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[StagnantSoul]

I get roughly 20-40 in 40.12, so I think some pathing issues might have been fixed. That is after five years, but I'd happily have 60-80 after twenty years in 34.11. I even had a fifty year fort stay at 50.

[IndigoFenix]

Call it a hunch, but I suspect that the slowdown has more to do with the increased complexity of local behavior (most notably conversations and the spread of on-site knowledge) than the activated world.

My DFHack experiments have shown that at the very least, visitors to the fort such as merchants and invaders are still abstracted as simply being an 'event' type object with an arrival date determined a few months ahead of their arrival, just like in the last version.  You can make them come quicker by moving the arrival date sooner, or changing the current date to right before the arrival date, which would be unlikely if they were actually mobile parties with a set location.

Also, if you skip ahead through time so that a hundred years or so pass, then check Legends mode, nations will have expanded more-or-less as you would expect if you waited through those years normally (though this does funny things with historical figures, like making a huge number of people die of old age the moment you see them).

This suggests that, in fort mode at least, a lot of events concerning the outside world are handled abstractly and are probably only updated on rare occasions, so they wouldn't cause much slowdown.

[malvado]

What speed is your RAM and what speed of RAM is your MoBo designed for?  I run forts on an i5 at 2.8GHz, with 8GB as well and I have NEVER had FPS that low, even over 18 in-game years, and I run forts at full industry on 3x3-5x5 embarks.  I don't use burrows, traffic designations, I dig out entire z's for materials, create tens of thousands of items and I don't drop below 60 FPS EVER.

Well, I have the same issues as other people here, after 2-3 years the drop is from 100fps down to 25ish ( now around 35 for a while with the latest fixes) , my current settup is :

FX 8350 @ Usually at 4.3 but also run at 4.5 / 4.7 Ghz (Tested and can't say theres a large difference in fps whith each 200mhz increase) , 16Gb 1600Mhz DDR3 9 9 9 9 24 Ram.
Going to put up a ramdisk and see if the issue can be related to poor hd performance.

Edit : Can't say there's a big improvement with a ramdisk, perhaps a few fps but hardly noticeable.

[dennislp3]

Has anyone identified an actual change that triggers it? People keep saying after like 2 years...are you getting imigrants? what is your population? anything else change such as entering caves?

Details make all the difference when it comes to finding the actual cause...

[StagnantSoul]

I had a fortress stay on ground level, no pickaxe, just wood cutting. Cut down eight trees, made a wall and a bunch of buildings. Had 60 people. FPS crashed horribly, no immigrants, 1 Z level. 20 FPS

[GavJ]

I had a fortress stay on ground level, no pickaxe, just wood cutting. Cut down eight trees, made a wall and a bunch of buildings. Had 60 people. FPS crashed horribly, no immigrants, 1 Z level. 20 FPS

one possible issue there is that your dudes are constantly moving around an area where there are tons of climbing opportunities to consider. Unlike in a normal cave fort with a ceiling on every level?

[dennislp3]

i would clear the forested area and see if that helps

[rhoxa]

What speed is your RAM and what speed of RAM is your MoBo designed for?  I run forts on an i5 at 2.8GHz, with 8GB as well and I have NEVER had FPS that low, even over 18 in-game years, and I run forts at full industry on 3x3-5x5 embarks.  I don't use burrows, traffic designations, I dig out entire z's for materials, create tens of thousands of items and I don't drop below 60 FPS EVER.

RAM is Mushkin Ridgeline running CL8 1866 I believe.  I've never had stability or speed problems in other games for years.  I'll be floored if its a hardware problem.  I've also run forts much longer without issue on releases before 2014, or at least a much slower and more gradual decline.  Same hardware. 

Has anyone identified an actual change that triggers it? People keep saying after like 2 years...are you getting imigrants? what is your population? anything else change such as entering caves?

Details make all the difference when it comes to finding the actual cause...

Getting immigrants.  My latest save is at 127 total dwarves (100 adults).  I breached the caverns very early in this game, only 8 levels down from the surface before even getting a wave of immigrants if I remember correctly.  Other saves were deeper and I breached them later, but the problem didn't start when I hit the caverns.  I was running 100 for a long time after breaching them, sealed and unsealed.  Everything is working as intended as far as I can see.  I'm pretty consistent in my forts.  Similar layout and industry development each time.  The most recent one did have a lot of non-iron metals, so I built tons of metal furniture.  Small clothes industry going.  I'm not sure what other details are important.  I build multi Z forts, not flat ones.  Plain entrance, no fancy zigzags. I use a drawbridge.  No burrows set up now.  I use a quantum stockpile for all of my stone and ores, placed next to my smelters and crafters.  Embarks are close to "ideal" for easy embarks, heavily forested, heavy vegetation, river, etc.  No lava on any of them.  No pump stacks or water wheels.  I use a high efficiency housing design that comes with the starter pack for a 60x60 floor of rooms for the non-noble dwarves.  I picked a Baron in most games.  I don't use quantum stock piles for anything but stone.  I don't use minecarts. 

