Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Raven]

Understandable but... Does my proc suck or Is decent? 

[Starver]

I think the opinion (which has better advocates than me, to be honest) might be that more Ghz could help, until the memory-shuffling becomes more the limiting factor (there's usually talk about the various levels of cache, but I'm not familiar with where yours sits on the scale - if the L1 was more L1D than L1I, it'd be better, I'm sure, but you never have that much choice there). More RAM would never hurt, but the pain is probably already inflicted.  Extra cores wouldn't do so much, for fairly recognised reasons, if you're not running other things in the background. You're 64bit so automatically better than a number of my machines.

There may be a simpler upgrade to migrate to an SSD, for various reasons, if you aren't already, and that'd likely improve load time, even if not FPS, but I'm still a bit wary of relying on them.


My main suggestion is that laptops are often worse than the same-price desktop (deals aside), are more likely to need costly repairs and less able to be simply upgraded or act as partial-doners to the next big purchase to offset that cost. Desktops are vastly worse at being used on the train, etc, so obviously I'm not saying your current choice is wrong for what you needed it for.  If you can live with it through your life reasons (I've been there, maybe it's the same reason I don't like discarding 'perfectly useful' old equipment) I'd do so. Then when you get the next machine of your dreams, whatever configuration but presumably all-round better where it counts, you'll enjoy it more.


Not trying to be flippant (this time at least), but I know any or all this might be contested by someone. Everyone? And if you want to go further than "can it be enjoyed with what I have?" (which depends a lot on your definition of enjoyment, and maybe it currently isn't for you) I'm perhaps not the best correspondent for the complete lowdown on that. My upper-range hardware tends to get used for different things, if only because I just know I'd be not using it to do those things if I started to play DF(/KSP/whatever) on any of them, so I'm deliberately keeping them out-of-bounds for that. 

[Raven]

I think the opinion (which has better advocates than me, to be honest) might be that more Ghz could help, until the memory-shuffling becomes more the limiting factor (there's usually talk about the various levels of cache, but I'm not familiar with where yours sits on the scale - if the L1 was more L1D than L1I, it'd be better, I'm sure, but you never have that much choice there). More RAM would never hurt, but the pain is probably already inflicted.  Extra cores wouldn't do so much, for fairly recognised reasons, if you're not running other things in the background. You're 64bit so automatically better than a number of my machines.

There may be a simpler upgrade to migrate to an SSD, for various reasons, if you aren't already, and that'd likely improve load time, even if not FPS, but I'm still a bit wary of relying on them.


My main suggestion is that laptops are often worse than the same-price desktop (deals aside), are more likely to need costly repairs and less able to be simply upgraded or act as partial-doners to the next big purchase to offset that cost. Desktops are vastly worse at being used on the train, etc, so obviously I'm not saying your current choice is wrong for what you needed it for.  If you can live with it through your life reasons (I've been there, maybe it's the same reason I don't like discarding 'perfectly useful' old equipment) I'd do so. Then when you get the next machine of your dreams, whatever configuration but presumably all-round better where it counts, you'll enjoy it more.


Not trying to be flippant (this time at least), but I know any or all this might be contested by someone. Everyone? And if you want to go further than "can it be enjoyed with what I have?" (which depends a lot on your definition of enjoyment, and maybe it currently isn't for you) I'm perhaps not the best correspondent for the complete lowdown on that. My upper-range hardware tends to get used for different things, if only because I just know I'd be not using it to do those things if I started to play DF(/KSP/whatever) on any of them, so I'm deliberately keeping them out-of-bounds for that. 

my hardware knowledge can be classified as "dabbling" so with only the first line of your reply i can be satisfied. Yes, a faster (GHz based) processor Could help me with DF and other stuff

I was just running chrome while creating the world (many tabs mean a lot of ram occupied) and yea, I have a freshly installed SSD

At this moment i can only use a laptop because the old room where i have my main pc needs a good cleaning and I am also considering to move the desktop in another room

[anewaname]

one last question: for life reasons right now i'm playing with a small laptop which has the following specs:

intel celeron N3350 1,10 GHz dual core and 4 GB of ram

I found creating a world with 250 year history and medium size a huge pain so i had to create a smaller size world, same history

starting the game took various minutes

do I have to upgrade my processor?

or is there something i can do to speed up the starting process?

Is the problem that you are looking for a specific type of world, so you wait while generating a world, look at it and reject it, then do it again, until you realize you burned up much of the weekend time you had allocated for playing DF?

If yes, it is possible to have DF create and save a bunch of worlds without needing you to be there, so you can tell it how many worlds you want to create on Friday morning, let it run, then look through the worlds on Friday night. Other players have created scripts for this but if no one offers one up, it would be simple to write. What OS and version?

[Raven]

Is the problem that you are looking for a specific type of world, so you wait while generating a world, look at it and reject it, then do it again, until you realize you burned up much of the weekend time you had allocated for playing DF?

If yes, it is possible to have DF create and save a bunch of worlds without needing you to be there, so you can tell it how many worlds you want to create on Friday morning, let it run, then look through the worlds on Friday night. Other players have created scripts for this but if no one offers one up, it would be simple to write. What OS and version?

nono, usually I am content with any world I create, thing is, it needs lots of time to process the 250 years of history for a medium world so I have to tune down the size

I run win10, latest version i guess, it updates often

it's quite annoying but i'll endure, i guess, not much i can do

[HungThir]

starting the game took various minutes

this kind of sounds like you have "initial save: yes" turned on (either via the clicky button in the LNP, or d_init.txt manually).  with this setting, after you finally embark there will be a few minutes stuck at a blank screen while it writes out the initial save, before you arrive at the wagon.  the longer the history/larger the world, the longer it takes to save the game

normal saves will also take the same amount of time, but you'll at least get the "saving..." overlay and know what's going on.  but the initial save doesn't seem to show the "saving..." overlay, for whatever reason, so if you don't already know to expect it, the long hang time can be disconcerting

[Raven]

this kind of sounds like you have "initial save: yes" turned on (either via the clicky button in the LNP, or d_init.txt manually).  with this setting, after you finally embark there will be a few minutes stuck at a blank screen while it writes out the initial save, before you arrive at the wagon.  the longer the history/larger the world, the longer it takes to save the game

normal saves will also take the same amount of time, but you'll at least get the "saving..." overlay and know what's going on.  but the initial save doesn't seem to show the "saving..." overlay, for whatever reason, so if you don't already know to expect it, the long hang time can be disconcerting

yes i activated that option on purpose because otherwise I risk of random crashes at the beginning of the fortress, losing my progresses AND the location, the embark, a big waste of time

but yea, my processor sucks

[Fleeting Frames]

Saving speed is more down to using SSD and smaller world. The entire world gets loaded into memory at start and then saved to disk on save.

[Raven]

Saving speed is more down to using SSD and smaller world. The entire world gets loaded into memory at start and then saved to disk on save.

I have an ssd but if possible i have a nice large world, there is more FUN in it

but also some hassle in the generation