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[wiselyshen]

Greetings fellow b12-ers!
I've been playing DF and lurking here for a year or two without a forum ID until now.
So, I'm on a HP Mini netbook, I tried nanofortress, Temperature disabled, g-fps to 15. The farthest I can get is 40-25 FPS with 70-80 dwarfs. I can't stand playing below 30 FPS. I never ever experience tantrum spiral nor the joy of having fully functional dwarf justice with full nobles assigned. I'm basically doomed if i try to do anything fun like breaking the candy or making water pumps, or building massive projects, etc. Poor me, and yeah I've been saving up to buy a much better laptop but in the meantime, s'there anything I can do now?
Do you have any advice for me to have fun with this limitation temporarily?

Thanks in advance b12er!

[Psieye]

Limit pathing, remove all clothes from the game (go to modding forum, there are now mod-loader startup screens such as Masterwork DF), make as few items as possible (so you may want to mod in gold as a weapons material and then make gold discs to sell).

[Girlinhat]

First of all "Lol trying to play DF on a netbook."  Second "Respect for staying true to the game."  Third, as above, clothing can be a big issue.  Clothing degrades over time, and the degradation check can draw a lot of FPS.  Shallow worlds help too, using adv. parameters to reduce the cavern layers to 1 (everything gets smushed into one supercavern) or remove caverns entirely, with the ability to also remove the magma sea or HFS (let's be honest, you won't be clowning on that machine).

Additionally, it has been proven that world size will affect your fort-side performance.  A small world - particularly one with fewer civs - will allow higher FPS.

[ledgekindred]

I've managed to pull off playing DF on a Dell Mini 9, just barely. 

Micro world with stuff turned off as the previous suggestions said.  Atom smash anything you don't need to limit the number of items being tracked.  Make sure that your fort is optimized for movement, keep wide corridors and large stairwells/ramps to limit the amount of collision between dorfs. 

Make sure you are playing the absolute latest version. I've noticed significant speedups on large forts.  I'm still getting 30fps on a fort with 220 dorfs and a good 120 animals in a large region.  This is usually where older releases would start to drag my machine into low 10s or single-digit fps.  (edit: I should point out that I'm talking about running on my macbook pro, not the mini 9)

I think, to be perfectly honest, you will have to accept that until you get a beefier machine, you're not really going to get 30fps on a netbook with any fort of sufficient size for optimal FUN. 

And I agree with Girlinhat - respec' yo.

(And hey, I can always dream that one day we will have DF for iPad...)

[zehive]

almost every single fort ive had has died an FPS death from going under 10fps. I really need a new rig, this one is selfbuilt on a budget and... wait for it... 8 years old. Somehow it runs skyrim on medium settings just fine, dwarf fortress it can handle until I start crafting and have more then 40 dorfs

[AWdeV]

Huh, what exactly does "FPS-death" mean? At the moment I'm at a fairly stable 14 FPS does it crash below a certain treshold or does fps-death mean it simply gets too slow to enjoy?

[Teneb]

Huh, what exactly does "FPS-death" mean? At the moment I'm at a fairly stable 14 FPS does it crash below a certain treshold or does fps-death mean it simply gets too slow to enjoy?

FPS death usually means FPS 0 or 1, when it's impossible to do anything.

[AWdeV]

Ah yes, makes sense. Any way to avoid such catastrophe in a fortress already running?

[wierd]

Get someone else with a beefier rig to host a dfterm game for you to connect to.

Your typical telnet terminal client doesn't need a lot of processing power. As long as the bandwidth is there, you can play at reasonably high fps.

I have considered hosting a dfterm session on my ubuntu i7 upstairs.  It doesn't get much love despite being a bear on dwarf fort. (Get over 100fps in 2dmode with large embark, and 60 dwarves. Dropping it into text mode would be insane.)

I would do it if I had some serious takers.

[Girlinhat]

FPS-death specifically refers to the moment where you become too frustrated with the slow speed and archive the fort, wherein time and patience do what no invader could.

[wierd]

Quite right.. sadly.

Happened to one of my 40d forts, before I got the i7. (Back when I was using an old athlon xp easybake cpu.)

[AWdeV]

Ah. Basically I just need some sort of supercomputer to give me a petaflop(s) or two. 


editing while posting: oh nadgers, my laptop is making extra noise and FPS is down to 4.

[Girlinhat]

Actually most supercomputers rely on multi-core arrays, which won't help DF at all.  DF is single-core, so a comparatively older computer with a powerful single core might actually run better than a new quad-core megamachine.

[AWdeV]

Nevertheless, I need more power. I really don't understand techno-babble although I guess I got the gist of it.

[wierd]

You want cpu gigahertz. Faster cpu with more cache == happy DF.

Cache is important, because of the repatative processing DF does. I liken the load to being similar to mpeg reprocessing.  A high end engineering workstation with a smexy xeon with lots of clockcycles and cache makes df very happy indeed.

Next best bet is a high end intel.  I have an i7, but that's pushing overkill because there are 7 vacant cores doing shit all nothing while df is running. Its claim to fame is the faster fsb, high clock, and bigger cache compared to an i3 or an i5.