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[Srial]

I'm loving my current fort, but it's fps is dropping to 15 or so and it's becoming painful to play.   I realized I had 8000 or so stone sitting around as an after product of my miners work.   I decided to implement many of the ideas I've seen for improving fps.   So I did the following:

1) I built a huge structure using up 2000 raw stone.  Fps before 15:  fps after 15.    I look in the stocks menu and low and behold it claims I have just as much stone sitting around before as after.  Well sure, the stone is still there.  It's just in a wall.

2) I built stone blocks putting 8 masons to work full time with a stockpile just outside the workshop constantly filled with cheap stone.  I built about 800 blocks. Fps before 15:  Fps after 15.  I have the same number of items in the game, so I don't understand how this was supposed to help me out.  I guess I get better value walls built on my glacial speed fortress.  Yippee?

3) I said screw it and atom smashed it.  I picked out 2000 or so rocks of my now 5k stone stocks item.  I waited forever while my dwarves lugged 2000 stone to my newly built drawbridge.  Once they were done I pulled the lever.  Fps before 15:  fps after 13:   Yes, it actually got worse.


Seriously, I'm beginning to think these 'fps improvement' ideas are just old wive's tales people who haven't tried them out quote.   

Can anyone please elaborate on how these fs improvements for using up stone really work in their experience?   Do any of these really work?   

Is there really any rescue for a. now 13,  low fps fort?   

[Dorten]

Shut up and be happy with your superfast fort.

Seriously.

[Srial]

Seriously.  You're a helper.

[lanceleoghauni]

you do realize that 12-14 FPS is optimum for the human eye right?

Ignore me.

[Jimmy]

I keep my stone count <1000 and I get 70ish fps, so it's likely there's something else going on in your fort. Bad pathing design, fluid movement, temperature calculations, pet lag etc.

Though we're all waiting for Toady to do something about it. If it gets any worse it's really too much.

[UmbrageOfSnow]

I've gotten down to 8 FPS with barely a stone to be found on my map.  So yeah, I wonder if the importance of stones is greatly exaggerated as well.  (TEMP/WEATHER OFF, all but a few animals caged)

And seriously, I see people whining all the time about FPS as "low" as 30 around here, why all the sudden hate on a guy who thinks 15 is low (it is).  I think it's playable as long as you keep in the double digits, but yeah real helpful first two guys.

Also, I had a fort recently where designating high/low volume areas as described in some of these threads actually hurt my FPS significantly.  I attribute this to that being an odd fortress layout, but nothing seemed better than what it was with only minimal traffic zoning.  A few small additions didn't hurt it any, but low-trafficing or restricting everything that wasn't a major (3-wide) hall/stair just seemed to slow things down.  But I figure that was a "sweet-spot" of bad fortress layout, honestly.

Anyway, if anyone has SCIENCE to prove the stones thing, I'm interested also.

[LemonFrosted]

you do realize that 12-14 FPS is optimum for the human eye right?

Except 12-14 FPS in this regard doesn't refer to refresh rate of the screen, but refresh rate of the game itself.

Also 14 FPS is waaaaaaaaay too low a refresh rate for me. Anything lower than 20 (double field) strobes visibly. For single-field I see strobing below 60.

I have no honest idea what your rubric is. In North America we use 24 fps (double field, meaning effective 48) for motion picture, and a fraction under 30 for television. Most of Europe uses 25/50. Your computer monitor probably doesn't go below 60. I dunno, are you trying to say that the speed that dwarves move across your screen at 12-14 FPS is optimal? 'cus I really prefer when I'm in the 25-50 range.

[forsaken1111]

Hell, I try to maintain 75+ because they crawl around so SLOW at low FPS

[Jimmy]

Extensive testing was done by people working on megaprojects in 40d to determine the causes of FPS lag. Efforts such as Undergrotto gave us a pretty good indication of the effect of large item counts, especially stone. If you doubt the validity of the community knowledge feel free to run tests yourself, but I'm taking it on good faith from the experts in megaprojects.

[forsaken1111]

It should be noted that projects like undergrotto dealt with 15-20 times the amount of stone the OP here tested with. Probably more.

[LemonFrosted]

Also Undergrotto vaporized the excess stone. It stands to reason that if making the stone into something is better than leaving it laying around then vaporizing it is even better than that.

[Internet Kraken]

Wouldn't Toady have gone out of his way to make sure excess amounts of stone don't cause to much lag? Pretty much every fort inevitably unearths more stone than he needs, so having it be a drain on FPS seems like an obvious problem.

[Jimmy]

Question is whether Toady's gone out of his way YET. Answer's probably no. We're working towards a bug free, stable release before FPS gets addressed, since it's mostly just code optimization, not feature addition.

[warwizard]

I just leave the FPS counter off. If I do not see it I do not get warning about ambushes or kobolds, so they are more of a surprise. Things get done when they get done.

 I agree the stone bit is not correct, I've had over 100,000 stone in stock on some forts and did not notice speed issues. I wonder if atom smashing isn't just hiding the objects if the FPS got worse.

[UmbrageOfSnow]

Yeah, I mean Undergrotto and what not are not your typical fort.  Stands to reason that millions of stone matter more than thousands.  So how come everyone always gives advice along the lines of "oh, if you use those 500 stone, your FPS will be much better."?  Has any testing been done on small-scale (compared to, say, Undergrotto) type effects?