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[Fleeting Frames]

Could you please draw me a map to that? Can't see it.

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[anewaname]

Could you please draw me a map to that? Can't see it.

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Just not possible, it doesn't exist... So, it is Armor and Weapon stockpiles that can use the Usable/Unusable flag to sort items by medium/large size and not Finished Goods.

[SpoCk0nd0pe]

The outstanding nr 1 reason I stopped playing: Poor performance. Dying the fps death is the most unfun thing in DF. And there is no substantial improvement in sight as Toady doesn‘t even recognize the problem.

Secondly some balance issues. How you could feed your entire population with just a couple of farm squares, how you could get a legendary weaponsmith in a few months while the rest of the world is stuck with items of mediocre quality.

[zilpin]

The outstanding nr 1 reason I stopped playing: Poor performance. Dying the fps death is the most unfun thing in DF. And there is no substantial improvement in sight as Toady doesn‘t even recognize the problem.

Secondly some balance issues. How you could feed your entire population with just a couple of farm squares, how you could get a legendary weaponsmith in a few months while the rest of the world is stuck with items of mediocre quality.

WARNING!  THIS POST RATED 'D'!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

#1) Fps death is only a problem if you have a processor less than 1THz or less.  Or are you one of those maroons who wastes your money on multithreading 8-core 4GHz computers?  Hello, the 20th century called and wants that relic back.

#2) So you think DF is too easy?  No problem, Toady will make it more difficult next release.  (He almost always does).

WARNING!  THIS POST RATED 'D'!

[Telgin]

It isn't that Toady doesn't recognized that FPS death is a problem, it's that he has limited time to spend on the game and chooses to work on new features and bugs that affect the game at all stages and not just later in a game.  Not to mention the ever present trade off between optimizing something now or replacing it with a better system down the road that in turn has to be optimized.

It doesn't change the reality of FPS death, of course, but it's not like Toady doesn't care about game performance.

No arguments on the balance issues though, except that farming, too, is probably intended to be redone in a much more deep fashion in the future, which will very likely make it require a much more realistic amount of space.

Hmm, I guess that's kind of a running and general problem with DF: since everything is up for replacement or improvement in the future, parts tend to stay in a suboptimal state for years.

[Oskar636PL]

I really despise how inconsistent the menus are. I haven't played the game for more than a month so I don't have great memory about it but I'm sure of it.
Some menus you select with one keys and on other with others, sometimes you use the arrows to move and sometimes +-. I understand that the menu rework is the last thing on his list, but come ON! At least make the hardcoded keybindings consistent (by hardcoded I mean that one keybind is assigned to many menus so even rebinding doesn't work because you'll still need two different keys). I also despise the inconsistency with filtering. The general stock button needs at least filtering for categories of stuff, I hate going through all categories of items in the fortress just to see if I still have that one thing/book.
He really should do something about the books too, the books are really not worth the 1-2 minutes wait time on the world artifacts screen, and the worst part is sometimes a world will have like an artifact steel breastplate and that is just too goood to pass.

[athenalras]

The eventual FPS death. There are some tricks to avoiding this but generally, it requires a small, efficient fortress. And even then, fps death is not guaranteed.

I know some people play fortress mode for the novelty of just creating some zany dwarf tricks but I tend to go for the sustainable route; something I can always just go back to and just enjoy the world simulation Toady created.

In a way, I appreciate the pseudo-god side of this game moreso than the way I can force creatures to interact with their environment via weather, temperature or just throwing them off some heights.

So yeah: the eventual FPS death is a huge bummer for me and the fact that Toady is just blowing up the game with more and more complex simulations makes me a bit sad since eventually, even the current "sustainable" route will eventually become like any other fortress that only lasts a few years and then grinds to a halt.

[malvado]

The eventual FPS death. There are some tricks to avoiding this but generally, it requires a small, efficient fortress. And even then, fps death is not guaranteed.

I know some people play fortress mode for the novelty of just creating some zany dwarf tricks but I tend to go for the sustainable route; something I can always just go back to and just enjoy the world simulation Toady created.

