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[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

So I finally got a fortress with 100+ dwarves (along with my first siege, yippee) and now I'm getting the slow-down I've heard so much about. My FPS is on average between 22 and 15. Now I've had no particular need for meat to boost my food stocks and so I've let the animals breed like crazy -for a rainy day or something. I've even started breeding foxes though the dwarves never want them for anything. I was just wondering if slaughtering half my 180 or so untrained fairly useless animals would increase my game speed. Will that many animals put any drain on the CPU or are they too stupid to take any notable toll? It's not game-breakingly slow as there is a lot to keep tabs on, but all the same if it'll make the game a bit faster then let the halls run red with the blood of 90 foals and cats.

Tag on 2 more q's to avoid creating new topics:

1) Is there any way to check what mechanism connects to what? I installed mechanisms for cages to my floodgate lever, (sucker goblins) and now I want them gone but I'm afraid of removing the floodgate mechanisms.

2) How long till a child grows up?

[ April 06, 2007: Message edited by: Funkadelic Jive Turkey ]

[schnobs]

I'm inclined to believe that the dwarves matter more than any amount of animals. My fortress also has slowed down considerably over time, although I tried to keep the pet population at bay: 158 dwarves, 61 war dogs and 35 other animals.

Starting at 85 fps, I'm now down to 20-25 on a 2GHz machine (2 actual GHz, I can't remember what pseudo-speed rating was stamped on the box).

Flooding my farms will incur further penalties, down to like 10 fps while the water is rushing in.

[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

schnobs, always helpful, thanks.

I don't remember computer specs when I got it, but now looking at my Device Manager: I've 2 3.2 ghz Pentium 4 processors. That seems much higher than I recall and I don't think I'd be having problems if it were accurate. Makes me question if I need to do some serious work on my PC (other than defragment it 1500 times in a row).

Water slows everybody down from what I hear, but ok, if animals have no impact you've just saved the lives of countless cats, horses, and a few foxes.    

Would de-fragmenting a whole bunch help btw? Yep, my computer is on a sorry state.

[ April 06, 2007: Message edited by: Funkadelic Jive Turkey ]

[schnobs]

at your service.

 

quote:Originally posted by Funkadelic Jive Turkey:
<STRONG>
Would de-fragmenting a whole bunch help btw? </STRONG>

Nah. I'm too lazy to really check, but I don't notice any frantic HD activity while playing DF. I don't see how defrag should help you with DF (though there may be other reasons, of course).

It really comes down to the CPU. All those dwarfes wondering what they should do next, looking for acessible job items, pathfinding through the fortress, that sort of thing. The animals surely have some impact too, but I don't think it amounts to much compared to the dwarves. Though I'd be curious to know for sure... so if you do kill your animals after all, let me know what happened.

Toady recently said he's improved at a few of these things. Or at any rate I believe to have read words to that effect. The next version may not only feature new maps.

[ April 06, 2007: Message edited by: schnobs ]

[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

Again thanks, now just the questions of kids and mechanisms if you'd be so kind. (See above)

[Chariot]

animals do have an impact around doors.

my game runs at 60 FPS constant no matter how many dwarves i have it seems(FPS cap at 100 in the init file, but never once have i seen it above 60), but if even 1 animal gets stuck behind a door, that FPS immediately drops to ~50. lower if more than 1 animal wants through

[ April 06, 2007: Message edited by: Chariot ]

[schnobs]

<grin>
kids: no idea.

mechanisms: I don't think it's possible, but am not sure. I always just flip the switch and see what door / floodgate / bridge moves.

Wait a sec. What exactly do you want to do? You have cages AND floodgate linked to the same lever? And now want to remove some of the mechanisms? Where's the IRC channel again? Find me there.

#bay12games on worldirc.org

[ April 06, 2007: Message edited by: schnobs ]

[Toady One]

The main slowdowns in the currently posted version really come from having a lot of items, although I think there's a specific slowdown associated to trapping animals behind doors as well.

[ktrey]

The best way I've found to determine what a lever is connected to at the moment is to try to connect it to the object again. It won't allow you to connect it to the same target twice.

For instance: You have a drawbridge and two levers sitting next to it and you can't remember which one activates the drawbridge. Try linking one lever to the bridge, if it allows it (ie the bridge shows up as connectible) then that's not the lever. Double check the other one the same way. If the lever is already connected, then it can't be connected again.

[Jaqie Fox]

re speed of fortress and various computer architectures:

CPU processing speed is most important.  A netburst based intel (P4 generation) will not perform nearly as well as an athlon 64 of the same clock speed.  This is due to the way they were designed, and why AMD reintroduced the speed rating nomenclature.  A P4 based celeron will do the absolute worst in this because a lot of the internal features of the chip have been disabled inside the chip.  Hyperthreading may or may not help, so it is a good idea to try with it on and off and see which helps (the setting is found in bios of intel P4 gen motherboards).

The second most important thing for DF is CPU <-> memory bandwidth.  if you run dual channel you are running the best.  Latency isn't near as important as interface speed (PC3200 is much faster then PC2700, etc etc but latency does have some effect, especially in DDR2).

SMP (multiple CPU cores, this does not include Ht since it is not truly multicore) does not help DF much but it does a little if you already have one.  The reason for this is that windows can use the other CPU to handle system tasks like I/O and other programs you are running at the time.  Setting DF to run in a single core (affinity in task manager processes tab) will help the speed some, but not much at all.