I could go on, but I haven't seen anything that specifically triggers it.

[Bortness]

Well, it doesn't seem like it now but it will be worth it further down the road.
Once we can gather an army and attack other sites, have our own caravans trade with other civs and all sorts of other good stuff, we need to have an activated world.

DF 34.11 is still available to play if you want to play without the new features of 40.xx.

With all the bugs of the old version also including invulnerable sponges. I dare say those features of attacking other civilizations are a long way off, maybe in DF2016. Instead there should be a way to limit or halt world simulation through options.

The simple fact that you ask for an "options" menu where you can "turn off" such an integral part of the game engine shows very clearly that you don't know how complicated it is to actually code something like Dwarf Fortress, especially as a workload for one man.

[Miuramir]

Has anyone identified an actual change that triggers it? People keep saying after like 2 years...are you getting imigrants? what is your population? anything else change such as entering caves?

Details make all the difference when it comes to finding the actual cause...

Getting immigrants.  My latest save is at 127 total dwarves (100 adults).  ...

I don't have a lot of free time currently, and am more of a perfectionist so don't start a lot of new forts.  But I've been considering some of the structure, and am wondering if there's some sort of roughly n^2 relationship that expands out and at some point kicks the resulting data structure as too big to cache properly at some level, resulting in significant slowdown. 

For instance, opinions of other dwarves are potentially x=n*(n-1); each dwarf may have an opinion on each other dwarf (and they are not necessarily bi-directional).  For starting n=7, x is 42; for 50 x is 2,450; for 200 x is 39,800. 

What if this was never cleared on death?  (This might even be a feature, to track feelings about dead loved ones, vengeful ghosts, etc.)  So, hypothetically, Fort A with 90 live dwarves and 10 dead ones would be x=9,900; while Fort Z with 90 live dwarves and 110 dead ones would be at x=39,000, despite both being "90 dwarf fortresses".   This might help explain the significantly different experiences some people are reporting. 

I also suspect that the new trees, between the stuff they drop and the complex pathing, are not helping; have the folks seeing significant drop-off tried embarks without them?  Has anyone with a "crashed FPS" level (IIRC StagnantSoul earlier in thread, for instance) tried clear-cutting it to see what happens?  How about marking everything above ground level, and everything adjacent to a tree or tree part, Restricted, with a few High Traffic roads where dwarves actually need to go?  (Not a cure-all, but might prune weird pathing issues if the game is checking to see if they can climb a tree to short-cut a chunk of hillside or something.) 

[rhoxa]

Oh!  Another thing I forgot to mention, talking about dead dwarves.  I do have a fairly significant problem with dwarves dying I can't track down.  My danger room dwarves seem to get very minor injuries, mostly just teeth falling out, but then slowly bleed to death over months and months.  A bunch of them suffer from "Severe Blood Loss" and never recover.  Its not only the danger room that does this, goblin siege combat causes the same problems.  I probably have at least two or three dozen dead between forgotten beasts, goblin minor injuries, and danger room training.  My hospital is up and running otherwise, keeping another dozen or so dwarves alive after major injuries.

EDIT:  I tried the new version today and my FPS is the same.  Slightly disheartening.

[Walkaboutout]

I thought I would add my input to this thread, for what it's worth.

It has also been my observation, just as others in this thread have mentioned, that after roughly two years in my forts, I see a pretty big drop in my FPS. Into the 40's. As others have stated, in the 34.x versions I could run a fort 40 or 50 years and still be at around 60ish, if I was being careful to keep things clean.

As the poster above me said, I was excited to try this current update, and loaded up an old save from I think 40.10, and ran it for a while. Unfortunately I didn't see a pick up in my FPS at all .

I heard someone suggest at one point in another thread that they thought perhaps the new trees have something to do with it, but I have no idea.

I myself am wondering at one particular behavior I noticed in my 40.x forts. Mind you, I last played 40.10 I think, and haven't had a chance to play really since then. But in those versions, I noticed that if I retired a fort after say, 3 years or so, and then made an adventurer and started that adventurer off in the fort I just retired, that the map would absolutely fill up with former merchant caravans that had visited my former fort.

