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[Sheylos]

Once again I am back to playing the best game ever always being made and after my third fortress I had to ask myself an important question. What would I consider FPS death. I can usually get between 90-100 until the last cavern and then it really starts to dip eventually bottoming out at 15-20 by the time I get to the blue gold.

My question to all here really is what would you consider the minimum fps tolerable in fortress mode?

[Dadamh]

Once again I am back to playing the best game ever always being made and after my third fortress I had to ask myself an important question. What would I consider FPS death. I can usually get between 90-100 until the last cavern and then it really starts to dip eventually bottoming out at 15-20 by the time I get to the blue gold.

My question to all here really is what would you consider the minimum fps tolerable in fortress mode?

Somewhere around 10.  I played through all of Oblivion and most of Morrowind at about 10 FPS.

That said, it's not exactly fun being that low.

It's a longstanding issue with DF.

[GhostDwemer]

10FPS is about the minimum I'll play for any length of time, and depending on how epic the fort is.

[wierd]

I have taken to running the Linux version on a Chromebook recently.  It is double-mild weak sauce, with a crippled 1.6ghz celeron and 2gb of ram.

I manage to run a proper Linux user land using Crouton.

I have a smaller 3x3 embark with just over 30 dwarves. It is running at about 20fps.

I am used to running 200+ dwarf fortresses, on huge 5x5 or larger embarks.

The challenge of having to work within the constraints of this system has made the game more challenging for me.

I guess what I am saying, is that fps death might not be all bad, since it can shake up your play style and get you out of a rut.

A 30dwarf fort is playable. It makes repelling invasions harder, because every dwarf counts.

[steel jackal]

thing about DF is that unlike TES, when its FPS goes down, its because the game takes longer to calculate everythings movements for that frame, so weather your playing at 1 fps or 100, the game still renders out each frame.

so while it may take 100 seconds at 1 fps to equal 1 second of gameplay at 100 fps, its really a matter of patience in DF.

my current comp is a 5 year old laptop, and it was mediocre when it was new, so it chokes on even moderate graphics (oddly enough though it plays KSP at 40-60 fps, even with a +200 parts ship on screen)
im used to playing games at 8-15 fps, lower than that and things just get too choppy, but since df has such simple graphics, its really just a matter of patience as to when your fort dies of FPS death.

you might want to try DF hack, make a tunnel to the blue metal that dosnt open into the caverns, and then use df hack to hide all non-accesable locations, that should give you some fps back.

and if you have a clothing industry, you might want to remove all storage from your dwarves bedrooms and make their rooms a refuse stockpile that dosnt accept anything, your dwarves will put their worn out clothing on their floors, and the refuse stockpile will make the clothes disintegrate even though the stockpile dosnt accept clothing. you make it so it dosnt accept anything so that your dwarves dont store garbage in their rooms. that trick really helped me out on my fort where i had so much worn out clothes that i could buy out every caravan and donate all the clothing that they could carry off with them and still have way too much clothing (that was actually my last fortress that i made with LNP and all the wonderful plugins like automation before df started updating faster than LNP could, though i hear df hack has a beta for 0.43.05 so lnp should finally be up to the latest version in a month or two)


also would like to make note, i run DF on both windows and linux, i have both on separate HDDs because some games run faster on linux, and some dont have a linux version, so i like to keep both.
ive never really noticed much of a diffrent in DFs speed between the two when in the same fort, but if your computer has low ram, you should definitely try linux, its a lot lighter on your ram and CPU than windows.
i personally use ubuntu.

[kingsableye]

I agree with the 10fps, though on my longest (87 years) I'm only getting 4fps but I want to see the 100 year mark.
On the topic of FPS challenges, I like to get a 1x1 embark (since that one update however long ago now) and set the frame limit to something crazy like 500 and watch the dwarves zoom around the map at approaching light speeds, makes reacting to things a little challenging, than Armok for the pause function.

Maybe one day Toady will implement multi-thread and the core issue of FPS death will be a thing of the past.

