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[Encrtia]

And now you see my predicament I'm having to loose out on !!FUN!! to attempt to gain more frames per second.

I do not care about FPS.

That's lovely. I do. I see we're at an impasse

32 GB, that's quite a lot. A lot more than important (once you have "enough", more than enough isn't a big deal). What's the Hz frequency and the CAS latency?
Also out of curiosity, what's the population?

Truly is overkill. I had a previous PC that sorely lacked in that department, so I went from one extreme to the other. I actually took one out a week ago actually, it was playing up, so make that 24gb*. CAC Latency is 10, & 4kMhz.
Clever idea limiting to 40, but I've sadly lived on 150 from masterwork & 100 from vanilla. Grr..

As for the population, Strict cap of 50, along with 0 visitors. I had to go to 80 for Goblin invasions, but read I could tweak it, so killed off 30 Dwarrows.

Play Dwarf Fortress and Aurora/Stellaris/hearts of Iron 4 together, you'll get used to the slowness and have something to do in boths downtimes.

Dear lord - end-game Stellaris was laggy too But no, I know a lot of people in today's gaming industry like to AFK game, but that's not for all or me. Never got into MMO's like that either. I'm playing Dwarf Fortress, & giving it full attention. The moment I start spending time not playing it, it's not long before I realize how boring it is - just letting some code run in the background to every now & again check on it before not really being able to do much. That's not a game for me, that's just wasting electricity & time. (Obviously in my opinion)

Questions and comments about the development page or DF development somewhat more broadly work here, though any contentious topics that lead to derails are discouraged -- there are threads for those too.

I'm going to pipe down now

[TheFlame52]

In worldgen, we can see nations fall. When can we expect to see them rise? Mythgen? Economy?

[thvaz]

Do you still play the game for purposes other than testing? And what about Threetoe?

I thought about this after reading the last devlog. Even if you are playing for fun you could still see many problems players won't ever imagine as bugs. Though as DF is very complex and allow very diverse playstyles, most of the problems are very playstyle-oriented, I imagine.

[King Mir]

Do you still play the game for purposes other than testing? And what about Threetoe?

I thought about this after reading the last devlog. Even if you are playing for fun you could still see many problems players won't ever imagine as bugs. Though as DF is very complex and allow very diverse playstyles, most of the problems are very playstyle-oriented, I imagine.

I believe Toady and Threetoe have previously said the answer to this question is "no". The game was made with the goal that it would be the kind of game ThreeToe and Toady would want to play, but in practice they don't actually play their own game.

[iceball3]

That reminds me of something...
Hey Toady, what's your opinion on the Dark Souls 3 Mound-Makers?

[Shonai_Dweller]

During the taverns update development you (maybe, correct me if my memory is faulty) mentioned the fortress guards getting involved in tavern brawls (breaking them up? Arresting folk afterwards?). Is that something you're still thinking of adding in this cycle or is that too big now?

Would be a nice addition. Balance reduction of tavern deaths through timely intervention of guards with having to fulfill mandates to avoid punishment deaths. Or just opt out with an alcohol(tavern keeper) free tavern as folk are free to do now.

[Lordfiscus]

Will creatures with transmissible symptoms be able to intelligently apply their poisonous substances onto an object in order to lay a trap, or otherwise weaponize it for biological warfare? For example, thralls could try to coat doors or loose objects with the dust that created them, so anyone who touches that object becomes another thrall. Or, certain sentient civs might be able to capture a forgotten beast and coat their weapons in the toxic blood/dust of the creature to provide an edge in combat.
Also, will there be a way to create temporary pocket dimensions to create bags of holding or similar? I'd like to be able to make a crystal or jar containing soldiers, then throw it at a target and have the dimension in the jar destabilize as the jar shatters, ejecting all of the occupants on top of the target. That, or do the same thing, but fill the jar dimension with lava instead, and make a magical incendiary weapon.
Thirdly, will fleshcrafting and gene manipulation be a possible magic discipline? Will we be able to clone dwarves or summon syndromes as an area-denial weapon?
Lastly, will necromancy be given a more complex skillset, and thus allowing dwarven necromancers to play a greater role in dwarf society? I was hoping to have necromancy be akin to a noble position, requiring a certain quality of room. One could designate the necromancer to raise a corpse, and the raised corpse could have certain skill specializations and respond to the appropriate labors. Better yet, a workshop by the name of Necromancer Altar or similar, where you could order the necro to raise a corpse and give them skills for certain labors. They would be able to perform labors befitting their skillset, but would be unable to improve their skills. If necromancy can be likened to a skill, then a higher necromancer skill level would allow the necromancer to raise corpses with higher skill levels or combinations of skills. Novice necromancers would raise corpses with one Novice level, Adequates could provide undead with 1-2 Adequate skills, and so on. The most proficient or legendary necromancers could raise highly intelligent undead with a wide variety of disciplines. They might even be able to give their undead necromantic skill, for the purposes of delegation or backups should the original necromancer die.

