Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Speakafreak22]

I had to quit another fortress due to 20 FPS. I didn't abandon it, just saved it, never to be touched again.
Everything goes fine until I hit a population of 60 dwarves. After that, the FPS plunges. After another migrant wave, it slows to a crawl.
This fortress was on a site with no rivers, a few stagnant pools, wide hallways, and a garbage chute into magma.
Any suggestions on how to increase FPS?

[King DZA]

20 FPS? 20 FPS would be a godsend to many DF players. Though if it's really too slow for you, you could look into switching temperature/weather off.

[Garath]

I used to have the same problem, turned temparature off and shot up to 35. Now I'm regularly destroying stuff and I'm hovering betweer 35 and 50 fps

[rtg593]

Ya, smash stuff, make sure paths are simple, cage all the animals,..

Just keep in mind, the game tracks every object currently in existence, as well as checking every route for everything that can move from its current location to its desired location to find the quickest route.

Fewer items to track = faster game
Fewer moving creatures = faster game
Fewer possible paths in your fortress = faster game.

Also tracks wear on items, so don't outfit your dwarves with every possible clothing item. Do the 3 minimum. Don't have a ton of extra food, it slowly rots I'm told. Just try and think, do I need this, and how much work does it put on the game for it to exist?

My understanding from the science threads, anyone feel free to correct any errors.

Edit: if you really like the fort but things are too slow, you can always superspeed the dorfs. Easiest way, dfhack, fastdwarf. Just turn it off for ambush/seige, otherwise a single angry child can smash an entire zombie seige :p they move and attack too fast for the enemy to dodge or even try to attack before dying :p c

[vjek]

I had to quit another fortress due to 20 FPS. I didn't abandon it, just saved it, never to be touched again.
Everything goes fine until I hit a population of 60 dwarves. After that, the FPS plunges. After another migrant wave, it slows to a crawl.
This fortress was on a site with no rivers, a few stagnant pools, wide hallways, and a garbage chute into magma.
Any suggestions on how to increase FPS?

Any chance you can zip/7zip the save/region and put it somewhere for download?  I have good success with sustaining 100FPS with forts up to 120 dwarves over 10 years of in-game time, so I'd like to offer an opinion on the layout or what might be different compared to what I do.  PM if you would rather not post a public link.

[Naros]

Don't forget about the Faster PC = Higher FPS solution.

I upgraded my PC a year ago, and even at 260 dwarves and a few hundred animals and a huge fort it stays on, or close to my cap (60 FPS for both graphics and game).
Of course, I don't really ever want more than 50 dwarves, so I loaded up a fortress belonging to a friend for testing.

Modern hardware along with the increased efficiency of the DF code have really helped out a lot with FPS.


If your forts get to under your desired FPS level at 65 dwarves then why don't use use the currently slightly bugged population cap?
If you set it to 20, it should stop sending immigrants around the 50 dwarves level.

[Count Dorku]

If your forts get to under your desired FPS level at 65 dwarves then why don't use use the currently slightly bugged population cap?
If you set it to 20, it should stop sending immigrants around the 50 dwarves level.

I love that in this game "slightly bugged" means "the cap doesn't trigger until two and a half times where it's supposed to".

[vjek]

If your forts get to under your desired FPS level at 65 dwarves then why don't use use the currently slightly bugged population cap?
If you set it to 20, it should stop sending immigrants around the 50 dwarves level.

I love that in this game "slightly bugged" means "the cap doesn't trigger until two and a half times where it's supposed to".

For my past five forts, all with 34.07, with children set to zero, my population is within 5 or 7 of what I set it.  As in, I set it to 120, and I end up with 125 or 127 dwarves, in the end, when migrants stop.

It's all the fault of the children.   Don't hate the game, hate the children.

[rtg593]

If your forts get to under your desired FPS level at 65 dwarves then why don't use use the currently slightly bugged population cap?
If you set it to 20, it should stop sending immigrants around the 50 dwarves level.

