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[Szkeptik]

In 0.40 on normal 4x4 maps I start with 70 fps. In DF 2012 I had 100 fps until I reached about 50 dwarves. I don't have anything installed except the Phoebus tileset. Can anyone give any good ideas to improve it?

[Duuvian]

Embark on places with little or no moving fluids, turn temperature off in the init, and set your population cap to maybe 30 or 40 and strict cap to whatever your ambition tells you that your computer will eventually be able to handle. Do not embark with animals or acquire breeding pairs unless you can be diligent in butchering them to avoid overpopulation.

While playing, destroy or trade away items you will not need and keep your item production as modest as you can afford. If caravans grow to the size that fps drops a lot don't give them good deals, or stop trading altogether.

I advise turning off invaders in the init too if you have a low population fort, at least until you are comfortable with your defense.

[Tarasque]

0.40 added life to the rest of the world (besides your fort) after worldgen. It's this additional computations causing the lower framerate. It has improved since the early versions of 0.40.

Known ways to improve performance in 0.40 (besides those listed above for general improvements):
- Reduce the amount of history created in worldgen - i.e. no 1000 years before start
- Choose a smaller world size (e.g. Pocket or Small)

[BigD145]

The day a game gets less complicated or does not make advancements in its development (without actually being released as the final version) is often the day I stop playing that game. 0.40 has more going on. Expect slowdowns due to more processing. If you're playing DF for its framerate then you're probably playing it for the wrong reasons. There are a hundred other games out there that play faster.

[elcr]

You really need to play small worlds with short histories in this version. The slower worldgen is, the slower it will be be in game. I usually go for a 200 year small region, but at this rate I'll need to reduce it even further in the future.

I also find the new trees have a significant FPS impact, probably due to pathfinding. I've got a 70 dwarf fortress on a 3x3 heavily forested embark and it's chugging. 14FPS compared to around 30-40 on a previous fort of this size that was sparsely forested. The most annoying bit is the passage of time. I've been playing this fort for what feels like forever but I'm only two and a half years in simply because the days take forever to pass.

[taptap]

0.40 added life to the rest of the world (besides your fort) after worldgen. It's this additional computations causing the lower framerate. It has improved since the early versions of 0.40.

Is there any evidence for this? There are so many other changes that could affect framerates, e.g. the permanent climbing expeditions that troglodytes etc. do in the caverns probably add a lot of potential pathing, the far more complicated plant growth and seasonal effects, falling fruits and leaves ...

[miauw62]

Falling fruits and leaves are known to cause lagspikes in autumn. But considering how heavy history generation is, I'm fairly sure that it plays a large part in the fps decrease, especially since dwarves don't climb and there's not that many cave creatures around.

[Tarasque]

0.40 added life to the rest of the world (besides your fort) after worldgen. It's this additional computations causing the lower framerate. It has improved since the early versions of 0.40.

Is there any evidence for this? There are so many other changes that could affect framerates, e.g. the permanent climbing expeditions that troglodytes etc. do in the caverns probably add a lot of potential pathing, the far more complicated plant growth and seasonal effects, falling fruits and leaves ...

Direct from the front page - I did a quick skim about the ones most likely affect FPS.

0.40.01
- World activation! There are a few things that aren't active, like megabeast invasions, but lots of world gen actions made it into the game. Birth, death (to the extent it wasn't handled before), marriages, site foundation as well as reclaims, basic succession and appointments/etc., invasions, as well as some more detail beyond world gen, like patrols, banditry and animal population handling. We still don't have army battles -- the invasions are all successful right now, unless they are locally interfered with by you.
- The game advances two weeks before each play -- the calendar there still moves slowly when there's a lot of action, as there is in larger worlds, but there are quite a few things I can do soon to speed that up. Due to the speed of the calendar, new forts in particular also get just two weeks. This'll probably cause some shenanigans with the caravan (or you'll just have to wait a year in an autumn fort for your first one) until we sort it out.

0.40.5
- stopped hyper-obese digesting dwarves from constantly recalculating insulation/mass data (ag)

0.40.7
- Stopped some CPU-intensive temperature wobble (ag)

0.40.10
- Fixed a pathing lag associated to mood dwarves not being able to get to their buildings

0.40.11
- Made chained animal checks respect z coordinate properly
- Made dwarf children not seek their mothers when idle, especially in violation of area restrictions

Based on my own personal experience, there have been some improvements since the earlier versions of 0.40. There are still a fair amount of issues affecting FPS that could be looked into. I'm sure these will be addressed at some stage.

