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[Temrek]

We all know that when a lot of things happen in DF, the gameplay slows. But should it not be possible to adjust game speed after FPS? So if 100 FPS is normal, a miner will dig twice as fast at 50 FPS. This could apply to everything, from task length to moment speed.

[Align]

The game already plays slower at lower framerates...

[Deon]

It looks like you don't get what Temrek said.
He meant <FPS => >speed. But I think that a lot of new operations caused by new calcutalions of order of movement/pathing with all new speeds will further decrease framerate. Also note that it won't affect time/date as well, so the players with bad FPS will have much more actions during a year thus making the game much easier (more ways to get new crafts before caravan arrives, faster training for all skills and military too, thus making it much easier to dispatch sieges etc.). This would lead to people asking toady for a way to decrease fps instead of trying to increase it... x_x

[Align]

Why would lower FPS mean higher speed? Your FPS goes down because your computer is busy calculating everything that's going on and each frame takes longer to make, thus there being fewer per second.

[Granite26]

We all know that when a lot of things happen in DF, the gameplay slows. But should it not be possible to adjust game speed after FPS? So if 100 FPS is normal, a miner will dig twice as fast at 50 FPS. This could apply to everything, from task length to moment speed.

FPS in this case isn't really display frames per second, it's game turns per second.  In Doom or Crysis or whatever, the big CPU hog is graphics.  It knows where everything is, it just takes a way to figure out how to show it from your point of view.  Figuring out how to display it is the bottleneck that slows everything else down.

DF is different.  There's no point of view, no graphics, really, so drawing things is fast and easy.  The bottleneck is figuring out what thousands of characters (Dwarves, goblins, animals, etc) are doing, checking each 1/7 of water to figure out what it's doing, etc. 

If you make the dwarves faster, it will be doing those calculations more often, which means slowing the game down even more.  That will slow the game right back down to where it was because the bottleneck is in the calculations you want to do more often.

[Mikademus]

I think the OP's　suggerstion  is fantastic: let's keep DF independent of any FPS game play aspects.

"Urist Hammerdabbler has completed BFG9000BC, the bad-ass crossbow. It menaces with spikes of massive energy."

[Baneslave]

I think the OP's　suggerstion  is fantastic: let's keep DF independent of any FPS game play aspects.

You are joking, right? Uh, atleast put a smiley next time, ok?

[qwertyuiopas]

Isn't there already an option for the graphical FPS as well as one for the actual turns per second?

Aren't they already in the init settings?

[Align]

Only for displaying them.

[Soadreqm]

I think the OP's　suggerstion  is fantastic: let's keep DF independent of any FPS game play aspects.

You are joking, right? Uh, atleast put a smiley next time, ok?

I believe that was a witty play on words regarding the various ways to interpret the acronym "FPS". The one presumably intended by the original poster is "Frames Per Second". Another popular one is "First-Person Shooter".

[Virex]

His idea seems to be to compensate for lower FPS by making everything faster. So if your FPS is cut in half, the day only takes half as much frames, dwarfs move double distance per frame, jobs require only half the time et cetera. The net effect would be that the time something takes in seconds remains roughly constant. The only problem I can see is that this requires a lot of extra calculations to adjust the speed, so in effect the FPS may drop a bit more then normal (which gets fixed by speeding everything up) and that some things might become less acuarate (I'm mainly thinking Fluid Mechanics here).

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I assumed he meant that if a timer on a dwarf's job is 12 ticks, and your FPS is the baseline of 100, the dwarf will complete the task in 12 ticks. But if your FPS is 50 (half as fast), your dwarf will complete the task in 6 ticks (twice as fast). If your FPS were at -10%, your jobs would be done in 10% fewer ticks.

This way, it would take exactly the same amount of player time to do a task, whether your FPS were 100 or 10. Of course, in cases where tasks take only one tick, you wouldn't see much difference. So by the time your legendary dwarves were churning out crafts in just a couple ticks, there wouldn't be much of a realtime savings.

And year length would of course be measured in ticks, so if your FPS were 10 you'd effectively be getting 10x as much done in that year.
But what if year length was affected by FPS as well, such that if your FPS were 20 then 5 ticks would be added to the clock for every tick of game time that passed.

It would screw things up royally. But it would be an interesting solution for people who wanted to run full embark maps with 1000 dwarves.

[Granite26]

Man, I've got to try that in Crysis... I'll handle the basic graphic unplayability of it by making everybody run faster.  We'll never have FPS problems in any game ever again.

/sarcasm

I'm sorry I can't find the correct words to describe why this doesn't work.  I'm really trying

[Jude]

I think the OP's　suggerstion  is fantastic: let's keep DF independent of any FPS game play aspects.

You are joking, right? Uh, atleast put a smiley next time, ok?

When it's blatantly obvious there's no need for smileys

[Makrond]

While I think it's still not a good idea, some of you seem to have misinterpreted the OP...

(Or not, but this is how I interpreted the idea)

It's not a case of making tasks take fewer ticks, but more a case of introducing 'frame-skip'.

This would be simple at a limit of 100 FPS, because with frame-skip, if you're running at 50 FPS, the game would 'skip' every second frame, allowing the game to look like it's running at normal speed, if in a somewhat jerky manner. If you were running at 1 FPS, the game would display 1 frame, skip the other 99, then display another frame. True, this would result in 'teleporting' dwarves, but hey, you save a bit of time.

After a while it would get annoying, as all frame-skip does, but maybe if you consistently get 60 FPS or so, it would be useful as an optional feature.