[steel jackal]

Maybe one day Toady will implement multi-thread and the core issue of FPS death will be a thing of the past.

a lot of people have said that multithreading will require df to be rebuilt from the ground up, so if thats true i dont think it will happen until DF version 1 has been released so that today can focus all his attention on doing JUST that and we wont have the issue of not having any updates to an incomplete game for what may be over a year.
then again, the sooner multithreading is implemented, the less work there will be in rebuilding it

[mikekchar]

I actually prefer 20 fps and set it up that way ;-).  It allows me to pay more attention to the lives of the dwarfs.  It makes for a long game, though.

Having said that, after my holidays I'm going to experiment with implementing pathing algorithms with GLSL.  This would allow a game like DF to shunt that kind of processing to the graphics co-processor.  Presumably you could also do things like liquid flow/pressure calculations and temperature calculations in the same way.  I think it would be much easier to go that route than to make the whole application multi-processing.  I'll put an unrestrictive license on whatever I accomplish so Toady is welcome to slurp it up if he so chooses.

[GhostDwemer]

I actually prefer 20 fps and set it up that way ;-).  It allows me to pay more attention to the lives of the dwarfs.  It makes for a long game, though.

Having said that, after my holidays I'm going to experiment with implementing pathing algorithms with GLSL.  This would allow a game like DF to shunt that kind of processing to the graphics co-processor.  Presumably you could also do things like liquid flow/pressure calculations and temperature calculations in the same way.  I think it would be much easier to go that route than to make the whole application multi-processing.  I'll put an unrestrictive license on whatever I accomplish so Toady is welcome to slurp it up if he so chooses.

Sounds like a good idea. Have you looked at the recast/detour libraries at all? It's open source.

[kingsableye]

a lot of people have said that multithreading will require df to be rebuilt from the ground up, so if thats true i dont think it will happen until DF version 1 has been released so that today can focus all his attention on doing JUST that and we wont have the issue of not having any updates to an incomplete game for what may be over a year.
then again, the sooner multithreading is implemented, the less work there will be in rebuilding it

yeah, the way DF handles calculations would require a multi-thread df to be built almost from scratch in a lot of ways from what I've seen. mikekchar's suggestion/project is a good idea, one that I'm 95% positive Toady has talked about.
Toady also made your statement Steel Jackal, that multithreading would take a lot of time, but the longer he puts it off the more work it will be.
We'll have to see where DF takes us. Adding in artifacts, heroes, magic, myths, and gods is all more exciting than redesigning code. Heck, even trying to stamp down a lot of the older bugs and problems associated with world gen, post world gen, and world interaction in Fortress mode is probably more entertaining for Toady then recoding everything he has made in the last 10 years.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Let me see, my current fort runs at 26 fps on my office computer, but drops to 10 fps when there's a siege (250 enemy units).
I once loaded the same using my 10 years old home computer, and it ran the game at 10 fps at most.
The map is 4x4, with all 3 caverns opened and accessable. I have 130+ dorfs, a handful of caged cats, a couple of war jabberers and occasionally some wild ainmals.

To me, 20 fps is still playable, but if I want to do any construction project, 10 fps is far too slow.

[Loud Whispers]

I can run with 2FPS on a Fortress I intend to manage over many years with lots and lots of planning involved (with most of the time spent just letting DF idle in the background with some casual overseeing), otherwise I tend to keep above 50FPS when I can spend all my time Dorfin

[gunpowdertea]

I can run with 2FPS on a Fortress I intend to manage over many years with lots and lots of planning involved (with most of the time spent just letting DF idle in the background with some casual overseeing), otherwise I tend to keep above 50FPS when I can spend all my time Dorfin

Same here... although at 50 FPS it is a frenzy after having a fort being played in the background over a year or so. Stuff keeps happening, and I am happy enough with having a few distractions still to solve (blocking a ton of water and magma flow from the sides of the map, cleaing up the egg and general food industry, ...)