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[Mathalor]

I used to enjoy DF.  I enjoyed looking through the wiki, finding how to do something, making it actually happen, and start to prosper.  I was looking forward to having a mature fortress with all the available industries prospering, and my dwarves happy.

But FPS lag is a terrible beast, crushing my fortress without regard to drawbridges and fortifications.

I looked on the wiki for suggestions to improve my situation, and found many, such as embarking on a 1x1 or 2x2 profile, cutting out unnecessary industries, not digging except where necessary, restricting my number of dwarves, not breaching caverns, not stockpiling anything I don't need, and not making anything that requires unusual pathfinding (esp minecarts), or fluid dynamics.

I suppose I'm asking for flame by posting a complaint on the game's main discussion board, but this just doesn't seem fun anymore.

[Dorsidwarf]

DFhack can recover -some- of the FPS, how old's the fort and what FPS are you getting?

[Mathalor]

The fort was in it's third year, I was getting 6 - 12 fps.

I started new forts trying to follow the suggestions from the wiki, but they weren't as fun.

I'm kind of interested by the things in 43.0x, but can't get excited about it, cause I know the lag will reappear.

[wierd]

On a fort that is REALLY suffering from FPS death, turning using fastdwarf in dfhack can breathe a little more life in, but eventually even then, it kills the fortress.

("fastdwarf 1" makes the bearded blighters zoom around like they had a cocaine enema, so even at that FPS, the game is still fast.)

That is about the time you need to retire the fortress and start a new one if you survive that long.  (Or uncork the circus, and have !FUN!)

[Libash_Thunderhead]

The fort was in it's third year, I was getting 6 - 12 fps.

How many dwarves and animals did you have?

[Evans]

Trying to retire and unretire fort might help.

It did prevented FPS death of my current place, after I dig all the surface areas I needed usually FPS turned out to be terrible.

Also avoid forests. Trees now drop leaves and nuts and fruits etc which are pickupable objects and are having all the calculations performed on them.

My fort is 5x5 and stable 60-40 fps.
Although I haven't breached the caverns yet (there is something going on down there, as I have large selection of imported items to arm my dwarves with in military screen. But I have none in my stockpiles).

I might actually save game, breach the caverns and send down squad there. I just hope it's not the Elder God again, I didn't turned it off before creating this fort...

[Dunamisdeos]

Unpredictable digital mayhem and dismemberment always get me excited.

Anyway, I have stopped having major fps problems since 64x release. Even more, I have now embarked on a glacier that lacks trees and non-cavern plant life. I'm in like year 12 with 20-40fps depending on what's going on. In my experience the environment causes all of my lag.

[Infinityforce]

In a few years, and many more versions to come (yay!) we should expect to see an improvement in fps, especially as computers become more powerful in general.
As technology advances, we're more or less guaranteed a smoother experience in the future... but right now it's not even at v1.0.
What kind of specs does your rig have? AFAIK RAM and CPU are important wrt fps... not sure about other things though...

Why not try adventurer mode? It's fun

[muldrake]

I find 2x2 embarks last reasonably long, but then, I'm at the part of my DF career where I view it as miraculous if I survive even 10 years, and if FPS drops a bit, it gives me more room for error for the horrible mistakes I make, so I can fix them before they're fatal.

I trust Moore's law, though. 

I do think, though, that Armok will probably take advantage of any increase in processing speed to add even more stuff to the game.

[Infinityforce]

At the risk of retreading what's already been said
Have you tried a custom tiny world with short history, few civs and no (or only 1) cavern?

[vjek]

Worldgen tricks can give you a fortress that sustains many dwarves for dozens of years while maintaining very high FPS the entire time.

Briefly, some of these tricks are:
Pocket world.
Minimum number of clowns.
No surface vegetation of any kind.
A very tiny aquifer for safe & secure water source.
Dry/bloodthorn single cavern.
A very thin world, ~20Z from embark to magma.
No surface volcano.
No surface water.
Very few Z levels of sky above embark level.
dead dwarven civ.  stops all caravans and migrants beyond two hardcoded waves.
one goblin civ in addition to the dead goblin civ.

Now, obviously, depending on your goals for the fort, some of these don't go together.  But I've used them all, at one time or another, depending on what others have requested.
A simple example is... by editing three lines, post embark, in one file in the saved game folder, you can have goblins show up with only 20 dwarves in your fort.  If you can get to 20 with the two hardcoded waves, and have a dead parent civ, lots of challenging fun can be had quite quickly.

[Girlinhat]

Keeping 'modest' seems to be key.  See what you can do with a pop limit of 25 instead of 200.  Handle less animals, or turn off temperature.  Restrict production to what's important.  If you want a long fort, you'll have to stay humble.  Large forts are often exciting but short.

[Shonai_Dweller]

There are other ways to play DF besides 'single fortress for as long as possible until fps death'. And other games too.

If you're not excited by playing DF in exactly the same way every time, you should probably do something else. It's kind of unhealthy to obsessively stick to one thing beyond the point where you no longer enjoy it and take to posting on forums about how you no longer enjoy it.

Toady still enjoys DF so it'll still be here when you decide to come back. Might even run better. Possibly.

[mirrizin]

The fort was in it's third year, I was getting 6 - 12 fps.

I started new forts trying to follow the suggestions from the wiki, but they weren't as fun.

I'm kind of interested by the things in 43.0x, but can't get excited about it, cause I know the lag will reappear.

That's...pretty slow. I'm running a fort in its second decade and I'm usually around 20-30.

Any idea what mechanic in particular is generating the lag? I've had some fluke drops into 6-7 range, but they've been temporary, and usually caused by something in particular (flying megabeast, thwarted mood, etc.)

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Well, you know, cpu is the biggest factor.

Also if you have 200 dwarves and 50 animals, 10 fps is not a surprise, but if you have 100 units totally, then either your cpu is old, or your play style is, well, curious.