[palu]

How about this (40.05):

07/21/2014 Toady One Took a first stab at the calendar lag today. Starting with a 200-year medium world running a 23 second dwarf mode two-week calendar and a 2 minute adventure mode two-week calendar (adv mode runs some extra information since the initial army/etc. positioning is important), I managed to get it down to 10 seconds and 11 seconds respectively by doing some normal optimizations and cleaning up some path-finding mistakes. There are many more things that can be done, and hopefully all of it can be done without weakening the simulation. The faster calendar affects regular fort mode speed to some degree, and also things like sleep being slow in adventure mode. The faster calendar is also good because it starts to open the door for optionally longer wait periods and other stuff like that. More bug fixes tomorrow, probably.

And this (40.13):

09/15/2014 Toady One Messed around with some of the lag culprits: stale activities, enemy detection, over-active food consumption logging, and so on. Doubled the speed of the test save, but it's hard to say how it'll transfer in general, though the fixed trouble spots would come up in every fort with lots of dwarves.

[Putnam]

0.40 added life to the rest of the world (besides your fort) after worldgen. It's this additional computations causing the lower framerate. It has improved since the early versions of 0.40.

Is there any evidence for this? There are so many other changes that could affect framerates, e.g. the permanent climbing expeditions that troglodytes etc. do in the caverns probably add a lot of potential pathing, the far more complicated plant growth and seasonal effects, falling fruits and leaves ...

Direct from the front page - I did a quick skim about the ones most likely affect FPS.

0.40.01
- World activation! There are a few things that aren't active, like megabeast invasions, but lots of world gen actions made it into the game. Birth, death (to the extent it wasn't handled before), marriages, site foundation as well as reclaims, basic succession and appointments/etc., invasions, as well as some more detail beyond world gen, like patrols, banditry and animal population handling. We still don't have army battles -- the invasions are all successful right now, unless they are locally interfered with by you.
- The game advances two weeks before each play -- the calendar there still moves slowly when there's a lot of action, as there is in larger worlds, but there are quite a few things I can do soon to speed that up. Due to the speed of the calendar, new forts in particular also get just two weeks. This'll probably cause some shenanigans with the caravan (or you'll just have to wait a year in an autumn fort for your first one) until we sort it out.

0.40.5
- stopped hyper-obese digesting dwarves from constantly recalculating insulation/mass data (ag)

0.40.7
- Stopped some CPU-intensive temperature wobble (ag)

0.40.10
- Fixed a pathing lag associated to mood dwarves not being able to get to their buildings

0.40.11
- Made chained animal checks respect z coordinate properly
- Made dwarf children not seek their mothers when idle, especially in violation of area restrictions

Based on my own personal experience, there have been some improvements since the earlier versions of 0.40. There are still a fair amount of issues affecting FPS that could be looked into. I'm sure these will be addressed at some stage.

None of those are related to the world activation.

Besides, measure how long the two-week pre-embark world simulation takes. Now consider that that is the equivalent of 16800 in-game ticks.

[Baffler]

A simple way to improve FPS is to use ASCII instead of a tileset. I find using the square curses font makes a difference of almost 20 FPS compared to Phoebus.

[StagnantSoul]

I'd rather have a slow game than develop eye cancer from ASCII graphics.

[Putnam]

I'd rather have a slow game than develop eye cancer from ASCII graphics.

sorry I can't hear you over all the amulet/bag dwarves and cabinet goblin sites

[utunnels]

Ascii may improve fps, a little, but that doesn't fix slowdown problems caused by other things.

To me,  <10fps = painful, 10~fps = playable, 20~ = OK, 30~40 = good, 50~ = a-bit-fast-sometimes-I-just-miss-things

[smeeprocket]

I'd rather have a slow game than develop eye cancer from ASCII graphics.

I don't understand this. This is how the game was made, what drew you to it if ASCII is awful to you?

I love the ASCII graphics, the incredible details and play itself came after my interest in the game as a rogue-like.

It drives me nuts that all the tutorials and such are generally using some icky looking tileset that makes absolutely no sense when compared to the actual game.