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[rodgort]

In my recent fort, I've put some thought into preventing the FPS problems of the past. Dwarf baths are positioned along several major walkways, and I picked a map with no running water. After mining out large areas, I've walled them off to prevent pathing problems, and the caverns are generally locked away safely behind a drawbridge for the same reason. The pop cap is at 80, and I atom-smash my garbage religiously. Pets are all caged up, and when blood proliferates I run dfcleanmap.

This worked great until a fairly precipitous drop recently. So far as I can tell, this coincided with only one marked change in my fortress - my two engravers finally hit legendary from smoothing walls, so I set them loose on covering everything with engravings.

Do copious engravings really slow things down? It occurred to me that perhaps there was some processing going on every single time a dwarf passed an engraving, which is newly true in every square of my huge dining room and living quarters. The fortress seems to be heading rapidly toward unplayability. I had been consistently up in the vicinity of 90 FPS, and in just a few seasons it has dropped steadily to around 30. I can't imagine a possible cause OTHER than the engravings, because not much else has changed.

[Jacob/Lee]

I would think that's possible, because the game would have more stuff to track the more you engraved.

[ext0l]

do you have ghosts?
in the past, i've never had trouble with engravings.

[NW_Kohaku]

Have you revealed all the caverns?  Those critters down below still exist, even if you haven't unsealed the lid and taken a look at them, yet, and they can do things like cover the entire cavern with webs or get overgrown with mushrooms or have odd pathfinding siezures or just plain spawning more and more critters.  Having caverns generally just does mean things to your FPS, regardless of what you, yourself are doing.

Your engravings shouldn't have any real FPS impact, since the major things that kill FPS are anything to do with pathfinding (and nothing should be pathfinding to your engravings) and things like water.

[fervor]

Just want to point out that walking past engravings do not give happy thoughts (according to the wiki).  So the game doesn't have to do constant checks.

[612DwarfAvenue]

I'm not sure engravings impact FPS, but i'm pretty sure the actual designations do.

[NecroRebel]

There have been suggestions that having a large number of designations accessible can cause a significant FPS hit, as everyone who is a valid target for those designations has to path to every single one and determine which they want to actually do first. Since your engravers can surely access all of the engrave stone designations on your floors, that would fit.

Also, given that engravings themselves have more information on them then a simple smoothed wall - the engraving's quality, what it is an engraving of, and, in the case of masterworks, who did it - that could cause FPS trouble akin to having additional items in your fort.

[Smew]

The large-scale creation of engravings definitely has a notable effect on FPS, as with most designations, I was going to expand more but then I realized the guy above me already did it. 

[dwarfhoplite]

designating large areas causes lag

[rodgort]

No, I don't have ghosts... but yes, I think it was the designations. And indeed, that fits the data of progressively worsening FPS. Initially, I began by engraving the mayor's new quarters. Moved on when that was done to the considerably larger dining room. And finally designated every single tile of the bedroom levels, which is about when FPS hit its minimum. It has been improving steadily as the engravers have made headway, reducing the total designated area, and I got a lurch when I conducted the experiment of briefly undesignating everything.

So I guess the fort's still a keeper. Thank you, folks!

[Girlinhat]

In general, when you do anything significant and FPS drops, then don't worry.  Like, you finally re-open the gates and let your civilians reclaim all that goblinite.  That's a lot of haul jobs happening all at once.

Also, I'm curious how your engravings turned out.  Any interesting ones to share?  My worlds start at year 1,000 (because I want mature dragons!) and in one fort I had a lot of engravings of elves being killed by giants in years 5-15.  Granted, engravings of dying elves is pretty awesome, but still.