In a way, I appreciate the pseudo-god side of this game moreso than the way I can force creatures to interact with their environment via weather, temperature or just throwing them off some heights.

So yeah: the eventual FPS death is a huge bummer for me and the fact that Toady is just blowing up the game with more and more complex simulations makes me a bit sad since eventually, even the current "sustainable" route will eventually become like any other fortress that only lasts a few years and then grinds to a halt.

Thats basically why I would prefer Toady using a year or two or even more to do improvements in performance through using more cpu ( more cores, better ways of handling the current data, improvements to database handlings ) and even though I have heard it before here, I personally think its now the best way to continue making the game enjoyable for everyone.
Yes, the things Toady adds are really precious, there's a lot of good changes, but the game is also slowing down making it unplayable on some setups after you get past certain aspects of the game, like population count, size of embark + time passed , animals and so much more...
Personally I've more or less stopped spending time in this forum and stopped the game, but it's still something I care about and wishes that it could evolve into something even better for everyone...

[Shonai_Dweller]

Except that, no, the game isn't slowing down.
Hasn't since the massive rewrite which switched on the world several years ago. If anything, despite all the additional mechanics added since then, it's faster. That's due to a few optimization tweaks Toady made despite more myths which say he doesn't do any.

[Dorsidwarf]

I guess it often feels like the game gets slower and slower during a "fast" update cycle, but I imagine thats more due to the fact that as we play our forts they slow down more and more (as they always have) and it feels related.

Also as Toady has said, hes not gonna take a sizeable time out to do performance things unless he really really has to for some reason. He has no interest in refactoring systems some of which he'll have to turn around and immediately rewrite again for the many huge content systems still to come.

[malvado]

Except that, no, the game isn't slowing down.
Hasn't since the massive rewrite which switched on the world several years ago. If anything, despite all the additional mechanics added since then, it's faster. That's due to a few optimization tweaks Toady made despite more myths which say he doesn't do any.

Well, in that case the game should be more playable here :
5 years ago : 150 dwarves , around 60 to 80 fps.  More things that are being used such as lava power generators, lava pumps from 80 leves bellow and some other things while building more of the fortress.
1 Year ago : 150 dwarves , around 5 to 6 fps. Less things being done, no lava power generators, no lava pumps from 80 levels bellow active and so on.

Same cpu ( yes, getting an upgrade soon ) same memory 16Gb , same speeds. It's an FX 8350 bought in 2013.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Except that, no, the game isn't slowing down.
Hasn't since the massive rewrite which switched on the world several years ago. If anything, despite all the additional mechanics added since then, it's faster. That's due to a few optimization tweaks Toady made despite more myths which say he doesn't do any.

Well, in that case the game should be more playable here :
5 years ago : 150 dwarves , around 60 to 80 fps.  More things that are being used such as lava power generators, lava pumps from 80 leves bellow and some other things while building more of the fortress.
1 Year ago : 150 dwarves , around 5 to 6 fps. Less things being done, no lava power generators, no lava pumps from 80 levels bellow active and so on.

Same cpu ( yes, getting an upgrade soon ) same memory 16Gb , same speeds. It's an FX 8350 bought in 2013.

World activation was 2014...

[Dorsidwarf]

I'm impressed at the thought of someone getting 80fps with 150 dwarves and an 80-level magma pump stack in a mature fort active in any version, especially on 2013 hardware that almost seems to beg belief

[Telgin]

I was going to suggest trying to use the same fort in both an old version of DF and the current version, but realized that probably isn't a fair comparison either since only newly generated worlds will have some features that chew up background time.  Sadly, there probably isn't any strictly accurate way to compare performance of different versions of the game.

[Saiko Kila]

I don't know if it happens to anyone else (I have a rare combination of hardware and operating system), but when I save the game and load, it is usually about 50% slower. This is not a big issue - I just exit the game after save, and run again if I want it to be speedy enough. But this could skew the results if I wanted to make some benchmarks, and I write it as a warning to other people benchmarking.