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[Footkerchief]

Out of all that, DF benefits only from the RAM, and one of the cores. There are no graphics to speak of, and Toady didn't have the skill to start making DF with multicore CPUs in mind, so your "beast of a machine" is no better for running DF than a medium-level office machine with a 3GHz dualcore, four gigs of RAM, and a crappy videocard.

[...]

Well, anyway. DF is vastly different from any commercial game in its requirements. Especially from Crysis.

I think he knows all that.  Performance is still a major problem in the game and it needs to be worked on.

And the fact that flowing water and magma bring DF to a crawl on a small map means that DF doesn't like your PC for some reason. My feeble old desktop manages to keep working at acceptable speeds when flows are involved. I don't remember the exact number, but embarking on a narrow waterfall in a 4x4 area gave me around 30 fps. I gotta check that again btw, it's been long since I ran DF on this rig. Maybe I'm even wrong.

edit: yes, wrong, and in a good way. Just embarked on a 4x4 site with a crossing of three minor rivers, meaning two waterfalls. The large space between the rivers constantly fills up with water, I'm digging channels around to let even more water through (creating Niagara falls, as it were), and I'm still constantly above 85 fps. This is on a rig so outdated it ain't funny - a 2GHz P4, with 512mb RAM and a GF4MX440. Which means that if you suffer terrible lag with flows, something is wrong between DF and your computer.

This isn't a controlled experiment -- he probably also had a high item count on his map, more dwarves, etc.  Nobody has ever produced convincing evidence that DF just "doesn't like their PC," and barring rendering issues related to out-of-date graphics drivers etc., it's very probably the game's fault.

My tip to Asmodeous would be to find the $21.95M that Toady doesn't yet have in his budget and I'm sure he'll find a way to get water flow modeling onto the GPU, or at least a 2nd core.

I can't tell if you're trying to be snarky, but Asmodeous already said he's happy to see performance inprovements on the horizon, so I'm not sure why you're giving him a "tip."  Additionally, it shouldn't be implied that performance is only a marginal concern ("tip to Asmodeous" should really be "tip to the large portion of the community that cares about performance") or that Toady won't work on it without a hefty donation. 

[robolee]

I too think that you're way too pessimistic with those "perdictions" (it's "prediction" btw), hydra test should only be a few hours especially with the new arena mode, cat mouth thing is literally a couple of minutes, the rest are vague and could take a few days each but I don't think any will take much more than a week (though they are pretty vague).

also about adding the top ten suggestions, I've looked at them and think that these should be added to the list of remaining items:

have suitable items able to be hauled in stacks
be able to set automation orders that get carried out with respect to input material and output material (if above x input & below y output, should not be cancelled but suspended and unsuspended automatically)
have materials show as the specific material colour when building something out of them
be able to set job priorities in the labor panel (with a value from 1 to 10)
be able to set graphics to any item in the game as you currently can with entities
be able to flag viens to be mined out (just designates any tiles that are adjacent to the now dug out tile if they are of the same vien)

I'm not really sure what the rest of the top ten entail really, the only reason farming isn't really realistic is because your dwarfs don't exactly eat at realistic intervals though you could add watering fields with a bucket I guess, I haven't looked into the guilds too much to be able to say anything about them, improved mechanics is very vague and improved path finding is basically general optimization of the engine which would be great but is something that would take a long time and research into techniques etc.

[SirHoneyBadger]

It's my (admittedly limited) understanding that just the fact that it's a quad, should help with any performance issues, since you can devote a core entirely to the game. Anything else that's going on on your computer can be handled by the other three. 

It's not optimal, ofcourse, because DF isn't multithreaded/multicore, but at the same speed, 4 cores should still outperform a single core, circumstantially, I would think. This should basically also be consistent with 2 cores, though, dependant ofcourse on what else you've got running.

[Mel_Vixen]

Interresting is that at 8 CPUs and above the computer gets slower if all 8 CPUS use the same RAM. Thats because there are to many Memory-accesses (also race-conditions etc.) at once on the RAM. Thanks to this the Chip-giants work on new Memory-distribution techs like YMO (Your-My-Our).

[SirHoneyBadger]

How much RAM are you using with 8 CPUs, Heph?

[robolee]

I believe he was just stating that adding cores slows down RAM access not stating that he has an 8 core processor

[Mel_Vixen]

Right. I use currently 2 CPUs on my laptop. I was just recitating a article from the CT (Important German Computer Mag) on this.

