphic card that's causing the problem?
I) It most likely isn't. The part that works hardest on DF is the CPU and not the GPU.
II) If it is, could it be because of old drivers/lack of proper support of OpenGL?

[CogDissident]

Also, some video cards come with a math SPU, which could be some of that extra processing power going to the pathfinding.

[Explorer]

I would guess the bottleneck is the CPU, not the graphics card. Even most older graphics cards should be able to handle this application. The game is quite CPU intensive, so that's probably what's holding things up.

[Jaqie Fox]

Toady said he cleaned up pathfinding in another thread, but I assume he hasn't released the version in which that is done yet.

[Toady One]

It really depends on what you mean by pathfinding.  The algorithms are better now, but they aren't horrible in the current version.  It's more the animals that try to search the whole map for places they shouldn't try to get too (which will actually be worse now).  I just have to locate those AI problems one by one and correct them.

In any case, pathfinding is not the main cause of lags in large fortresses.  It's storage checks (which I've also improved).

For an early savegame, the main CPU issues are temperature/weather (which you can disable in data/init/init.txt), and the main graphics issue is having drivers that don't handle OpenGL very well.  The graphics really isn't aren't doing anything intense.  It's printing 4000 quads, I think, which isn't a lot (though a bit of a load for software maybe).

The issue for an ASCII display for me is the input.  I'm using a Windows message loop now, so I can't use PDCurses as I understand it, and I don't know much about displaying text in Windows.