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[Galick]

Alright, I just read a few of the succession games going on and uh...got thoroughly inspired to start my own fort once again.  Thing is, it' s been a grand total of like three years since I last played and I have to ask:

My laptop is shitty.  Incredibly shitty.  Like, I have issues running any game that isn't a text game shitty.  What version of DF has the lowest likelihood of melting my laptop and/or what do you suggest I do to render this thing playable.

I have a Dell Inspiron with an Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU T3400 @ 2.16GHz.  Got 3 gigabytes of ram, and around 30 gigabytes free on my hard drive.

[Girlinhat]

23a would be the lightest version I think, it's 2D and small, but that was ages ago (never played it myself).  The current version actually runs better than some previous versions, if you play it right.  Utilize advanced worldgen, shallow worlds, pocket worlds, short history, low population cap for civilizations, and then check your init files to disable temperature and weather and-

Y'know, nevermind.  We get like 2 of these threads a week.  "How do I maximize FPS" search it.

[Galick]

23a would be the lightest version I think, it's 2D and small, but that was ages ago (never played it myself).  The current version actually runs better than some previous versions, if you play it right.  Utilize advanced worldgen, shallow worlds, pocket worlds, short history, low population cap for civilizations, and then check your init files to disable temperature and weather and-

Y'know, nevermind.  We get like 2 of these threads a week.  "How do I maximize FPS" search it.

I'm not after maximizing my FPS, actually, I'm just looking to try and make it actually playable    As in, not crashing upon worldgen.

[Girlinhat]

It's the same difference, at core, though that still applies to worldgen.  Short, small worlds.  A lot of people think that they need 1,000 year mega-worlds to do anything interesting, and then they embark on a 3x3 and sit in their fort for 7 years before abandoning and deleting the world.  Go small

[KodKod]

Go small

Very much this. I was getting irritated at the countless rejected worlds that would pop up for my advanced worldgen parameters, so as a test I set my worldsize to ~65x65 instead of ~257x257, and suddenly I was generating worlds instantly. Now I'm never going back to needlessly large worlds because they don't really add anything to the gameplay, except mounting FPS issues.

The difference that size and time makes has to be seen to be believed, but it's huge. If you're working on a craptop then get as small a world as you can and you wont go far wrong.

[miauw62]

Go small

Very much this. I was getting irritated at the countless rejected worlds that would pop up for my advanced worldgen parameters, so as a test I set my worldsize to ~65x65 instead of ~257x257, and suddenly I was generating worlds instantly. Now I'm never going back to needlessly large worlds because they don't really add anything to the gameplay, except mounting FPS issues.

The difference that size and time makes has to be seen to be believed, but it's huge. If you're working on a craptop then get as small a world as you can and you wont go far wrong.

Especially if the small world doesnt have what you want, you just gen a new one!

[Deathworks]

Dear Gallick!

The others have already mentioned that reducing the size of the world can help a lot. Concerning your specs, at least as far as world gen is concerned, you should be fine. I just genned a medium world for fortress mode going to the year 312 in about 2 hrs: Since I have uploaded it to the DFFD, you can have a look at its params and also at its map at the map archive.

And my specs are inferior to yours: According to the system information, I have 2GB of RAM, also a dual core processor at 2100MHz.

The game does crash when you hit 2GB of RAM usage, as far as I know, so your 3GB should be more than enough. Disk space requirement is far less than 1GB if you use compressed saves (default) and don't have autobackup activated. The game itself is single-thread and only the graphics may use a different core, so dual core is all you need.

So, if you keep things small, you should be pretty much okay with the machine you have and can use the most current version.

Ah, a final piece of advice about world gen: Watch the number of historic events. At least on my machine, the game crashes about when I reach somewhat more than 1,500,000 events, so if you see a good world getting close to that number early, you may want to interrupt world gen and use the world as is. And remember that the number of new events per year tends to increase

Yours,
Deathworks

[Galick]

Alright, I did the following:

Set graphical refresh to 15, turned FPS to 50, and disabled weather/temperature and the game itself runs great!  Still laggy during worldgen, but nothing unbearable.  Thank you for your help!