I love that in this game "slightly bugged" means "the cap doesn't trigger until two and a half times where it's supposed to".

My understanding is its not bugged, it just works really weird. When the liaison comes and sees you're at/over the cap, he returns home and tells them to stop sending migrants. But any migrants already on their way still arrive.

If you keep your wealth low, you get small waves, and you'll be very close to the cap.

As opposed to generating massive wealth and getting 60+ migrant waves.

[Sabreur]

Don't use a magma dump, use an atom smasher. There was a science thread on fps recently where it was revealed that melted items stay in memory and continue to drain fps. From personal experience, I recommend using dfhack to autodump misc clutter, especially corpses. Having corpses lying around is murder on fps, apparently.

[Mitchewawa]

Play Masterwork, it basically increases speed by 50%. You don't even have to turn on any features if you don't want to.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Play Masterwork, it basically increases speed by 50%. You don't even have to turn on any features if you don't want to.

However, it increases speed by disabling things in the vanilla game that might be considered features.

[Speakafreak22]

Thanks for all the replies, guys.
I started a new fort with Masterwork today, same thing happened with the FPS.
I'm gonna start a new fort with Masterwork, and I'll have to build an atom smasher ASAP. I always thought the magma dump was faster.
I'll also have to screw around with the population cap. Maybe I'll set it for 40 dwarves, so it'll have maybe 60 at most. We'll see how that works out.
Vjek, how to I upload a fort?

[Drawde]

When your first dwarven caravan arrives, check your population then save and quit.  Go into d_init.txt and set your population cap to about 7 or so above what you currently have.  Restart the game, then don't save until AFTER the next immigrant wave has fully arrived.  The next two waves will be roughly the same size as that one.  Calculate what your ending population will roughly be.

You can either end the game (not save) here and adjust the cap slightly or countinue on.  I've ended up with a population in the mid-fourties this way by the second caravan.  After this, adjusting the cap to slightly above your current population will result in small waves, even if you started above your current cap when the second caravan left.  I've skipped the first wave after the second caravan then set the cap to get a wave after that.  You just have to be careful not to set the cap too much above your current population or you end up with a big wave.

It's possible that this could work between the first and second caravans, but I doubt it.  I've gotten the third wave there even when above the cap from the first or second wave.

[Garath]

someone proposed dfhack fastdwarf to speed up construction with fewer dwarfs and low fps. Don't. It kills your fps and when it reaches 2, 1 or 0, your game is likely to crash.

repeated: turn temperature off. No you won't be able to unfreeze water with magma now and creatures won't die in it. Magma forges still work though. However, it will save you a load of fps. magma dumping is also fps draining because the game is now tracking burning/melting items. If they were metals, metalic globs will remain, wood might leave ash, etc. With temperature off, atom smashing is the only solution.

the pop cap works very simple. People call it bugged because they don't understand how it works. The outpost liaison/caravan reports how many dwarfs you have. If it's below the pop-cap, you get 3 more waves based on wealth. So yes, insane amount of rock or gold crafts just to trade with the caravan for stuff you might not really need yet can cause a lot of migrants to show up. Trading a few mechanisms for booze and an anvil (if you didn't bring one) and just making some wooden cage traps against early thieves and ambushers, and even the next few waves will rarely push you above 70. With my pop-cap at 55 I never get more than 5 waves, unless I get massacred along the way.

If you're using the pop cap, use the child cap as well. One number there is an absolute number of the maximum amount of children, the other as a % of the adult population. default is set at I think 100:1000, either stop at 100 or 1000% (10x) adult population. A bit impractical. What I currently use: I don't want more than a third to be children and never more than 25, so 25:50 (the 50% is a third of total population, half of adult). If a lot of adults die, I could change it.

@masterwork: one change is removing lots of "special" names, so for example leather is leather instead of turkey, dog and cat leather, which is easier on your processor. A small note however when you have questions, tell people you play masterwork mod or you might get confusing or confused answers.