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[forgotten_idiot]

Small-sized world, medium history, 2x2 embark, 50 pop cap. 2 years into the game, FPS drops from 150 to 100. Another year passed, FPS is down to 60. I mean, what gives? Is this normal? 3 years! My military isn't even fully trained and already I can hardly play the game. I am seriously upset by this. With all those cool features I don't want to go back to 34.11!

UPD. I am an idiot, problem solved.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

Hmmm. That doesn't sound normal, how old is your computer?

[Robsoie]

Are you dumping then atom smashing regularly all several hundred of useless items/body parts/etc... that are continously produced by regular fortress ?
Are you using quantum stockpiles or several large regular stockpiles ?
Have you marked as restricted (d -> o -> r(estricted) ) any area of the map and of the fortress that dwarves have no need to travel into ?

Without using those kind of tricks, framerate will drop regularly in the course of the game unfortunately.

[mobucks]

2x2 embark, but how deep is it? If you have a deep embark with three caverns, it's going to affect FPS. My rig is 10 years old but can sustain a 3x3 that is 45z deep with a single cavern at over 100 fps with 50 dwarves + visitors/traders/crundle herds for at least 5 years. If anything, the latest version 44.09 runs faster than 43.xx. for me. Keep in mind I embark on completely flat embarks medium worlds 150 yrs with no trees on the surface, build entire fort on a single z-level, as well as other FPS saving tricks.

I've done deep (150z) embarks where the starting 7 gave FPS "hiccups" and abandoned them.

[§k]

60 is fine for FPS, at least that's how I find it.

When I'm actually playing, I cap it at 20 or 30, so dwarfs aren't flying around wildly like bees, and I rarely have to pause. At 100 FPS, one dwarven day is 12 human seconds. At 20 FPS, it's one minute. You can set things up and take a stroll to the balcony, for some refreshing nauseating sun. When you come back, a week passed, and things get done! It is, in some way, a better experience than the hectic 100 FPS game.

That's obvious my own opinion, anyway!

[thompson]

I've been experimenting with a new fort design concept where I channel a giant monolith from the earth and use the interior as the fort. It has the advantage of minimising pathable surface area while allowing extensive mining and 3D construction.

I should add I channel out the entire map, except for a 1 tile think square around the edge, so wild animal pathing is limited too. I ended up abandoning that game after a crash (the only way of losing that isn't fun), but the concept worked well. The giant pit surrounding the monolith makes for an excellent defense against ambushers.

I'll probably give it another shot after Toady does a little more bugfixing. I'll be obsidian casting the caverns as well. I didn't get that far last time, but pathing through there could also be a problem.

[forgotten_idiot]

Hmmm. That doesn't sound normal, how old is your computer?

Intel Core i5-2500 CPU 3.30Ghz, 4 cores; 12 gb RAM. It's pretty old but not THAT old.

2x2 embark, but how deep is it? If you have a deep embark with three caverns, it's going to affect FPS. My rig is 10 years old but can sustain a 3x3 that is 45z deep with a single cavern at over 100 fps with 50 dwarves + visitors/traders/crundle herds for at least 5 years. If anything, the latest version 44.09 runs faster than 43.xx. for me. Keep in mind I embark on completely flat embarks medium worlds 150 yrs with no trees on the surface, build entire fort on a single z-level, as well as other FPS saving tricks.

I've done deep (150z) embarks where the starting 7 gave FPS "hiccups" and abandoned them.

There are 3 caverns, one of them is insanely deep. Actually, when I first opened it, FPS tanked to 40, but went back to 150 on the surface. Maybe this is the problem. Is there an option to turn off caverns completely?

Are you dumping then atom smashing regularly all several hundred of useless items/body parts/etc... that are continously produced by regular fortress ?

I drop all garbage into magma and seal off all unused tunnels, yes. Not that it helps much.

60 is fine for FPS, at least that's how I find it.
When I'm actually playing, I cap it at 20 or 30, so dwarfs aren't flying around wildly like bees, and I rarely have to pause.

For me it's like watching paint dry. But maybe I'll get used to it. It sounds kinda Zen.

Actually, I'd like to ask you guys, how old are your fortresses, usually? And when FPS problems become too annoying to keep it going?

