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Author Topic: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting  (Read 473410 times)

zagibu

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #660 on: December 10, 2012, 10:12:34 pm »

seeing multithreading as 11th in the voting list made me wish more people knew what it is.
MULTICORE SUPPORT MAN. YAYUS.

I think the reason it doesn't get more votes is because it would require a massive overhaul of the game to put in, and during that time Toady couldn't really do anything else. So the overall development would stall for a very long time without anything new being added. Sure, performance would improve, but that's about it.

Personally, I'd rather have more features and less bugs than better performance, and I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

Same. 

Also, some technical stuff: Concurrency is difficult and bug-prone, it would require different code for each supported OS, and even modern games still only run two or three threads: Device I/O (network, hard drive, whatever), Game Logic, and Graphics.  Offloading the entire game logic to a different thread would be negligibly helpful in this case, and even if the game logic were spread out into multiple threads (like one for pathing, one for fluid simulation, and one for everything else for instance) all the game logic threads would still have to wait on the slow one to finish before updating the state of the game.  tl;dr: Even if pathfinding and fluid simulation were offloaded, the rest of the game would still have to wait for it to before finish a "tick" of the game could happen.  It would be of minimal benefit for colossal effort.

I think the idea is more that a problem is split up in subproblems that are then calculated in different threads. Pathing is a good example. Each path could be forked into an own thread, which would greatly increase the speed of producing a pathing result for the next game tick. But you are right, it is not easy to do, and if pathing isn't the bottleneck, it will actually hurt more than help, because the thread-switching of course means an additional overhead.

The game should be profiled to identify the problematic code locations, then these should be improved. Toady is probably a very good programmer, but I'm quite sure that there is still potential for performance improvements. Maybe, for some of the code, multi-threading will be the solution. Maybe not.
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King Mir

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #661 on: December 12, 2012, 01:39:02 am »

At 100fps, it's hard to imagine may computations that would be sped up enough to overcome the overhead of passing information around between threads that frequently. A lower fps goal wouldn't be much better.

You could potentially. speed up things that don't have to happen every tick though. Provided that those things don't need the most recent information.

Taren

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #662 on: December 17, 2012, 07:54:42 am »

Are we allowed to post in old suggestion threads that are on the voting list? For ideas or to show support for them? Especially those that are higher up, otherwise can we reopen a topic ourselves? If we had something they might of missed or a workaround, or just anything to offer.
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Draco18s

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #663 on: December 17, 2012, 08:43:39 am »

Are we allowed to post in old suggestion threads that are on the voting list? For ideas or to show support for them? Especially those that are higher up, otherwise can we reopen a topic ourselves? If we had something they might of missed or a workaround, or just anything to offer.

Please do.  Try to add something more than "I like this" however.
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Wastedlabor

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Draco18s

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #665 on: January 11, 2013, 09:01:30 am »

Shameless plug for my favorite underrated ones:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php#vote40
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php#vote107
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php#vote162

1) There are no anchor tags on that page, so those three links are functionally identical
2) Because things are sorted by popularity as soon as the order changes, your numbers are wrong
3) Congradulations* on voting for the one item that has no business being in that list as anything other than a joke ("Improve Everything").

*Intentional misspelling.
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Wastedlabor

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #666 on: January 11, 2013, 12:33:06 pm »

wat

Code: [Select]
<a name="vote40" href="http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=26985.0">Automated zones of treecutting and plant gathering</a>
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Draco18s

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #667 on: January 11, 2013, 01:09:01 pm »

wat

Code: [Select]
<a name="vote40" href="http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=26985.0">Automated zones of treecutting and plant gathering</a>

Code: [Select]
<tr>
<td><b>137.</b> (5)</td>
<td><a  href="http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=26985.0">Automated zones of treecutting and plant gathering</a></td>
</tr>
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Mesa

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #668 on: February 16, 2013, 11:05:30 am »

Apparently, I am a total dummy - how to add suggestions to the list? :/
Never been using ESV (great acronym) before, so...
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Draco18s

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #669 on: February 16, 2013, 12:36:22 pm »

Apparently, I am a total dummy - how to add suggestions to the list? :/
Never been using ESV (great acronym) before, so...

Scroll to the bottom.
Drop down box.
Select "create new"
Click "go"
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Thundercraft

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #670 on: February 16, 2013, 04:30:39 pm »

seeing multithreading as 11th in the voting list made me wish more people knew what it is.
MULTICORE SUPPORT MAN. YAYUS.

