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[grouchysmurf]

May I ask what is average FPS your games have? I start with 100 and sticks to this number till I start to tinker with water; I made a twelve z-levels deep reservoir, connect it to the brook and the FPS drops to 30! With a huge force besieging the fortress it drops to 24-25. That's a huge performance loss and I don't think it can't be justified only with the game being forced to compute an alternated water flow. As for the dorfs, there were as many as 120 of them in the fortress -- not too many, you have to admit.

Whilst it's not the best computer in the world that I play on, it's a low end, definitely. I bought it half an year ago, 8 or so GBs of RAM, a quad CPU; it supports the Witcher and Witcher 2, new Paradox games and anything from the Total War series (haven't yet tried Shogun 2, though).

What is your average FPS that your games flow with?

The second question pertains to the bolts the marksdorfs use during combat and training. I have set them up to use wooden/bone bolts during training and metal bolts for combat. So there was this giant elk rampaging nearby so I ordered them -- the marksdorfs -- to move to the location where it was positioned and then ordered to kill it. They went there, sure, but they forgot to take the bolts so they ended up beating it with the crossbows. One of them died during the heat of the combat -- should they have taken the bolts with them, it would have not been the case! How do I ensure dorfs do grab the bolts when ordered to station/go to a place other than their everyday barracks?

MOD: wrong forum, moderator, could you please move it to 'gameplay questions'?

[Jimmy]

First question: DF doesn't get much mileage out of a quad core CPU as the game doesn't support multithreading. What this means is that the whole game only runs on a single core, no matter what. Fluid movement is a huge drain on processing power as the calculations for water movement consume a lot of resources. If your system is old, I recommend avoiding fluids as a design element, or limiting them to small amounts only. Invaders cause drops inf FPS because each unit tries to calculate a path to your dwarves. If there's a lot of invaders, a lot of dwarves and a lot of paths, this creates big amounts of lag. There's not much you can do about this aside from fortress designs that limit available pathing options. See the wiki on increasing FPS at http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Maximizing_framerate

Footnote: Reducing clutter in your fort can have a significant impact on your FPS. The popular Masterwork mod has tools that reduce this by decreasing item types (such as making all types of leather a single item type instead of grouping it under the animal, etc). They claim to have ~25% higher FPS when using it, though I've never tried it myself. The mod can be found at http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=98196.0

Second question: 'c'reate a squad from your 'm'ilitary menu. Use the 'archer' uniform type. Select your desired dwarves and put them in the squad. You probably already did this. Then you need to go to the 'a'lert page, press the down key to 'Active/Training', press the right arrow key to select the squad you just made and press 'enter'. This is the part most miss, but it's essential if you don't want them to try to beat things to death with their fists. Exit out of this menu and your dwarves should go grab their gear, including bolts. Once they have done this you can use the 's'quad menu from the main screen to order them to 'k'ill a target, and they should shoot at it correctly.

[grouchysmurf]

I will have a look at the mod, thank you. I prefer plain vanilla, though, which I haven't yet beaten. But as FPS may be crucial, I may look for a workaround even though it requires altering the gameplay.

As for the second question -- I haven't expressed myself clearly enough. The dorfs are training, they do. They would take the wooden and bone bolts to shoot at the archery range. Once their quivers are empty, they cease to do so -- which is fine, alright, no ammo, no training, that's clear. What I do have a gripe about is that they do not grab the iron bolts they should use for combat (as I set it somewhere in the military screen) when I order them to rush to the enemy. They just go with what they are left in the quivers; sometimes these are the wooden bolts, sometimes no. Beating giant moose with your fists, no, it does not work! Bolts are better, you little bastards!

[krenshala]

Myself, I leave marksdwarves to use "any bolts" to avoid this issue.  For the majority of enemies you will face a wooden or bone bolt is just as effective as a metal one.  If using a mod like masterwork, of course, things change a bit.

Oh, and in addition to m -> a -> select active/training -> select squad, you can also start them training via s -> select squad ['a' if you only have one] -> t [to toggel through the available states, inactive and active/training being the defaults]

[grouchysmurf]

Using iron bolts, which are in scarce supply, for training seems like a bit of a waste to me :-)

And as for the FPS, what is your FPS, for you mid-sized fortress (120 dorfs, 12-15 levels deep, no caverns); for me it was 34 without and 26 with a siege. Yikes!

[krenshala]

Using iron bolts, which are in scarce supply, for training seems like a bit of a waste to me :-)

Yeah. I solve that part by not bothing with training.  Volume of fire, and all that.

[Meph]

I saw that my mod was referenced here, but I think this: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=117954.0 is better suited. It is entirely focused on increasing FPS. Without the added extras of MasterworkDF.

My current fortress has 91 dwarves, ~30 pets, 2 waterfalls and runs at stable 150 FPS.

[toomanysecrets]

Lowering your G_FPS_CAP in init.txt will boost your FPS, at least in my experience.  I keep mine at about 8-10, down from the default 50.

[i2amroy]

A few things:
1)My game usually sits at around 180 and up (I've increased the max to 500) until I get around 100 dwarves at which point it starts to slowly drop until eventually I'm down around 20-30 around 180 dwarves.

2)As Jimmy mentioned, DF is single-threaded, so water and creatures take a lot of processing power. Magma will take even more then that due to also processing temperature, to the point where we have even made a special version of the pumpstack designed to handle magma with less FPS loss. Also note that water/magma tiles that are 7/7 do not take any real power. As such the first time you connect a reservoir to a river you will suffer some large FPS drops, but once the reservoir is full and the river rises back to it's original height then most of your FPS will return. This is also the reason why the best liquid systems are either closed loop or dump back into an endless source like a river or aquifer. Simply dumping water into the caverns to dispose of it works, but is very FPS intensive.

3)While items produce clutter, the largest FPS drops are liquids, temperatures, and creatures. A note, but destroying items will not completely restore any lost FPS due to items until DF is restarted. This is because DF keeps a few pointers around for destroyed items until you restart DF, at which point they are cleaned away completely.

Lowering your G_FPS_CAP in init.txt will boost your FPS, at least in my experience.  I keep mine at about 8-10, down from the default 50.

Keep in mind that your GFPS also determines how well the game responds to commands. Lowering your GFPS too much will result in the game becoming unresponsive. Also macros will break more easily (due to missed commands) the lower your GFPS is.

MOD: wrong forum, moderator, could you please move it to 'gameplay questions'?

Final note here, but due to the fact that we only have two admins (Toady, who we would much prefer to work on the game more; and ThreeToe, his brother who isn't very active) you can move or lock your own threads. Just scroll all of the way down to the bottom of the page on a thread you created and you should see an option there (IIRC it is in the bottom right).