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[goddosupido]

I agree with ullrich, I think the game is much more understandable with tilesets at the beginning. I started with tilesets (the game is difficult enough!) but after a year switched to a ASCII tileset, very easy to decipher and beautiful (imho).

Back on topic, I always read that we should generate small or pocket worlds. But wouldn't reducing the number of civilizations/sites and history be enough? World activation only deals with civilized creatures. That's what I have been doing lately and I managed to keep a high framerate. But i'm still at 80 dwarves on 3*3 embarks so I can't know for sure.

[bluephoenix]

Small worlds, low amounts of sites and civilisations should help.
Also I have noticed that when I am looking at the inside of my fort/mountain I get a 20 FPS increase compared to when I look at the trees, grass and other stuff outside. Not sure why that is since I am using the normal non-legacy (SDL) game version.

[evictedSaint]

I've noticed a massive decrease in fps in this new version too.  I used to run forts at 150 fps begore they started lagging down to 50.  In the new version, I start off at 30 fps right off the bat.  It's frustrating, because now it takes five times as long for a single year to pass.  I keep getting bored and wandering away while I'm waiting for things to happen.

[Putnam]

That is far worse than anything I've ever seen. What conditions do you embark in?

[evictedSaint]

3x3, usually in wooded areas.  I'm using the  Dwarf Fortress 40_16 Starter Pack r2

[MDFification]

3x3, usually in wooded areas.  I'm using the  Dwarf Fortress 40_16 Starter Pack r2

A suggested fix; avoid wooded areas/move to place with scarce trees at least. Trees now cause considerable lag (all that extra pathing calculation) and seasonally produce a boatload of containment (petals, leaves, fallen fruit) to drop FPS even further. A heavily forested area isn't even necessary anymore due to the huge increase in wood dropped by trees.

Other things you can do; standardize materials you don't care about (I changed all grass in neutral areas to a single type, and all cavern grass to a single type, but you can standardize body materials if that's your thing) for a pretty sizeable fps boost. Another good idea is modding all cavern creatures to inhabit the same level and then start genning worlds with only 1 cavern layer; even unopened, caverns drain fps with that extra pathing data.

[smjjames]

You know, back in 40D, I preferred embarking in deserts or otherwise sparsely forested areas because I noticed that more heavily forested areas tended to be laggier. Of course though, that was years ago and there's lots of things that could have contributed to the lag.

It wasn't as much of a problem when I started again though.

[mndfreeze]

I wish the basic worldgen options were a bit more advanced, or that the advanced worldgen was simplier to use and understand?  Some of the basic things like cutting down caverns should be just a single option or two in the basic worldgen setup.  I tried a few times to use the advanced worldgen and even with the wiki and guide it was still WAAAY to complicated for someone who just wants to make a few small changes.  Maybe its not to hard for Toady to modify if we put in the request for it.

I think performance hitting things like caverns and maybe trees dropping fruit, etc could be added as a single yes/no or minimal slider option, and it would be a great boost to the FPS issue people have.  I mean I'm on a pretty powerful system.  A i7-3820 with 16 gigs of ram and its overclocked to 4.4ghz and I still get some massive FPS drop once my dorf count gets up above the 100 count, then another maaaaaaajjooorrr drop when I get above around 160 to 170.  Still playable but man it takes soooooooooooooooooo loooooooooonnnnggg for a season to pass.

[malvado]

The latest releases have been slowly improving my fps in the fortresses I have.
Some more tweaks and bug fixes and the game will probably be as fast at the old one.

Also I have tweaked my cpu a bit , Turned off Amd's Cool 'N quiet after a hint from a friend of mine and it was pretty noticeable in a few applications , also overclocked the cpu a bit for more performance..

[smeeprocket]

how efficient is DF when it comes to its use of the CPU anyway? Can it access multiple cores, for example? Plus whatever other details matter that I don't understand because I just know about placing the damn things, using thermal paste, and putting on heatsyncs.

[Putnam]

No, it cannot access multiple cores, and letting it do so is not trivial in any sense of the word.

More important is the RAM issue.

[bluephoenix]

Yeah the RAM, a lot of people have reported getting an EXTREME boost in performance when switching to DDR3 RAM compared to DDR2 RAM.

[BoredVirulence]

DF would do well if it were run on the GPU rather than the CPU, or partially on the GPU. Not that this is trivial, but it would be better for the map calculations.
Imagine a world where temperature changes took only a single calculation rather than a calculation for every tile that changed, same with fluids. Pathfinding would be weird, but I think we could perform unit pathfinding in parallel. So there would be N calculations where N is the maximum number of iterations needed to reach a path. So if we had 4 dwarves requiring 50 iterations, 10 iterations, 50 iterations, and 200 iterations, instead of 310 we could manage 200. Maybe.

RAM should improve the speed a lot, DF is so memory intensive that it can't properly be cached for the CPU, and its very memory bound.

[smeeprocket]

SOmeone was saying DF will only access a max of 2gb of ram, instead of the 4 some programs access. There was apparently a mmod for 64-bit systems way back when to allow for 4gbs, but I couldn't find it. I don't think it has been updated even remotely recently.

[BoredVirulence]

SOmeone was saying DF will only access a max of 2gb of ram, instead of the 4 some programs access. There was apparently a mmod for 64-bit systems way back when to allow for 4gbs, but I couldn't find it. I don't think it has been updated even remotely recently.

You don't need a specific mod. Your DF executable needs the 'large address aware bit' to be set. You can find a utility to do that for you on the internet.
It really doesn't add any speed though, if DF tries to access more than allowed, it just crashes. So unless you're doing a big embark and DF suddenly crashes, you don't need it.
But with it, you can do a 16x16 embark with 500 dwarves just fine, barring the slow framerate...