I think the reason it doesn't get more votes is because it would require a massive overhaul of the game to put in, and during that time Toady couldn't really do anything else. So the overall development would stall for a very long time without anything new being added. Sure, performance would improve, but that's about it.

Personally, I'd rather have more features and less bugs than better performance, and I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

[snip]...Concurrency is difficult and bug-prone, it would require different code for each supported OS, and even modern games still only run two or three threads: Device I/O (network, hard drive, whatever), Game Logic, and Graphics.  Offloading the entire game logic to a different thread would be negligibly helpful in this case, and even if the game logic were spread out into multiple threads (like one for pathing, one for fluid simulation, and one for everything else for instance) all the game logic threads would still have to wait on the slow one to finish before updating the state of the game...

I think the idea is more that a problem is split up in subproblems that are then calculated in different threads. Pathing is a good example. Each path could be forked into an own thread, which would greatly increase the speed of producing a pathing result for the next game tick. But you are right, it is not easy to do, and if pathing isn't the bottleneck, it will actually hurt more than help, because the thread-switching of course means an additional overhead.

The game should be profiled to identify the problematic code locations, then these should be improved. Toady is probably a very good programmer, but I'm quite sure that there is still potential for performance improvements. Maybe, for some of the code, multi-threading will be the solution. Maybe not.

[Emphasis mine] THIS! More than shiny new features, new creatures, multithreading, or even bug fixes, that's what I want to see. As for identifying problem areas, there's a list of player suggestions for improving performance in the Maximizing framerate article on the wiki. Of these, pathfinding is probably the biggest culprit - even though it often does not look like it. (See the research done on the Undump Engine and Micha's fort for evidence that the pathing involved in hauling and stockpiles is the real problem with items, not the sheer quantity.)

Multithreading sounds nice. But it would be a lot of work and I think the improvement would be far less than the expectations. Anyway, multithreading systems already take care of their OS and other background tasks while DF gets a separate thread. And if you run Dwarf Therapist, Stonesense, or other tools, there's also that...

With each release I hold out hope that Toady does something - anything - to improve performance. Granted, rather recently there was some progress in that direction. (Specifically: A memory issue, some contaminant issues, and fixing that old bug on clothing ownership.) But considering how each major release adds tons of new stuff that the game has to do and keep track of, it's not nearly enough.

Consider the most recent poll on the Phoebus' Graphic Set thread. It asks "What are your most common reasons for losing a fort?" The most common answer, by far, is "FPS Death"!

I'm pretty confident that the reason FPS death does not get more attention is because players have gotten used to starting over with reclaiming or a new embark and many don't consider that a big deal. And many forts do not last long enough for FPS decay to matter much. Losing may be fun, but there's no question that FPS death is a lame way to lose!

Also, consider the discussion on the FPS issue on slow PCs: Worse than before thread. Opinions are divided, but the majority seem to suggest that the 0.34 versions are about as slow as 0.31 versions (even taking aforementioned improvements into account). And in the 2 years or so since 0.31, many players have upgraded to newer hardware. With such upgrades they should see a noticeable improvement... even though many do not.

It also mentions that, in terms of hardware upgrades, RAM latency is the biggest bottleneck in DF performance.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2013, 04:34:03 pm by Thundercraft »
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Flesh Render

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #671 on: February 17, 2013, 03:05:27 am »

What is about dwarf cavalry? :3
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Draco18s

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #672 on: February 17, 2013, 10:44:58 am »

What is about dwarf cavalry? :3

Dwarves don't ride horses, they're too tall and the dwarves tend to fall off.
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Thundercraft

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #673 on: February 17, 2013, 12:34:14 pm »

Bah! >:( There's no logical reason why dwarves can't use an animal as a mount. All they need is a good saddle.  :P It's bad enough that dwarves (or Adventure Mode) can't use pack animals to carry stuff like caravans.

Invaders can use all sorts of critters as mounts, even things like giant cave spiders, cave crocodiles, and voracious cave crawlers. Heck, the cave crocodiles can still go amphibious and drown the goblin riders! ::)

Seriously, though, players have been waiting for the ability of dwarves to use mounts since forever. There's something dwarvenly epic about dwarves riding into battle on their war bears!
« Last Edit: February 21, 2013, 11:57:48 pm by Thundercraft »
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10ebbor10

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #674 on: February 17, 2013, 04:12:25 pm »

I'd think we'd first need to give the ability for riders to control their mounts before implementing dwarven mounts.

((It wouldn't be very interesting if your war bear cavalerie suddenly decides to hang out in the meeting hall, wouldn't it))
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