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[Drowchyld]

Hellos o/~

My new year's resolution for 2016 was... interesting. I vowed to learn how to play Dwarf Fortress! It scares the [quack] out of me, to be frank. I've been gaming and doing all sorts of things all year and well I need to start learning! I have the latest 'starter pack' installed. I made a large, 1000 year old world. In the past (maybe a year or two ago) I had watched a bit of youtube tutorial/ lets play from, I believe his name is, Captain Duck... but I don't remember much of the info if any. I have a few steam friends whom play a tiny bit so I might bug them for help after I learn some stuff. I also found an IRC to ask newbie questions on and hopefully get some wonderfully nice people to help me when I start: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#dwarffortress

But the reason for this thread is to ask about my game settings. My PC is not current. Its still good. I don't know what sort of start I should have based on my hardware. Since I am using the starter pack I will be running Dwarf Therapist, DF Hak, and maybe the Legends Viewer while I am playing. Other then this I try to keep my running programs on the light side to not bog me down. Based off all that info here are my actual PC specs...

Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with latest updates
Intel Core 2 Quad: Q9650 3GHz... I am aware DF only runs on 1 core
four 1gb sticks of PC 6400 DDR2 with very high timing (I don't know the timing off hand)
and I know the video card is not really used but I have an EVGA GTX560ti 1gb... I'll be using the default Phoebus 16x pre-packaged tileset
I have two 1980x1020 monitors. I plan to the extra tools on my 2nd monitor while I play.

What size map should I play on do you think? Population cap is 120 by default... too high? I'd like some feedback to help me make a good choice that won't hurt me later if I somehow manage to thrive.