Those were definitely the old caravans that had been there, because I at one point took note of the names of a couple of traders, and saw them on the site as an adventurer. I don't think that's enough to account for the FPS issues of course, but it seems like some stagnant data about previous traders and their caravans may be staying with the fort; data that may not have to be kept, or maybe wasn't even intended to be kept as such. Again, who knows if that's significant in any way, but its something to keep in mind I guess.

At any rate, I'm hopeful that things will improve as Toady has time to work on stuff .

[Dirst]

I thought I would add my input to this thread, for what it's worth.

It has also been my observation, just as others in this thread have mentioned, that after roughly two years in my forts, I see a pretty big drop in my FPS. Into the 40's. As others have stated, in the 34.x versions I could run a fort 40 or 50 years and still be at around 60ish, if I was being careful to keep things clean.

As the poster above me said, I was excited to try this current update, and loaded up an old save from I think 40.10, and ran it for a while. Unfortunately I didn't see a pick up in my FPS at all .

I heard someone suggest at one point in another thread that they thought perhaps the new trees have something to do with it, but I have no idea.

I myself am wondering at one particular behavior I noticed in my 40.x forts. Mind you, I last played 40.10 I think, and haven't had a chance to play really since then. But in those versions, I noticed that if I retired a fort after say, 3 years or so, and then made an adventurer and started that adventurer off in the fort I just retired, that the map would absolutely fill up with former merchant caravans that had visited my former fort.

Those were definitely the old caravans that had been there, because I at one point took note of the names of a couple of traders, and saw them on the site as an adventurer. I don't think that's enough to account for the FPS issues of course, but it seems like some stagnant data about previous traders and their caravans may be staying with the fort; data that may not have to be kept, or maybe wasn't even intended to be kept as such. Again, who knows if that's significant in any way, but its something to keep in mind I guess.

At any rate, I'm hopeful that things will improve as Toady has time to work on stuff .

The 40.11 update dealt with a lot of duplication issues, but the release notes didn't seem to promise fixing already-duplicated stuff.

It might be worth looking through the bug tracker to see if stale caravan data is mentioned anywhere.  A save file exhibiting the problem is always useful.  If nothing seems to match, you can submit a new report that could turn out to help a lot of people with FPS issues.

[Authority2]

I also suspect that the new trees, between the stuff they drop and the complex pathing, are not helping; have the folks seeing significant drop-off tried embarks without them?

Yup. Due to a raw issue with me updating my copy of Modest Accelerated Mash, I generated a world... with no trees. Twenty dwarves and just over a year in, the FPS was already down to under 30.

[Kryxx]

Has anyone identified an actual change that triggers it? People keep saying after like 2 years...are you getting imigrants? what is your population? anything else change such as entering caves?

Details make all the difference when it comes to finding the actual cause...

Getting immigrants.  My latest save is at 127 total dwarves (100 adults).  ...

I don't have a lot of free time currently, and am more of a perfectionist so don't start a lot of new forts.  But I've been considering some of the structure, and am wondering if there's some sort of roughly n^2 relationship that expands out and at some point kicks the resulting data structure as too big to cache properly at some level, resulting in significant slowdown. 

For instance, opinions of other dwarves are potentially x=n*(n-1); each dwarf may have an opinion on each other dwarf (and they are not necessarily bi-directional).  For starting n=7, x is 42; for 50 x is 2,450; for 200 x is 39,800. 

What if this was never cleared on death?  (This might even be a feature, to track feelings about dead loved ones, vengeful ghosts, etc.)  So, hypothetically, Fort A with 90 live dwarves and 10 dead ones would be x=9,900; while Fort Z with 90 live dwarves and 110 dead ones would be at x=39,000, despite both being "90 dwarf fortresses".   This might help explain the significantly different experiences some people are reporting. 

I also suspect that the new trees, between the stuff they drop and the complex pathing, are not helping; have the folks seeing significant drop-off tried embarks without them?  Has anyone with a "crashed FPS" level (IIRC StagnantSoul earlier in thread, for instance) tried clear-cutting it to see what happens?  How about marking everything above ground level, and everything adjacent to a tree or tree part, Restricted, with a few High Traffic roads where dwarves actually need to go?  (Not a cure-all, but might prune weird pathing issues if the game is checking to see if they can climb a tree to short-cut a chunk of hillside or something.)

34.x   The world events were static. 
40.x   Every site in the world is inter-acting, more people being born/dying, killed etc.   Same as your fort. But probably on a slightly smaller scale.

So yes, after a few years.  There is bound to be less fps as each of those calculations need to happen also.   This is why people generate short histories with small worlds.  Less sites.

I don't have an issue with my 5x5 in large world and med histories so I'm just staying with it.