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[micha]

Here's a quick heads-up on what's going on in an experimental fort of mine, how it came to be, and my completely unbelievable results:

I ran into another one of Nil's most excellent contraptions and made a fort to tinker with it.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=92241.0
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/User:Vasiln/Undump

Now dfhack's cleanowned tells me that I have 19244 items in my fort.
While the dwarfs are working the fps meter shows around  '33(33)'.
That number might drop to '20(20)' for a moment, but hey, that's just for a moment.

When it is like now and i have 14 of my 18 dwarfs idle, the fps goes back to '50(44)' or '49(43)'.
And that is where it was when I began my experiment.

See, my forts die when i drown in crap. Seeing the potential in Nil's undump to replace my previous nodump strategy to defer the end, I embarked with 4 masterwork slade turrets, dug a dual entrance drowning kind of siege killer with a reservoir under a river, stuck the turrets on the top floor of a tiny building and dedicated a few floors to tinkering.

you can read up on all that in the undump thread. but let me continue.  from my experiments i saw how how the dump worked and figured out how to optimize it for throughput. then i began using it as an everything pile. the design evolved once more and at the heart of Wallshadow the stout dwarves, under the leadership of Mrs. Rampart Scholarlantern and Granite Testmachine, created this:

THE UNDUMP-22-ENGINE r2


the 22 pistons/cylinders/rooms are all part of one stockpile which was placed after all the stuff was built and then had the middle 'x'd out.  turns out that you don't need the doors or anything because its very unlikely (1 in 11000 unlikely) that one would need it at all.  anyway, when its all brand new the swarves will start filling the pile but since they can never reach these far away squares behind the (unlocked) doors due to the pressure plate opening the hatch, they drop their load, usually on the 2nd square.. leaving the last square empty.. and signaling to the world that there's more room for storage there.

what has now happenend is that we've created 44 squares on which dozens and hundreds of pages of goods will be stored .. within steps from a staircase. without bins. (i have no idea what happens when you throw bins in there. i set the bin count to 0, barrel count to max)

If you stick with this for a minute you realize that you can put all your normal workshops somewhere close to these 11 stairs for very short and constant paths (if there would be an expert in the house who could improve the stair design, please chime in!).


Anyway, what this design seems to prove is that you can keep all your stuff in one or more of these piles with ZERO impact on your FPS, at least when idle. You need to build this to understand that forum wisdom is completely wrong attributing FPS death to item count. This design will show you that item-count has virtually no bearing whatsoever on your FPS.   

Decorations and customizations don't matter either; having zillions of masterwork announcements doesn't seem to matter. Not digging seems to matter, not making piles seems to matter.  but not item count.  item count appears to be irrelevant.  cool, eh?

guys and gals and dorfs, STRIKE THE EARTH .. and report back please.

(i'm at 20789 items now, 2 dorfs busy, 4 wagons on the map fps '49(42)'. will someone please pinch me?!)

Enjoy!

[Uncle Wulfie]

I tried something similar to this and found that many of my haulers did not trigger the pressure plates even though they were set to minimum weight and triggerable by citizens.  The one thing those haulers all had in common? They were all females aged 13-16.

[micha]

wtf, the first response from an unintelligent pedophile troll?   thanks bay12, so long.

[Sphalerite]

Very interesting.  I'll build one of these and test it myself as soon as I have a chance.

[Uncle Wulfie]

Sir, I find your overreaction deeply offensive.

I built a very similar setup.  Every time I turned around it was getting gummed up.  Does that make me a troll?

I spent a fair amount of time watching and examining the dwarfs who walked across the pressure plates without triggering them.  They were all very young. 

[Loud Whispers]

wtf, the first response from an unintelligent pedophile troll?   thanks bay12, so long.

Er... What?

[Arbinire]

wtf, the first response from an unintelligent pedophile troll?   thanks bay12, so long.

Er... What?

I think that is what is called "projection" in the psychology business.

[caddybear]

Younger dorfs are smaller. That's probably why they didn't trigger the plates.

Also, posting in epic ( soon to be locked and banished to depths of hell, probably )thread.

[DanteThanatos]

I tried something similar to this and found that many of my haulers did not trigger the pressure plates even though they were set to minimum weight and triggerable by citizens.

Younger dorfs are smaller. That's probably why they didn't trigger the plates.

It was set to minimun weight, as he said. Im going to test this and come back with the results.(Probably)

Edit: Tested and managed to screw it over and over again...But, I've come with something of minimal importance:

Putting the presure plate at a diagonal entrace doesn't work, the dwarves takes longer to walk diagonals and most of the times my dwarves put the items over the pressure plate, not the stock pile.

[Cusi]

Sir, I find your overreaction deeply offensive.

I built a very similar setup.  Every time I turned around it was getting gummed up.  Does that make me a troll?

I spent a fair amount of time watching and examining the dwarfs who walked across the pressure plates without triggering them.  They were all very young.

What about the young male dwarves? I think your female exclusive, young age was what set him off, though I think only disturbed minds think of pedophilia when young dwarves are mentioned. The more sensible ones think of danger rooms and magma.

[Callista]

Females of all species are smaller than males. You notice it most with grazers--the smaller females need less pasture, so you can squeeze more of them in. And they give milk and birth young, so most people who have flocks will have maybe two males for every ten females... Yet another attention to detail thing I like about this game.

Dwarves are probably the same way: Females are slightly smaller than the males, so the youngest females will be the ones who are most likely to be too small to trigger pressure plates.

[slink]

From the Dwarven raws.  There is no mention of gender difference, however if UW observed a few young females in succession it would have been natural to assume that the real-life normal difference applied in the game.

   These tags establish the growth phases of the creature's life.  The format is (BODY_SIZE|<year>|<day>|<average size>).

   [BODY_SIZE:0:0:3000]
   [BODY_SIZE:1:168:15000]
   [BODY_SIZE:12:0:60000]

   These body modifiers give individual dwarves different characteristics.  In the case of HEIGHT, BROADNESS and LENGTH, the modifier is also a percentage change to the BODY_SIZE of the individual creature.  The seven numbers afterward give a distribution of ranges.  Each interval has an equal chance of occurring.

   [BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:HEIGHT:75:95:98:100:102:105:125]
      [APP_MOD_IMPORTANCE:500]
   [BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:BROADNESS:75:95:98:100:102:105:125]
      [APP_MOD_IMPORTANCE:500]

[Callista]

Ah, I was wrong then... Still a reasonable assumption though since it holds true for some other species.

[slink]

I agree, it was a reasonable assumption.  It is possible that Tarn Adams programmed in an automatic size difference for genders, even though it is not in the raws.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I agree, it was a reasonable assumption.  It is possible that Tarn Adams programmed in an automatic size difference for genders, even though it is not in the raws.

I doubt it, most other dwarf functions are very gender neutral--e.g. the built-in "practice-editing-the-raws" thing Toady added with the option of adding beards to female dwarves by simply adding brackets to existing data. I think it is more likely the sample size was small and only young female dwarves were present. Another question is weight/fatness/diet--were they skinny? What did it say in their description?

But to go back to the op's claim: item count not affecting f.p.s.--your f.p.s. is at 50, which is what I usually get from atomsmashing in an advanced fort, so it seems like f.p.s. drop is proportional whether or not the items still exist...