[iceball3]

Will creatures with transmissible symptoms be able to intelligently apply their poisonous substances onto an object in order to lay a trap, or otherwise weaponize it for biological warfare? For example, thralls could try to coat doors or loose objects with the dust that created them, so anyone who touches that object becomes another thrall. Or, certain sentient civs might be able to capture a forgotten beast and coat their weapons in the toxic blood/dust of the creature to provide an edge in combat.
Also, will there be a way to create temporary pocket dimensions to create bags of holding or similar? I'd like to be able to make a crystal or jar containing soldiers, then throw it at a target and have the dimension in the jar destabilize as the jar shatters, ejecting all of the occupants on top of the target. That, or do the same thing, but fill the jar dimension with lava instead, and make a magical incendiary weapon.
Thirdly, will fleshcrafting and gene manipulation be a possible magic discipline? Will we be able to clone dwarves or summon syndromes as an area-denial weapon?
Lastly, will necromancy be given a more complex skillset, and thus allowing dwarven necromancers to play a greater role in dwarf society? I was hoping to have necromancy be akin to a noble position, requiring a certain quality of room. One could designate the necromancer to raise a corpse, and the raised corpse could have certain skill specializations and respond to the appropriate labors. Better yet, a workshop by the name of Necromancer Altar or similar, where you could order the necro to raise a corpse and give them skills for certain labors. They would be able to perform labors befitting their skillset, but would be unable to improve their skills. If necromancy can be likened to a skill, then a higher necromancer skill level would allow the necromancer to raise corpses with higher skill levels or combinations of skills. Novice necromancers would raise corpses with one Novice level, Adequates could provide undead with 1-2 Adequate skills, and so on. The most proficient or legendary necromancers could raise highly intelligent undead with a wide variety of disciplines. They might even be able to give their undead necromantic skill, for the purposes of delegation or backups should the original necromancer die.

These dips dangerously into "suggest-questions", which goes in the suggestions forum, more or less.
The question of what places necromancers can hold in what societies, given pragmatism or otherwise, is a good one.

[SmileyMan]

Just a quickie regarding the last devlog - will the new outdoor construction cleaning include roads?
I have a real problem with newly arrived immigrants spewing green all over my nice shiny marble roads! To the point where I now seek out olivine layers

[Rockphed]

Just a quickie regarding the last devlog - will the new outdoor construction cleaning include roads?
I have a real problem with newly arrived immigrants spewing green all over my nice shiny marble roads! To the point where I now seek out olivine layers

Obviously you need to edit the dwarf raws to make their vomit white!

[PatrikLundell]

Just a quickie regarding the last devlog - will the new outdoor construction cleaning include roads?
I have a real problem with newly arrived immigrants spewing green all over my nice shiny marble roads! To the point where I now seek out olivine layers

Drunk driving is dangerous. You shouldn't let them out on the roads in that condition

My interpretation of what Toady said is that you'd get the roads cleaned if you put a roof over them. That would also cut down on the amount of cave adaptation vomit being deposited on those roads.

[iceball3]

Seems suboptimal, though you could save material by making those roofs out of bridges.

[King Mir]

If you do that, you might just make the "road" itself out of self cleaning bridges.

[mikekchar]

Not to extend the FPS discussion, but since optimisation in real time systems was my job for a decade or so, I thought I might chime in.  One of the things that's tempting... well, not so much tempting, but virtually impossible to stop your self from doing, is thinking that you have a good idea how to speed something up.  In my experience, the problem with performance is never what you think it is.  Frequently people will decide what to do to speed something up, do it, and walk away patting their own backs -- but nothing has really improved.  In fact it often gets *worse*.  It's incredible how often I've seen that professionally.

When I go into the problem I always caution people: It's never what you think it is, so stop thinking.  You really need to set up experiments, measure, analyse the code, go back to the beginning.  It usually ends up being something ridiculous that you would never even imagine.  I remember one time going through this insane parser with crazy logic and discovering that something like 99% of the execution time was in the string allocator.  It never even needed to allocate memory for strings -- it was just a convenience in some of the code.  Another time I remember working on some completely over the top database query code only to notice that it was allocating 500K date objects in a few seconds -- it turned out that someone created a date in a function rather than using a constant. 

When you have thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code, there will be some stupid code and it will be on the critical path.  Usually (but not always) that's the problem.  Very, very occasionally you discover that you just build something that doesn't scale and you have to start again.  That latter thing is unusual in my experience, but very frequently people jump to the conclusion that "It's all crap and we have to start again!"  And when they do, they put some stupid code on the critical path and the new code is just as slow as the old code.  The obvious things usually end up not being the problem precisely because they are obvious -- the performance issues for those things have already been mitigated a long time ago.

Suggestions for what Toady should do to improve the FPS are obviously well meaning, but they are unlikely to be helpful.  It's never what you think it is.  Whether or not Toady will spend a large effort to optimise at this juncture, I don't know (he's reported *some* optimisation recently!)   I don't think it's bad to say that it's your highest desire, but "Would you consider multithreading" (or some other proposed solution) is unlikely to be constructive.

[PatrikLundell]

And to add to mikekchar's comment: Before you start to optimizing the code by doing "clever" things to wring a few additional CPU cycles out of the code, check that the algorithm you're going to optimize actually is the right one. Optimizing a linear search implementation may give you 10% faster code (for that little part of the code), while switching to a completely unoptimized binary search when the data is ordered is going to give you much more (and probably with a lot less effort).