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[EBannion]

Ok, so the save to which I will be referring can be found Here at DFFD

The thread which lead to this is over here.

In fort mode, at the end of the fortress, I was getting about 20 FPS which is in the 'acceptable' range for me.

In adventure mode, several independent adventurers have reported one frame per several minutes as a framerate, which is obviously not acceptable.

Useful information:

- Units:
       - DFHack 'slayrace' antpeople (there is a hive with like a hundred of them alive under the fort) netted no performance improvement
       - There is a nest of batpeople, and several (like, 6) FB's, many of whom have wings. It's possible that flyign pathfinding is part of the issue, but slaying the batpeople resulted in zero improvement, so... who knows


- Flows:
       - The underground sea is apparently not completely full and is sloshing around. On the idea that this might be leading to the framerate issue, an attempt was made to close the edges of the map with DFHack produced obsidian, and then to eliminate the non-full tiles of water to stop the sloshing. I"m not entirely sure of the efficacy of the experiment, and there could probably be more testing.

Does anyone know if there's an elegant way to freeze all of the water? That would let us eliminate water flows entirely as a potential source of issues.

       - The magma is pretty well-contained in its pipes, but I suppose that temperature or sloshing of magma could contribute. I don't think it's likely though since folks have adventurered themselves to places with magma and not been squashed by the FPS gods.

- Objects:
       - There're a lot of... things... scattered around, as is typical for a fort that gets 'crumbled' and then revisited. This didn't cause an issue the last iteration, though, so I don't think that it is related.

Anything else anyone can think of is welcome. If we can crowdsource a solution to this particular site's issue, it might result in data that are applicable in a more large-scale sense.

Please help!

[mnjiman]

I will take a look.

What are your computer specs?

[mnjiman]

Sorry but why do I have to look for the fortress? I thought this was the fortress file itself.

[Catsup]

i may post my save for diagnoses later too. Enjoy playing it if you guys want to too, i dont have any goblin torture rooms set up yet, but the corpse grinder and child smasher are fully set up and functional (well, only 2/4 corpse grinders are functional, but they havent seen any usage yet).

[Broken]

Look, here there is my adventurer, right after reaching the fort.

http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=7615

[EBannion]

I will take a look.

What are your computer specs?

4 gb RAM, 2.3ghz Athlon X2 dual-core, windows 8 64bit.

I haven't actually taken an adventurer to the site myself, but several other folks reported the same terrible framerate there so it seems like it's bad enough to be pretty common.

[sealclubber]

I will take a look.

What are your computer specs?

4 gb RAM, 2.3ghz Athlon X2 dual-core, windows 8 64bit.

I haven't actually taken an adventurer to the site myself, but several other folks reported the same terrible framerate there so it seems like it's bad enough to be pretty common.

It is common. AFAIK, DF doesn't handle multithreading all that well (if at all?) which is why there are terrible framerate problems even on high end systems with multicore processors. I just hope the new release fixes that...

In other news I'll poke around too and see if I can find anything.

[EBannion]

Oh, yeah, totally. It makes sense since so many of the processes are dependent on each other; multithreading it would be a huge project all by itself.

Hopefully if we can narrow down the cause of the issues here, we can extrapolate and help Toady identify and remove bottlenecks, eh?

[Azated]

I don't think the new release will have much to do with anything more than single-core support. DF is sort of complicated when it comes to massive re-writes like that.

[sealclubber]

Oh, yeah, totally. It makes sense since so many of the processes are dependent on each other; multithreading it would be a huge project all by itself.

Hopefully if we can narrow down the cause of the issues here, we can extrapolate and help Toady identify and remove bottlenecks, eh?

That'd be dope, but unfortunately network security is my expertise. I'm totally vapid when it comes to programming.

I don't think the new release will have much to do with anything more than single-core support. DF is sort of complicated when it comes to massive re-writes like that.

True, but one can still hope

[CaptainArchmage]

Dwarf Fortress runs on four threads, based on the activity monitor. From what I've heard, the game mechanics (i.e. not graphics) seem to run on a single thread, and that happens to be the most intensive one, and some of those other threads (i.e. the parts of the game that are not the mechanics, such as OpenGL) were partly written by someone else.

I think the main source of performance drain is the number of items. I had one accident in a modded game (not modded by me) where a reaction produced 2500 items in one go. The FPS dropped by about 10 each time.

I think FPS also drops depending on the amount of the fortress excavated.

[sealclubber]

Dwarf Fortress runs on four threads, based on the activity monitor. From what I've heard, the game mechanics (i.e. not graphics) seem to run on a single thread, and that happens to be the most intensive one, and some of those other threads (i.e. the parts of the game that are not the mechanics, such as OpenGL) were partly written by someone else.

I think the main source of performance drain is the number of items. I had one accident in a modded game (not modded by me) where a reaction produced 2500 items in one go. The FPS dropped by about 10 each time.

I think FPS also drops depending on the amount of the fortress excavated.

Good thing to keep in mind. I've been playing smaller forts (60 - 80 pop cap) for years now (mostly because I thought my junk laptop at the time couldn't handle anything higher). I then switched to larger caps of about 140 on a high end machine recently (in anticipation of the newest release) and noticed the problem was just as bad. The performance degradation caused by a bazillion items seems to be noticeable across the board. I might have to start getting fancy with dfhack.

[EBannion]

So, how can we test if the lag is primarily caused by the number of items on the site? Can DFHack delete items or something?

[sealclubber]

So, how can we test if the lag is primarily caused by the number of items on the site? Can DFHack delete items or something?

Dunno how it can be done in adventure mode, but you can designate things to be dumped in-game and then just use 'autodump destroy' to nuke it off the face of the earth. Make sure those items aren't forbidden though.

[Meph]

I can only offer help in that I made a mod for people with FPS issues. Accelerated DF, but that cant be retro-actively fitted onto an existing fort.

The biggest issues for FPS is pathfinding, flows and temperature.