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[smjjames]

Since vermin just teleport around, they don't affect FPS AFAIK.

Try setting a burrow with food and drink in it (say, in your meeting area), setting an alert to that burrow and activate that alert? It'll probably give you job cancel spam, but you can just set the orders menu to not give you any cancellation messages.

Alternatively, get all of your dwarves in one room, block it off (or lock the door) and see if that does anything to FPS.

OR, kill off each dwarf one by one (and use the removebadthoughts to keep the rest from tantrumming) rather than most of them all at once.

[XXSockXX]

I dunno, depending on you computer specs you might have to settle for something in the ~25 FPS area. Constant 5 FPS is clearly too low and indicative of something going wrong. I doubt however that there are many players who can maintain something above 100 FPS for very long.

[yaymeh]

Hehe... Cheat-embarked with 100 settlers, 100 pets and lots of pickaxes to try something just a few minutes ago. Had 210 FPS...

With fastdwarf 1 1 it went down to 40FPS, but they mined out the whole layout (well, the part that I can easily macro at least) of the other fortress in only a couple of minutes.

Onlny built a few stockpiles, but no signs of slowdown so far. If it wouldn't be such a PITA to set up the stockpiles, jobs and everything properly again, I'd just continue playing with that version instead :/

[XXSockXX]

Having high FPS at the start is easy. Maintaining it over the years is the problem, with increasing item count and fortress size among other things.

[yaymeh]

Yes, but the thing is - first of all, the fortress isn't that old. I spend most of the time micro-managing in pause mode and I donated so much food to the first caravan that they sent me a huge wave of migrants. Also: removing ALL items + the fortress doesn't get the FPS back up.

Just tried another thing: Sent 2 dwarves up to the roof, filled the whole map with magma (all the z-lvls below, the whole fortress).
FPS started INCREASING as the dwarves inside the Fort died. I think that's a sure sign that there's something wrong. FPS shouldn't increase with with flowing hot magma everywhere!

( Well, It segfaulted shortly after... but the game was almost at a playable speed for a short while )

[nekoexmachina]

Ive' had a very same problem, however it seems it was just lack of experience in building.
Last week I was building a good fort with a target of 250 dorfs livin'-in, and well, I've had 280 including babies, and they were pretty fast: 50 fps. Wide hallways, unneeded stuff goes under the bridge, etc.

[BoogieMan]

The single best way I've found to keep FPS up is an efficient layout of your fortress, where stockpiles are very close to their workshops and product drop off stockpiles. The bulk of my fortress is always on the same screen and not requiring scrolling, just build it up/down like an underground tower.

Other than that, the next best things have been:

Not having too many pets/animals

Minimal changes to water flows from however the map was originally

Small benefits from using traffic patterns (High, Low, Restricted) and painting places that the bulk of your dwarves should not be going to as restricted, like workshops.

Blocking off depleted mined out areas

Default Embark Size


 Other than that, it seems good performance is closely tied to the speed of an individual core/cpu. Dwarf Fortress seems to have either no or very little ability to utilize modern multi-core CPUs. Sadly, that's a problem that is getting more and more common. There are a lot of games out there that can be played with a scope so large and complex that it's literally impossible to play it because of the limitations of the programming.

For example, older PCs with a more powerful single core CPU (so long as their RAM and such isn't horribly slow) can outperform newer systems with multiple (but individually lesser) cores. A 3.2Ghz single CPU can do better than a modern quad core system with 4x 2Ghz cores or the like.

[yaymeh]

I have bad FPS on that map even without the fort and without the items, so it can't be the fortress layout or the items. Or liquids. Removed those too. I put the 100 idle naked dwarves in a small plain room, replace everything else with solid rock / still only ~30 FPS.

[Sutremaine]

Hmm, what happens if you delete all the stockpiles? What about if you leave the dwarves free to run around, but disable all their labours?

[BoredVirulence]

I have bad FPS on that map even without the fort and without the items, so it can't be the fortress layout or the items. Or liquids. Removed those too. I put the 100 idle naked dwarves in a small plain room, replace everything else with solid rock / still only ~30 FPS.

How small? Dwarves don't like being crammed together. If its too small, you will constantly have dwarves lying prone and trying to get up, and generally bumping into each other, creating a path finding nightmare.

Generally speaking, for decent FPS each dwarf should have their own tile, but ideally have several extra for movement. maybe 1.5 tiles per dwarf. So ideally your room would need to have 150 tiles, or be approximately 13x13. I'd spring for at least 18x18, but 10x10 shouldn't be terrible.

I'd digress, your FPS problems still most likely come down to path finding. But there could be something else in play. Without the save though its hard to dissect.

[yaymeh]

Ok, so in my current experiment, I have the 100 dwarves in a 20x20 room. Everything outside the room is either plain obsidian or trapped vermin (still did not figure out how to remove all vermin with dfhack), all items were deleted. Temperature and weather are deactivated, the only job available is "sleep". Still only 50 FPS - I guess that would be the "absolute maximum idle FPS" I can get there on that save with 100 dwarves and it should be 200FPS instead (like it was when I embarked with my cheated 100 settlers). That from a maximum FPS of only 50 it would go down to 5 with all the dwarves doing their jobs seems reasonable to me...

Now how would I go about dissecting that any further? I guess with all dwarves isolated and no items on the map...


I tried sealing + abandoning and then reclaiming the fortress, then cheat-settled there with 100 dwarves again. Unexpectedly had only 20FPS from the very beginning - before I even opened the first passage down into the old fortress. So whatever it is, it is not the dwarves alone I guess... maybe something that does something with dwarves... but "slayrace" says there is no hidden underground army trying to path-find them nor anything like that :/

[itg]

Have you tried making all those changes, then saving and reloading? (obviously backup your save first). It could be that DF doesn't unload all the stuff it might unload when you hack in the changes.

[smurfingtonthethird]

Hmm... You should learn pathing designations, its an in-game feature that can double your FPS when done right, by providing the pathfinding for them. Go on animal culls, give your peasants armor instead of clothes, start on a tiny embark, etc.

[choppy]

We need more information about what you are using. What version of dwarf fortress are you using? And what mods are you using? The only other thing I can think of was a community fort game where the clowns multiplied every time the save was reloaded. The sad thing was even sealing every space did not help.

[yaymeh]

Have you tried making all those changes, then saving and reloading? (obviously backup your save first). It could be that DF doesn't unload all the stuff it might unload when you hack in the changes.

Oh crap, that makes sense. Thanks for the suggestion, will try! So it could be the items after all...

You should learn pathing designations,

Used that from the beginning, didn't make a difference in this case. My fortress isn't really designed to leave the dwarves many path options - just straight up/down in the centre stairwell and that's the only "high traffic". Also I really don't think it's a pathfinding issue. Path-finding issues should disappear if I lock all dwarves in a room with nothing to do, shouldn't they?

We need more information about what you are using

Using DF 0.34.11 on linux x86/64, I have 3 cores @3.20ghz dedicated to DF only (one @100%, one @6%, the third one's staying @0% because DF only seems to have 2 threads :3), ~8GB free ram, GPU-Utilization 5% & ~700MB unused video memory. Tried with dfhack 0.34.11_r3 and 0.34.11_r4. Also using newest DT(splintermind, can't find the git pull request any more, but I only compiled it ~a week ago). First game I have FPS problem with was vanilla DF (+dfhack). Second game - same problem - is masterwork DF.

The only other thing I can think of was a community fort game where the clowns multiplied

( I peeked into hell with DFhack by the way... there were lots of spider webs but nothing else. Removing them didn't change anything. )