Hey, I meant to do it this time. And the last time was totally Yuli Vlasi's fault, plus whoever designed the front gate in a way that made it impossible to tell if it was open or closed.
CaptainMcClellan, you'll probably need a late-generation dual-core processor to run the fort. I was getting decent FPS giving it a core to itself on my Phenom II X2, but my understanding is that nobody else was able to coax worthwhile FPS out of the thing. If someone wants to resurrect from the save before mine and try to create an alternate ending I'm completely cool with it, I just figured I'd write an ending since I seemed to be about the only person who could make one happen.
Amusingly, DF is literally one of the reasons why I went with a late-model dual-core instead of a quad-core processor.
Because of a higher clock rate? Also I'm reviving it from wherever the save I've been given is and am getting decent FPS on the school computers. And that's not even the Comp Sci computers which I haven't tried yet.
DF is single-threaded, unless Toady managed to do some parallelization in the last few releases and I forgot about it.
A dual-core processor will outperform a quad-core in a case like that when the overall clock speed of the processor is similar, even though a slower quad-core will often outperform a faster dual-core on multithreaded applications. The reason being, the individual capabilities of each core will be higher for the dual-core versus the quad-core. A dual core is thus pretty ideal for running DF, because you do need the separate cores so that you can fully dedicate one to the DF process (you can't do this on a single-core because there are essential processes that need to be able to run in parallel with DF itself).
When I run Dwarf Fortress, I generally assign it to run only on one of my two processor cores, and instruct Windows to offer DF pretty much exclusive rights to that core (High priority generally). This means that everything else that needs to run that isn't the DF process gets the second core, and DF takes the first core.
It means that my computer is a bit underpowered for a lot of other applications, but it means that it's taken years for processors to catch up to the single-core performance of mine from 2010. (Although some poking at some benchmark sites does suggest that I've finally been overtaken by higher-end i5 and i7 quad-cores.)