--------------------
And I have another question while I am thinking about it. Ages ago I came across an article showing off some tool to make DF render in sort of pseudo isometric 3D. It was still 2D but you could see walls and 'turn' the camera to view things from different angles. Does anyone know what I am talking about? Links would be welcome, of course. If its a good solid stable app can it be run in addition to the normal game window? Like a 2nd instance off to the side of the same game.

~~~

Well those are my questions! Thank you for reading and please post some feedback if you have any.
Have a fantastic day! 

[Tarsis]

      I had a comp almost the same as yours last year, but you left out the most important variable. You. IMO it takes much experience with DF to find the FPS you are willing to live with. On my older computer, I would run small or medium worlds with 250-750 year history, 50 civs, and a pop cap of 400. I built forts with FPS as a major design influence from day 1, and used Fortress Defense and many custom mods. I'm ok with 6 FPS.

     My suggestion to you, would be to use the default (or something faster, such as small/med, 200 years, pop cap 75) for your first, oh I dunno, 8-10 forts, or whenever you get comfortable with what you are trying to learn/do. Pop 80 used to (maybe still does?) bring some new stuff I felt is better handled with some experience. The UI can be a bear to get a handle on, but with a few forts experience, you will find yourself just hitting the right keys without even thinking about it (and I am a two fingered typist, so I am terrible with keyboards).

     I welcome you to your journey, and assure you the rewards are so very  worth the trials!

EDIT: Oh yes, the isometric view I use is stonesense. I dunno who wrote that little gem but he/she deserves cookies. Comes with the starter pack http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=126076.0 which I see you use, but this thing should be linked on every post on the internet.

Also, no choices hurt you so early, you will lose many forts trying new things, which makes the journey all the more interesting.

[Pvt. Pirate]

i am currently using an even older setup: winxp32, 2x2gb ddr3 RAM, 2x2600MHz.
i can only double what Tarsis said: "but with a few forts experience, you will find yourself just hitting the right keys without even thinking about it"
i myself am still on the way towards achieving that, but most of the time the main tasks work exactly liek that to me. go watch some tutorials and try it again and again and again.

[Drowchyld]

I like the idea of the largest sized world possible with the longest history. I was under the impression the world size and history don't effect your actual gameworld, just the time it takes to generate the world itself.

Well what exactly does low FPS mean in this game. I know what lag is but I'm confused with such a term applied to this type of game. Does it mean each 'turn' takes longer? If that's the case I'd be okay with a smaller FPS I think.

Yes I understand my first, errr, 50 tries will end with me not even understanding what's going on. I'm just trying to get a ballpark idea of the embark site size and stuff.

[Dirst]

I like the idea of the largest sized world possible with the longest history. I was under the impression the world size and history don't effect your actual gameworld, just the time it takes to generate the world itself.

Well what exactly does low FPS mean in this game. I know what lag is but I'm confused with such a term applied to this type of game. Does it mean each 'turn' takes longer? If that's the case I'd be okay with a smaller FPS I think.

Yes I understand my first, errr, 50 tries will end with me not even understanding what's going on. I'm just trying to get a ballpark idea of the embark site size and stuff.

There are two FPS numbers, and they will be reported on your screen if you have a Starter Pack with default settings.  I'll talk about them in reverse order.

The second number is GFPS (graphical frames per second) and is directly analogous to the FPS you hear about in other games.  It measures how often the screen is redrawn, and very low scores here can cause frustrating lag.

The first number is the more important one.  It measures how many time-steps of simulation occur per second.  If your "ticks" are passing slower, it will take more real time for the game to progress through a certain amount of game time.  For example, doubling your FPS would halve the amount of real time it takes crops to grow.  This is more salient in mature forts because they aren't paused as much and there are more things that can slow down the FPS.

With default settings, the game will attempt to maintain 100 ticks of simulation per second (12 real seconds per game day) and 50 GFPS.

[Tarsis]

          As your game world fills up with creatures, the pathing will take up more and more of your computer's processing power, more items, more history, more areas to path through etc. As you get more processing power used to do all those things, the game can only calculate so many Frames Per Second (FPS). On action games, anything less than about 50 FPS is too slow for me to feel comfortable, DF under 10 FPS is where I start to get bothered. There are no actual animations to watch, and no camera motions to make you feel motion. You'll often start a fort at 100 FPS, by year 3 it's down to about 25, and dropping hard unless properly controlled.

         Some people call low FPS, or framerate drops, "lag", but lag is most often a term used for latency in connection in online games (not an issue in DF). Sometimes a program doesn't immediately register commands, which some also call lag, but I call unresponsive.

        I understand your desire for largest world and longest history, but waiting all that time for world generation just to lose the fort to fluid dynamics in year 2, or your first magma forge,  seems a waste. I've found that smaller embarks and lesser creature numbers most effective at controlling FPS, but the world sort of lives on now while you play, old large worlds can also affect loading and saving.

        I'm not trying to steer you away from a single thing, the greatest thing about DF and it's community is nearly all of them encourage experimentation, doing your own thing, and playing how YOU have fun! They encourage attempts, and failures too (sometimes especially the failures)! If you try something no one else seems to have thought of, the community will jump to your thread encouraging you to post your results.

       You will have some memorable early forts, and once you settle in, you will start making connections that will turn the game into a story of your fort facing adversity. These types of things are easier in a smaller fort anyway.

       My suggestions were just an attempt to ease your way off the cliff of DF, but forge your own path and be the stronger for it!

EDIT: Ninja'd with great info. Thanks Dirst!

[Drowchyld]

I own the sims 3. Sometimes so much stuff is going on it gets pretty slow. Pausing the game for a few seconds helps this sort of thing out for a while. That sounds like CPU 'lag' I suppose. In this game does pausing also help to speed things up when the cpu load is high?

I would rather have a ig world with a rich history and wait an extra 10-15 mins for loading and saving. That seems a good sacrifice to me. But as per your feedback I'll be playing on a small embark map I guess and lower the max population to ~ 70. Does DF have scaling of any kind? Would, say, a raiding party of 50 goblins be less/ more with account to how many dwarves I have? I think Gnomoria is like that... I owned that for a short time but naw. This one is loads better. I know that and never really played either

[timotheos]

Pausing only sort of helps with fps. Say you were running at 25fps after pausing for 30 seconds it will shoot up to 80fps and then drop back down to 25fps over the next minute. Basically unless you are pausing for some other reason you don't gain anything.

I actually find long historys more boring as the goblins just take over and all the mega beasts are dead. On the other hand too short and there are not enough goblins to send big sieges or interesting historic events to find carved on your artifacts. On small to medium worlds 300-500 years is fine.

As for scaling you can set that yourself. The option to limit the number of invaders (as well as friendly visitors) should be next to wherever you set the pop cap. Which should also be considered for fps reasons as all those invaders use as much cpu time path finding as your dwarves.

[PopTart]

In each of your early forts, strive to master one new thing at most. Examples: workshops, farming, defense, forges. After you master this one new thing, let the fortress go. Abandon it forever. It'll get you used to unattaching yourself. Think of how much greater your new fort will be!

After 20-30 such forts, you'll have a routine down that is all your own! And then you can start the entire process over when you get tired of your routine.

[Starver]

As already pointed out, 'lag' through game-tick slowdown really doesn't mean the same as it does with other games. The passage of gametime is different from realtime anyway, with many actions typical of strategy games being entirely within the paused-state (and, with Adventure Mode, it runs as fast as any reasonable input mashing, except when unconcious and when time passes and injuries are inflicted as quickly as your helpless self can observe them battering your body).

I forget which version of DF I started with, but I got used to its speed on the machine I was usingvat the time, then the next (or next but one) major update streamlined everything and suddenly dwarves were rushing too fast across the unpaused landscape.

It'll depend upon playing style whether waiting for things to happen is tedious, or most of the time it's all paused because you're micromanaging everything else and you hardly notice the slower-than-slow overall pace of that vital job.

Horses for courses., really.  Enough computer architecture to not crash under the strain of your dwarven architecture, would be the lower limitbthat I would put on a 'playable' Fortress.  A stated zero-FPS value is nothing I'd personally worry about, so long as it works...  YMMV.

[Bumber]

Pausing only sort of helps with fps. Say you were running at 25fps after pausing for 30 seconds it will shoot up to 80fps and then drop back down to 25fps over the next minute. Basically unless you are pausing for some other reason you don't gain anything.

Observation tells me you don't actually have 80 fps upon unpausing. It's just a trick of how the number is averaged. Dwarves will continue to move at the same slow speed. GFPS will drop immediately, with FPS ending up at around that value.

[Pvt. Pirate]

well, there are three major factors for you to chose:
1. world size: it all gets calculated along while you play and creates more "history"
2. history well the reports of what happened and where what kind of settlements grew etc. (and i don't know if you can actually read each and every battlereport and if all creatures are calculated the same as inside the embark)
3. embark size, because that's what definitely has to be calculated more in depth than the outside world.
i usually have a 2x2 or 3x3 embark and my machine (winxp32, 2x2gb ddr3 RAM, 2x2600MHz) handles it at ~20FPS within the first 3 years, dependign on how extensive the caverns are or how many invaders came on the surface.

[hops]

Skimming through things, people don't seem to have mentioned the Herculean amount of time that would be required to update history on large worlds while you play the game.

[Putnam]

Skimming through things, people don't seem to have mentioned the Herculean amount of time that would be required to update history on large worlds while you play the game.

It's bad enough that I don't make larger worlds, but mind that it's not really a problem for FPS death.

[Melting Sky]

Try a medium world with a couple hundred years of history. Pick a 2x2 embark to start with and see how your computer handles it. My guess is that as a new player your fortress will die a horrible death before you ever need to worry about FPS loss.