Current consensus as of recent is that, while processor power helps, another big help is upgrading your RAM, toward improving the frequencies and latency of the memory you'll use, largely due to the fact that DF is constantly in a state of reading and accessing ram addresses, which can bottleneck if your CPU is up to the task. Having enough RAM to begin with isn't difficult, but if you don't have enough ram, that can severely hamper performance too.
Ingame, a lot of not-too limiting things can involve cramming as many of your non-grazing non important and baby animals into cages as possible. Using traffic designations can also optimize pathfinding as well for instance, if you designate the doorways of multi-doorway rooms as low traffic, dwarves will be less likely to try to consider a "shortcut" through it, saving on a few processing ticks here and there. Blocking off large unused subterranean areas with forbidden doors will also help reduce the amount of pathfinding that stretches to unneeded areas. That's just a few pieces of advice, anyway. Also apologies if my initial comment were a bit scathing, it honestly largely concerned the original post concerning "How much money would toady accept before he focuses only on x feature" question.
Oh, thank you
Even if you didn't need to apologize, I really appreciated that!
I would say that everything you've typed is something I shall pass on due to its usefulness, though I already utilize such techniques to the best of my ability. However, I purposefully phrased the question with "beyond limiting the game's potential as a player" to highlight that I, as the player, am forced to apply inhibiting techniques (as generously provided), compromising my freedom (not talking mega-projects) when playing the game. Without going into extraneous detail, it's simply go-to advice for players (on any PC, as we're aware) to avoid whole sections of the game (liquids, 3x3 or larger embarks, HFS, caverns even) just to maintain acceptable frames per second (being ideally the starting 100fps speed imposed by the game, but really staying above 35fps at the moment). Consequently, it was more of a "what can be done from the Developer's side to alleviate such issues if Multi-Threading isn't the holy grail?"
My angle though, was wanting to see Toady's stance on the matter as explained by MrWiggle. There are so many opinions for & against multi-threading, that it's utterly pointless debating it with other users. It is, however, the main & most controversial optimization technique to cure what I, perhaps in the minority, consider the single biggest deterrent to this amazing game, being the FPS drag. (bugs don't count
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Again, thanks for the advice. In case you're wondering, below is how I've tackled it as the player. If I you bother to read it, would be grateful for any other techniques
I'm maintaining 75fps/48fps below/above ground, 50fps/38fps with foreigners below/above ground, 25-35fps with two active military squads.
- i7, 32gb's of ram, along with other goodie OTT hardware.
- WorldGen: 100 years. Large. High savagery, more megabeasts than usual.
- Embark Size 2x3.
- Flat embark with zero trees (Seemingly no effect)
- No working with liquids. I spawned six 7/7 lava blocks at the top layer (less traffic) & two 7/7 river source blocks for wells.
- Temperature off, weather disabled. (Seemingly no effect)
- Stock less than 3k - constant chore (Minor improvement)
- Quantum Stockpiling.
- Efficient path-finding plan.
- Caverns sealed off. (No effect)
- All workshops + stockpiles in 2 rooms. Bedrooms are 3 blocks each (excluding nobility).
- Visitor Cap: 0. Dwarf Cap: 50.
- Domestic Cap: 20. (No effect)
- DFhack techniques - Cleanowned scattered x, Flows commands, spotclean command (No effect)
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1443829 times)