[PatrikLundell]

60 is a very good FPS in my book. I've given up hope of staying above 20 for long term fortresses (currently about 15 after about 35 years).

You need to have at least one cavern layer for dwarves to exist in DF as they depend on cavern products to exist (such as Plump Helmets). I think it should be possible to hack raws to remove that dependency, either by modding dwarves or setting a surface race as playable, but I don't know for sure. I guess you could as in the modding sub forum.

[Robsoie]

60fps is excellent if you can still manage to keep at that for the 10th years of a fortress, as dwarves and time will then still move fast enough for the interesting things to happen without waiting hours in between.

For the dwarves civs to exist without cavern, it's the token [OUTDOOR_FARMING] that you should add to the dwarven entity in the entity_default.txt

By using the advanced worldgen, you can change the CAVERN_LAYER_COUNT to 0 if you don't want any caverns, but if you want to have underground plants existing, you'll better have it set to 1 , already much better for framerate than 3 (that is the maximum value of the CAVERN_LAYER_COUNT anyways) and you'll miss nothing in term of forgotten beast and etc anyways.

[forgotten_idiot]

Boy, do I feel like an idiot (hence the name). Armok Vision was somehow running in background, stuck in an infinite fall. That's what was killing my FPS. Whoever is in charge here, give me a jackass hat and delete this thread, please. Actually, don't, some useful advice here, so it wasn't for nothing.

[PatrikLundell]

Boy, do I feel like an idiot (hence the name). Armok Vision was somehow running in background, stuck in an infinite fall. That's what was killing my FPS. Whoever is in charge here, give me a jackass hat and delete this thread, please. Actually, don't, some useful advice here, so it wasn't for nothing.

Sorry, the stock of jackass hats has been depleted. Another 10000 hats have been ordered, but they're used up fast.

@robsoie: I believe you do miss out a little on FBs, as it seems there is one FB generated per cavern biome, and there are 3 times as many cavern biomes in a 3 cavern world than in a single cavern one. A larger world has more cavern biomes, though, so you can (over)compensate by playing a world 4 times larger.

[Telgin]

Actually, I'd like to ask you guys, how old are your fortresses, usually? And when FPS problems become too annoying to keep it going?

Mine typically last to the 20 year mark or so, and FPS is usually in the 20s by then from what I remember.  It's been a few years since I've run one that long though.

FPS would have to dip below 10 for me to give up on a fort for FPS reasons alone.  I usually just get bored with them before then because they become too static.

[thompson]

How do cavern biomes work?

[ChairmanPoo]

Boy, do I feel like an idiot (hence the name). Armok Vision was somehow running in background, stuck in an infinite fall. That's what was killing my FPS. Whoever is in charge here, give me a jackass hat and delete this thread, please. Actually, don't, some useful advice here, so it wasn't for nothing.

Sorry, the stock of jackass hats has been depleted. Another 10000 hats have been ordered, but they're used up fast.

@robsoie: I believe you do miss out a little on FBs, as it seems there is one FB generated per cavern biome, and there are 3 times as many cavern biomes in a 3 cavern world than in a single cavern one. A larger world has more cavern biomes, though, so you can (over)compensate by playing a world 4 times larger.

I thought there was a separate parameter for FB number in worldgen

[PatrikLundell]

How do cavern biomes work?

A fairly imprecise question... Not sure how this relates to FPS frustration either.
There are two cavern biomes: Chasm and Water, where Chasm is "muddy cavern" while Water is the normal one. A Cavern Water value of less than 10 results in a Chasm, while higher values result in Water. Chasm biomes support no vegetation except blood thorn, and water dependent animals are excluded (such as pond grabbers). Strangely enough, Chasms still seem to HAVE "grass" under the mud, even if grasses are absent from the list of plants (it seems to always be empty, save for a possible blood thorn).
Plants and animals can have cavern layer connections such that they can only be present in particular layers, e.g. blood thorn is exclusive to layer 3. Each cavern biome has its own set of creatures and plants randomly selected from the complete set available for that layer.
Since there are only two biome versions, it's typically hard to see the difference between two adjacent biomes, as they tend to be of the same type, but there are a lot of different ones in the world (the can be seen with the Biome Manipulator).