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[Maab]

Hello guys,

i play df more than one week and i start the game many times again, as well as yesterday i build a new fortress and today i want to continue my savegame.
Today i see that my df jerks, but my fps are between 70 and 103.
I play in windowed mode and i use the mayday graphics.
My current operating system are windows vista.

DF used my cpu by 56%, if it is not in paused mode, and it reserved 140kb.

Did anyone have an idea ?

Thanks for help,
Maab.

[GoldenH]

That's a pretty good FPS for df. The jerks aren't too bad unless it actually stalls and goes to 0 FPS. It can also be due to fortress design, do you have large parts of your fortress cut off from each other?

[KenboCalrissian]

There are a lot of things that can cause fluctuations in FPS.  I generally recommend playing with the FPS counter off because, well let's face it, you're better off not knowing.

You're a new player, so I'm going to guess you have a lot of cats running around your fort.  Slaughter or cage them now.  Cats are known to be one of the worst causes of FPS drop in a fortress, and once they adopt a dwarf as a pet there's little you can do about it without starting a tantrum spiral.  Generally, all animals make frequent calls to the path finding algorithm, and most of the time this can be remedied by cramming all of the animals into a single cage to relieve some of the work load.  Cats are an exception because of their nature.  Pets can't be slaughtered or caged, and cats assign themselves as pets automatically, and then they start breeding everywhere and suddenly your fortress is overrun with cats who are hogging your frame rate.

Generally speaking, you should expect your FPS to drop gradually as you play.  Both of my big forts settled around 25-30 FPS by end of year 5.  There are ways of bumping it up, but you need to get used to it eventually.

[darkflagrance]

Moving fluids, temperature, and rain also do horrible things to fps, the latter two being the most significant. I often find myself forced to turn off the latter, and experimentation with the former generally resulted in abandonment due to sluggish fps.

Also, when ambushes appear, the stealth detection required also drops fps.

[Maab]

I've not many cats ... the game runs 4hours and it jerks.

I have 32 dwarfs and 18 * 3 animals.
I don't think it is to many, or it is ?

I think the game isn't strong enough to bring my (dual-)cpu to its knees ^^
My Cpu is a dual core with 2.26GHz, i think that's enough for a non-graphical game like DF.
But i think the problem is by the dwarfs, i got 18 new dwarfs at hour 3... any chance to fix that problem ?

I dont want stop playing DF, but iam dont like jerking games  :-/

Greetings,
Maab.

//EDIT
Here that's my fortress:
Level1
Level2
That's all ...

//EDIT2
Thats my CPU usage -.-
I think DF does something wrong ...

[Derakon]

DF doesn't do much with graphics, but it does a lot of calculations. It's like how scientists need really massive computers to do their weather predictions. In general, what's really expensive, CPU-wise, is the pathfinding that all units do. So all your extra animals probably aren't helping, and each dwarf you add will slow you down a bit more, too.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

a god idea is to dedicate an entire cpu to DF, this can be done manually with the task manager but there's a little program that makes your job easier, google for smp seesaw...or maybe i'll google it for you, be rite back

EDIT 'ere ye go http://www.mlin.net/SMPSeesaw.shtml

it has a very simple and intuitive interface, but if you need any help, just ask

EDIT2 my browser doesn't download the msi when i click on the link, instead it tries to open it as a webpage, if you experience the same, instead of left clicking the link, right click it and select "save as" and save the file, making sure you add .msi to the end of its name