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[Diamond]

Welp, I thought the whole point was about actually PLAYING it on tablet, not just running it or generating a world, which was done before on pretty much everything short of microwave. No novelty value here.

[wierd]

sorry, but I find it difficult to actually PLAY while I am AT WORK.

So far, it looks perfectly playable on a small world. I am seeing how far I can push it, by genning a set of worlds, then testing on those worlds. That takes time. I JUST set this up last night.

[Porpoisepower]

Or you can just get a surface...

[O.Wilde]

Good lord, everyone is so whiny.

That's pretty friggin cool man. Next time I have some disposable income I might just steal your idea a little bit.

[wierd]

4x4 embark, small world, 8 dwarves == 60fps.

will need to play a while to see how it drops as dwarves show up.

Up to 15 dwarves. No appreciable drop yet.

[Sanctume]

Try small world, 1 cavern only, make distance from surface to magma sea ~ 30z;
I like around 175 to 199 year history to be long enough to kill all "one of its kind" dwarf and get 2nd generation founders.

[wierd]

It looks like it would be beneficial to use a blutooth keyboard, and set in text mode, then play over local SSH tunnel (say with connectbot).  The xtightvnc service seems to struggle/compete for CPU with the DF process. I bet I would be getting 100fps (or better) without the VNC server running.  xtightvnc hogs up a pretty big chunk of ram, forcing df to use the zram swap pretty hard. (It battles for 50% CPU with DF.)

Sadly, I dont have a blutooth keyboard to test with.

It is definately playable on a 4x4 embark though.

[wierd]

Now at over 30 dwarves. Down to 45fps on the test 4x4 embark. Got a full year into fortress construction.

I think the limited RAM is the bottleneck on this tablet, aside from xtightvnc eating at the cpu.

I think this pretty much sinks the argument that DF couldnt be ported to tablets. it runs unmodified on mine.

[O.Wilde]

Thats actually a lot better than I would have expected it to work.

[gunpowdertea]

 
now, if we could get the xserver to run *native* on the tablet... sadly mine is not going to work, despite having an Atom CPU. The manufacturer does not release the necessary drivers for the kernel to install a full linux on it

[wierd]

Linux Deploy has a "framebuffer" option for the GUI mode, which draws directly on the android device's framebuffer device-- but support is spotty.  I havent tried it on my tablet yet.  I would NEED the bluetooth keyboard+mouse if it worked through. Touch input doesnt work in framebuffer mode.

[gunpowdertea]

Curse you! I had planned to do some work! Now I need to investigate this.
(though I guess I should really get my code up and running, so it can do my work on the weekend for me https://xkcd.com/303/

[wierd]

Ok, it is running a fair bit better after going "ultra minimal" on the x-window subsystem.  Instead of loading the xfce desktop, I have it loading xterm and twm. This reduces memory consumption by the system by about a hundred MB or so. Enough that Zygote is no longer trying to kill off the launcher and the VNC viewer while DF is running, and for available swap to no longer dip dangerously close to zero.

I turned off truetype rendering, (saves a little more memory) and increased the viewport from 80x25 to 100x65, which fills up about 2/3 of the display when the tablet is held in portrait mode. 

I now have approx 40 dwarves on my test fortress. Still holding at 45ish FPS. Lollipop's multitasking is less fragile after reducing the X window memory footprint. I can successfully tab out to other android apps now, which previously ran the risk of making the tablet unresponsive. (I am pushing this thing as hard as it will go.)

I ran my fortress for over 2 hours on battery earlier today. Tablet only gets slightly warm.

I suspect that zram's compress/decompress of swapped pages is in fact giving a performance penalty. Occasionally, the OS will shuffle pages around, and afterwards I will have small bursts of 70fps, until DF's pages get paged back out again.

I tried playing text mode only over ssh, but the colors were all wonky/incorrect, and it drew the play area incorrectly on all the clients I tried.  Console based gaming does not seem to be the intended audience of these apps.

That's OK though. I should be able to run a graphics pack with the streamlined vnc setup.

Using the soft-keyboard in bVNC is taking some getting used to, but I am adapting. 

I might be able to reduce processing overhead even more by reducing the display geometry of the vnc desktop.  Currently, it is 800x1000something in portrait mode.  If I cut this down to 800x600, that will leave the bottom part of the display unused, reducing the size of the virtual framebuffer, reducing the processor requirements of the vnc server, and freeing those resources for dwarf fortress.

i am gonna keep tweaking and poking at it until I have the optimal setup for this hardware.

[Pirate Santa]

Another question, can it handle also running DFhack and other add on utilities?
If so, how many at once?

[wierd]

It is the same Linux flavor DF found in the download of the main DF web page.  If DFHACK works with that version, then yes, it will work.

It is bad testing procedure to introduce a bunch of variables all at once though. You cant isolate performance gains or losses to individual changes that way. That's why I am still playing without a graphics pack.  Presumably, if I get performance at maximum possible in ascii mode, then I can evaluate how much of a hit adding the graphics pack introduces, etc.

Once I am satisfied that I have it working with the most efficiency possible, I will start evaluating other variables.