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Faster than 40d, no problems

42 (26.1%)

Faster than 40d, problems

72 (44.7%)

No slower than 40d, no problems

14 (8.7%)

No slower than 40d, problems

16 (9.9%)

Slower than 40d, no problems

2 (1.2%)

Slower than 40d, problems

3 (1.9%)

Doesn't work (please explain)

12 (7.5%)

Total Members Voted: 160

[Baughn]

It's not the number of textures, actually.

40d2 and up create  single texture, made up of all the bitmaps used in the game. It does a fairly good job of packing them, but depending on the GPU and drivers this can still produce a texture that's too large for your system.

There's no hard and fast rule for this, but.. for example, if a 16x16 graphics set doesn't work, there's still a good chance an 8x8 or even 12x12 one would. The bitmap count is irrelevant, only the total area matters.

40d did use a single texture per bitmap, which works better in some ways (it obviously did for you); however, it also produces considerably worse performance. A lot worse. Really, horrifically worse.

[Earthquake Damage]

That clarifies things pretty well, actually.  Thanks.

[Grimlocke]

This is a hell of a lot faster then normal, my adventurer travels at least twice as fast! (and got eating by a scorpion twice as fast  )
But it does give me a lot of problems...
-The full windows prompt doesnt work for some reason, the game never appears and only eats processor speed. Took me quite a while to find out that it was this that crashed the game.
-Switching from fullscreen to windowed makes my graphics go crazy (like torn into ribbins and wrongly put back together, screenshot didnt work, that just ended up normal)
-Some weird red flashing at the right side of my screen when skipping intro, guess that doesnt matter.
-Some cursor keys dont respond when pressing multiple ones at a time (cant go right+up for example, just goes right).

If no other errors pop up, Ithis upgrade is more then worth the trouble, so thanks! 
Though I would realy appeciate being able to change my music without having to safe, exit and restart the game without haivng to run windowed all the time.

[johnnybeltz]

First of all, Hi, I'm new to this forum and to df, but not new to roguelikes: I've caught on pretty quivk and learned to navigate the interface well. I've tried 40d11 just last night, but it wasn't much faster than 40d with PARTIAL:0 and SINGLE_BUFFER:YES , as well as G_FPS_CAP:20. I have chosen a site that had moderate mountains and a brook running through it (with one small water fall), and my map was 6x6 tiles in the local view of the selection screen. Altogether, even with my FPS_CAP at 1000, my comp runs it at about 80-110, with only my seven dorfs. I am trying to find the best combination of init.txt tweaks to help me get the most speed for the game without sacrificing weather, temperature, etc.My HP comp has an Intel 1.6GHz processor, has 520mb SDRAM, and runs WinXP SP2. Please help?

[Random832]

There's no hard and fast rule for this, but.. for example, if a 16x16 graphics set doesn't work, there's still a good chance an 8x8 or even 12x12 one would. The bitmap count is irrelevant, only the total area matters.

40d did use a single texture per bitmap, which works better in some ways (it obviously did for you); however, it also produces considerably worse performance. A lot worse. Really, horrifically worse.

Does it filter out regions of the tileset images that aren't used for tiles?

[corvvs]

First of all, Hi, I'm new to this forum and to df, but not new to roguelikes: I've caught on pretty quivk and learned to navigate the interface well. I've tried 40d11 just last night, but it wasn't much faster than 40d with PARTIAL:0 and SINGLE_BUFFER:YES , as well as G_FPS_CAP:20. I have chosen a site that had moderate mountains and a brook running through it (with one small water fall), and my map was 6x6 tiles in the local view of the selection screen. Altogether, even with my FPS_CAP at 1000, my comp runs it at about 80-110, with only my seven dorfs. I am trying to find the best combination of init.txt tweaks to help me get the most speed for the game without sacrificing weather, temperature, etc.My HP comp has an Intel 1.6GHz processor, has 520mb SDRAM, and runs WinXP SP2. Please help?

Honestly, with those computer specs you're probably not going to get too much better than that. DF is quite computationally expensive. That waterfall, for instance, isn't just for show - there's actually stuff being pseudo-physically moved around there. If you dam it, it will flood.  I'd recommend embarking on a 4x4 or 3x3 area, or upgrading your processor (which will require a new motherboard too) and getting at least 2 GB of memory.

My computer (Athlon X2 5000+, 4 GB ram, Geforce 8800 GTX, Linux) will let me up my frame rate on embark to 500+ FPS if I'm crazy enough to, but then my computer starts beeping to let me know it's overheating.

[johnnybeltz]

At least it runs a little faster...

This may be irrelevent, but would you know where to find the core.xml files to dump in /conf for 3Dwarf?

[Earthquake Damage]

Thinking about the texture size issue, it'd probably be better if the game broke an overly large texture into reasonably sized ones.  By that I mean a combination of the 40d and 40d2+ methods.  Once the texture page reaches some size (whatever might be too large...  2048x2048 maybe?), it divides it.  So having too many tile pages (esp. at too high a resolution) may slow the game by forcing it to create an extra texture (or two), but it will still run (no overly large textures) and be faster than 40d (by virtue of not having some 100+ textures).

[Baughn]

I have considered something like that.

Currently, making such a system work reliably would be a lot of extra work; too much to be worthwhile. However, once I have multi-layer tiles coded in, it would be quite reasonable to divide the texture catalog into one texture per layer.

The usefulness of this is.. well, I don't really know how useful it might be yet, but I'll find out, and implement it if it's worthwhile.

What I can't do is divide the catalog along arbitrary seams. If I did that, I'd end up having to reset the GPU texturing unit (too) often, which would drop performance through the floor.

[Earthquake Damage]

However, once I have multi-layer tiles coded in, it would be quite reasonable to divide the texture catalog into one texture per layer.

Assuming there's no hard limit on the number of layers, that sounds good to me.

I hope you manage some solution to my problem.  From a modding perspective, it's never fun to hit hard limits, especially when they weren't there before.

[Andir]

However, once I have multi-layer tiles coded in, it would be quite reasonable to divide the texture catalog into one texture per layer.

Assuming there's no hard limit on the number of layers, that sounds good to me.

I hope you manage some solution to my problem.  From a modding perspective, it's never fun to hit hard limits, especially when they weren't there before.

In computers there's always a hard limit...

[Earthquake Damage]

In computers there's always a hard limit...

I'm referring more to the difference between "you can only make 256 different creatures" and "you can only make as many creatures as your HD and RAM can accommodate".  Or, in this instance, more along the lines of "all your sprite pages mashed together cannot exceed X by X pixels" (where X is probably 2048, 4096, or whatever) versus "you can have as many sprite pages of whatever resolution you want, so long as your HD and RAM can handle them".

[Baughn]

Or, in this case, "You can have as large a texture catalog as you like, so long as your gpu can handle it". Yours /is/ a bit old, plus it's not an nvidia card - ati's opengl support has sucked for a decade.

[Earthquake Damage]

Touché.

I wasn't aware ATI had particularly poor OpenGL support, though.  Sucks to be me, then.

[Geekman]

Just out of curiosity, i tried this linux port (debian lenny ) and quickly found a problem : my french keyboard isn't properly recognized. I simply can't go down a layer except by using Shift+ numpad 5.
> ( shift +< ) works as does ? ( because it's "shift + , ",  which on an QWERTY keyboard must be >, i guess ) but < or . ( shift + ; ) don't.
i think some mean to easly edit keyboard shortcuts should be added.