Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kode527]

I build an fortress, with little over 100 dwarfes and quess what? FPS < 25, which is low. I was using 3x3 embark, but the framerate dropped from 250 to 25 during the first few years. So before I start a new fortress, I want to know what things I need to consider when building a big fucking fortress, to maximize the fps. I won't use pop cap.
Things I have been thinking:
-Do the bloods, splatters etc. lower the fps? Like having 100 splatters of blood on each tile? Since I can't do almost anything to them.
-I got an 1 tile staircase to the lower parts of the fortress. Did it become more difficult for an dwarf to find a path and that way lower the fps?.
-Digging down something like 50+ tiles. Probably the fps drops when I reveal more hidden tiles?
-River? Should I have one? Is it better to make water pump powered waterwheels than have a river? Or just use wind without any water on the map?
-How about stones? Just dumping them to a garbage zone ok?

So I'm just looking for tips how to make the game run smoother in bigger fortresses.
My processor is some amd64 x2 3,5Ghz btw.

[rdwulfe]

One thing I did was edit clothing out of the raws. First, I got tired of goblins running in and dumping craptons of garbage on me (which I can produce more of anyway, so having a ton of garbage from Gobbos never appealed to me, especially silk crap).

Another is to make sure you don't have too many animals. While the meat industry is now a VERY viable (and probably too productive) source of food, having tons of puppies and horses run all over your fort drains the FPS as quickly as more dwarves, with much less return.

I edited all crap clothing out, from all races, to keep things 'level'... and noticed a good 50% increase in FPS. I normally get 20 or so FPS with 100 dwarves, and I'm at 50-70, when there's no merchants. The more junk on your map, the slower you'll run. I advise an atom smasher to get rid of garbage, also, and you'll have to be on top of your vermin piles.

Hmn, what else?

Not sure, I'll add more later if I think of it.

[codepage9]

There are a ton of different posts on this. You should be asking in the Gameplay Questions forum I believe http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?board=7.0

What I've found is this:
Make sure to set Partial Print to YES
Turn off weather and temperature
Dumping stones doesn't work, instead turn them into roads/floors/walls, hide the stone, or use an atomic smasher (stockpile the rocks under a rising bridge and bring it down on the stone.
Running water will slow you down, so don't try making any rivers.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Turn your graphical FPS cap down from 50 (the default) to something like 5 (whereupon my forts stop lagging so badly).

[Emordnys]

Interesting, I'm going to try these.

I didn't think of a lot of these, and I just modded the [SPEED:] to something like 100-400 so that everything moved faster at the same FPS.

[Satarus]

That always seemed a bit like cheating.  Dwarves get more jobs done in less in-game time and can attack more times than the goblins or other enemies.  I simply designed my forts so halls are plenty wide for less path recalculations when dwarves run into each other.  I also atom smash the crap stone I have so less items to account for.  I also modded out most of the clothing in sentient races so they won't drop it when they die.  Also makes cleanup a lot easier.  Animals get caged or chained so they don't keep pathfinding too.

[darkflagrance]

I've heard that apparently item lag comes from the game having to iterate every item in the game over each frame. Therefore, I am unsure how useful building stone into walls or floor can be. Certainly, I've noticed that my megaconstruction forts where I do nothing other than mine out massive amounts of stone and incorporate all of it into walls tend to die fps deaths anyway.

Atomsmashing stone (or evaporating it with modding) appear to be better solutions.

Note: I've got a decent 48 year-old fort that still gets ~48 fps thanks to these.

[Shiv]

So just 'h'iding stone will count as getting rid of it?  I figured since it was still there the game would still calculate it and the only way to benefit your FPS in relation to stone was to atom smash it. 

[Grumman]

Have a lottery to drop random unproductive dwarves into the atom smasher, for the good of the fortress.

[darkflagrance]

So just 'h'iding stone will count as getting rid of it?  I figured since it was still there the game would still calculate it and the only way to benefit your FPS in relation to stone was to atom smash it.

No, the game still keeps track and "iterates" the hidden stone. It's not merely for graphical purposes, but for "keeping track in the game" purposes. I'm neither a programmer nor memory hacker, so this is only my vague idea as to how it works.

[Hyndis]

Temperature is the biggest change you can make. Turn it off.

Also make sure there are no flowing liquids. Flows will kill your FPS.

Keep your animal population in control. Build a whole bunch of butchering and tanning workshops and get your farmers busy cleaning out the herd. You can always set up traps underground to farm the local wildlife as it comes onto the map. Weapon traps with steel discs in them work very well to automate hunting. Make chokepoints around the edges of the caverns as close to the edge as possible, using mining or masonry to narrow it. Put disc traps in the chokepoints. When animals spawn on the edge of the map they'll wander right into your traps, and then haulers will haul away the corpse to be butchered.

Build wide hallways. Major traffic paths should be 4 tiles wide, depending on traffic. Wider the better.

[Urist McDepravity]

Yesterday i started new fort to check some things. Wasn't planning to actually play it, but it was growing fast and nice. Got 80 dorfs before end of 2nd year, and, to my surprise, FPS was still at 100, even when all 80 dorfs were dumping stone.
Objects, flows and walkable space hurt FPS more than dorfs themself, i believe.

[Lordinquisitor]

Turn your graphical FPS cap down from 50 (the default) to something like 5 (whereupon my forts stop lagging so badly).

This is the most efficient thing you can do- But you should set it to 10. Lower, and the game looks laggy. (Even though it isn`t..)

[Hyndis]

Turn your graphical FPS cap down from 50 (the default) to something like 5 (whereupon my forts stop lagging so badly).

This is the most efficient thing you can do- But you should set it to 10. Lower, and the game looks laggy. (Even though it isn`t..)

If the GPS is too low you will get dwarves who move faster than the display is updated, and so it looks like everyone is teleporting around.

[Kode527]

Thanks.
- I play mostly unmodded DF so I'm not going to turn temperature off since I think it would be more or less cheating.
- I've been using low graphics FPS already, with an accelerator, so that doesn't have an effect on FPS.
- I used animal pop control too in my previous fortress.
- Stones, food, other crap items, I had like thousands of them in stockpiles last time. Probably should store just the amount I actually need.
- I'll need no water at all. Magma's the way to go
- I'll make wider hallways and use fewer z-levels in the actual fortress.
-Also, atomsmahsing items sounds good, how does it actually work? Can I atomsmash the forbidden items in garbage zone that's just under the smasher?

Seems like thats all I can do without ruining all the fun in DF.

Btw, is there a way to get rid of the blood covering the fucking everything!? I have heard something about flooding the fortress to get rid of it, but it's bad since my dwarves would drown.