[Brian]

My 4 year old processor seems happy with my diverted river going into an underground stream I created which is 11-tiles wide.  This stream is an output of my fort which is using water pressure to pipe water up and down 3z levels throughout. My 81 dwarves are happily sparring, and the constant 10+ zombified deer, fox and cougars are running around as well. I think I'm getting around 40 fps at the moment. I've already dug down to the lowest z level and I have thousands of exposed items and thousands of built things.

I don't think that's too bad.

[Martin]

I can't tell if you're trying to be snarky, but Asmodeous already said he's happy to see performance inprovements on the horizon, so I'm not sure why you're giving him a "tip."  Additionally, it shouldn't be implied that performance is only a marginal concern ("tip to Asmodeous" should really be "tip to the large portion of the community that cares about performance") or that Toady won't work on it without a hefty donation.

Regardless of the source of the performance issues, I think it's pointless to compare one of the highest budget games of the last few years to a shareware title with a single programmer. Even if the performance issues were clearly identified, that doesn't mean much up against the limited and constrained time of a single programmer with no real budget. Problems require resources to solve, of one nature or another, and DF has very limited resources. That's just the way of it, and the magnitude of the concern really doesn't mean much unless it's Toady's concern.

My suggestion wasn't that the donation was necessary for Toady to work on it, just that he doesn't have the budget to hire programmers, or CFD experts, or to bring in programmers from the GPU makers or Intel to consult on the best way to optimize the code for their products. Crysis can do all of those things precisely because they have that budget, so they have vastly more means to find the resources to address an issue when one comes up. In the case of DF, we just need to wait for Toady to get to it, to find the inspiration on how best to solve the problem, and so on. Banging against that particular door just isn't terribly productive in this situation and I think the comparison with Crysis is, frankly, unfair.

[IronyOwl]

Even if the performance issues were clearly identified, that doesn't mean much up against the limited and constrained time of a single programmer with no real budget.

I think the comparison with Crysis is, frankly, unfair.

While I tend to be wary of complaints as broad as "make it run faster", if the game's not playable it's not playable, and being free doesn't help that much. That's not to say you should expect century-old forts to run as well as fresh ones, just that "we have no budget" is not a blanket excuse for "there's a problem".

I also don't think anyone was trying to compare DF to Crysis directly. It just got used as an example of how good a particular machine was, which led to a discussion of how comparable the processor/RAM usages were, which led to a discussion of how optimized each game was/could be.


Dunno about Totaku's breakdown, but a month does sound about right. For some reason I get the feeling that the listed stuff will go by pretty fast, but the bug hunting/remembering small details part will take an obscene amount of time.

[James.Denholm]

I quote the 90-10/10-90 rule of programming:

The first ninety percent of the program will take ten percent of the development time, and the other ten percent of the program will consume the other ninety percent of the development time.

See you all in ten years!

[Mel_Vixen]

On the other Hand Toady hasnt to reinvent the Car. For many problems there a good number of well thought solutions that you can have for free (for. example the "list of Algorithms" on Wikipedia) so many many things toady hasnt to do the sience.

Heck toady even ones joked that he wants Quantumphysics in his game.  There is actually a c++library for this: http://www.libquantum.de/

Also we have the Generall discussion Forum and the Suggestion Forum where many Projects and People with knowledge from many fields are posting very good stuff that can help toady with Ideas Algorithms shortscuts and plain ideas. Not to Mention Baugn with his 40d## tech or SirHoneyBadger with his wonderfull healthcare research.

DF is not one Man - its one Man with many people that believe in his idea.

[Thndr]

There is of course always the extremely dwarfly option of collapsing a sufficiently tall slab of native rock into the empty space so that you can just dig stairs down the new pillar...

Edit: Oh, and wasn't it possible to cushion a fall by having someone to fall onto? I'm sure we'll figure out ways to use a mortally injured kitten to get our masons down safely...

I'm starting to think this will be more fun without a sensible way down than with 8-)

Whats stopping you from not using the stairs and doing this anyway? Great way to use cats/kittens. Just got to make sure they don't move and then throw your own dwarves down there.

[James.Denholm]

Cats always land on their feet, right? So the impact should break their legs.

[Thndr]

I quote the 90-10/10-90 rule of programming:

The first ninety percent of the program will take ten percent of the development time, and the other ten percent of the program will consume the other ninety percent of the development time.

See you all in ten years!

That would apply if the rule didn't mean traditional programming teams as well as for a final release. This is an alpha.

So see you in 50 years for Version 1.