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[Blurk]

Usually when i get a collapse underground on embark it means there is an upright spoiler somewhere down there, but that shouldn't hurt FPS that much.
it might indeed be a cavern being drained into another.
you could try using reveal to see what it is?

[Max White]

You know all those cats you butchered? Well they all turn into ghosts, doomed to wander the planes, and now that you have generated that plane, the path finding of those invisiable ghost cats is killing your fps. Its karma!

[thebigJ_A]

Oh, ok. So where do I download the Excorcism utility?

[rephikul]

Ya the list of deceased being on my unit list is getting ridiculous with about 900 animals butchered yearly.

[thebigJ_A]

So I finally broke down and turned off temperature. This got me up to ~85 at embark. That's acceptable, but it kills me to turn off a feature like that.

Besides, it's only a fix during non-winter months (I absolutely must have ice in winter) and until I strike magma (what's the point of magma if there's no heat?).

[helf]

Use DTaskManager I linked to earlier and it lets you select anything you want. I usually click the first process, scroll to the bottom, hold shift, select the last item, then find the dwarf fortress process if ive already launched it, hold control, deselect it and then change the affinity of all the other processes all at once. Its pretty quick and easy.

[Larry421]

Something is definitely wrong. I have an almost identical machine (Athlon X2, 2.1Ghz, 2G RAM) and I get 100fps at embark (3x3) easily.
Have you tried modifying your world_gen to only have 1 cavern layer? You get less flavour in underground critters but can end up with 20-40z instead of 150.
Also, please tell me you're not running Vista...

[thebigJ_A]

I am, in fact, running Vista. Why would that have an impact? Should I try running in compatibility mode or something?

I know something is wrong with my comp, it has to be. Which is why I hate having to turn of parts of the game to get it to run satisfactorily. But what could it be?

One thing I'm noticing is that, while I have the game running, my CPU usage, according to process explorer, rarely goes above 50% even when I don't have its affinity set to one core. This might not mean anything, though. I don't know enough about PCs.

[lolghurt]

Uhh, no, stairs are significantly more fps-efficient than ramps, and faster for dwarves to boot.

If you're using a recent version, open up init.txt and change [PRINT_MODE:2D] to [PRINT_MODE:STANDARD]. This should give you a rather large fps boost. Other than that, try this thread for extra tips.

However, on some computers, [PRINT_MODE:STANDARD] with a tileset will cause the game to not show the right half of the game.

[Larry421]

I am, in fact, running Vista. Why would that have an impact? Should I try running in compatibility mode or something?

I know something is wrong with my comp, it has to be. Which is why I hate having to turn of parts of the game to get it to run satisfactorily. But what could it be?

One thing I'm noticing is that, while I have the game running, my CPU usage, according to process explorer, rarely goes above 50% even when I don't have its affinity set to one core. This might not mean anything, though. I don't know enough about PCs.

Vista was not designed for machines as old as ours. It's a significant resource sink. People who actually use it may have advice on how to switch off some of the bloat. I'd wager that that's your problem, if you're getting dodgy fps on embark.

Tips with regard to DF though: reduce the number of caverns in world_gen, cut your population cap and baby cap, turn off temp and weather, and embark in a small area. Avoid flowing water. Destroy or trade clutter as your dwarves produce it.

[jei]

I would absolutely take on writing optimization for pathing, if Toady threw the pathfinding related source code at me.

D* is probably being used and it's highly unlikely you can optimize it further, besides implementing CPU and OS specific optimizations tricks.
DF already uses tricks to cut down on water flow work for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D*

Adding multicore support would probably be the easiest and most beneficial way to get performance boost, besides doing other tricks and waste management within DF to eliminate unnecessary and useless path finding in the first place.

Unfortunately paranoia about source code leaks seems to prevent the DF team from getting any programming help. There's a ton of people who would help.

[melomel]

Posting mostly to follow, as I think this POS PC just doesn't have the juice for my map.  (4x4 embark, volcano, pretty tall, not much constructed/dug out, no river, 25 dwarves, 154 animals but most of them caged, a metric shit-ton of caged wildlife, XP Pro/Pentium4 2.5GHz/1 gig RAM.  FPS...  10 or so at best.  Was was playable until I tried to get the cotton candy, which required going down about 150 zs & cracking open the caverns.  [PRINT_MODE:STANDARD] does nothing for me.  Single core, it's not threading.  Not running anything else intensive--got the browser, music player, and Notepad.)

It was a really awesome embark, too...

[thebigJ_A]

Vista was not designed for machines as old as ours. It's a significant resource sink. People who actually use it may have advice on how to switch off some of the bloat. I'd wager that that's your problem, if you're getting dodgy fps on embark.

Tips with regard to DF though: reduce the number of caverns in world_gen, cut your population cap and baby cap, turn off temp and weather, and embark in a small area. Avoid flowing water. Destroy or trade clutter as your dwarves produce it.

That stinks, seeing as how this pc came with Vista. It was a gift, as I'm a poor college student. Which also prevents me from getting a new one. All I could afford was to stick in a middling GPU a year or two back. It still manages to run most of the types of games I play pretty well on medium to high settings.

As for vista. I took someone's advice and switched to vista basic view, thus apparently turning off Aero. I can't tell if that helped or not. So how about it, anyone know how I can "switch off some of the bloat"?

[FleshForge]

The thing is, modern video-heavy games are greatly dependent on the graphics card and much less on the processor, so you can have a rather nice gaming rig that will run this game poorly - because DF is 100% CPU.  I'm sure ancillary stuff like bus architecture and memory bandwidth and all that shit matters, but when the game gets busy it's because the processor is pegged 100%.  Not really any way around that except getting bigger iron.

err, note though that each map varies A LOT with respect to what's going on and you may have much better speed with one map over another; I just now had an embark with a lake dumping INTO a river (goofy as that sounds) and right on embark it was around 75 FPS, whereas I normally have a very comfortable 100 FPS with most maps.  Take a look at the map's total volume also, e.g. as melomel said if you have a map that is 160z tall (counting about 10z for sky) that's an immense amount of individual tiles.  You can force the volume of all maps to be smaller by tweaking world_gen.txt and setting limits on cavern depths.

[Diacritic]

1. Grab  Wubi
2. Install for dual-boot capability
3. Boot to linux
4. Grab linux version
5.
6. FPS profit!