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[Veroule]

Do not babble here about what your framerate is, or you system specs.  This topic is specifically for things we know cause large drops that shouldn't, meaning anything while paused.  Maybe a few suspected things during play as well.

First hitting tab and expanding the amount of displayed play area is a definite drop.

Second changing levels definitely makes a significant hit even while paused.

I suspect part of the general slowness mentioned by many is from a flow effect gone wrong.  I noted a swarm of 6's moving about in an underground lake.  They always maintained the same positions relative to each other, and with my system ground down to 10 FPS they still zipped acrossed the section of play area I had displayed in a second.

[oolon1]

Sure, here's a list of things that cause a short lock-up in my game.

-Dwarves moving up and down levels via staircases and ramps.
-Accessing the materials/stocks page when building a shop or walling (expected, but even happens with very few items to choose from)

[Toady One]

Yeah, there's definitely something weird going on with the display of certain tiles, and it seems to be happening more underground (is that right?).  Something like that should be easy to handle once I locate the cause.  The general lags are more difficult.

[axus]

It's proportional to the number of unseen (black) tiles, maybe sky tiles but I didn't have a minute to stop and check ;p

[Behrooz Wolf]

Seconded.  Having hidden or sky tiles visible is definitely causing a slowdown, both paused and unpaused.

Slowdown appears to always be present when any sky tiles are visible, and seems to be maxed out and roughly the same whether only one sky tile is visible or the entire screen is sky tiles.

Hidden underground tiles appear to exhibit a proportional slowdown effect dependent on the number of hidden tiles on-screen, ranging from almost no slowdown with a few hidden tiles to a slowdown equal to the sky slowdown when the entire screen is hidden.

Tiles visible one Z-level down (dots) appear to exhibit a similar proportional slowdown to hidden underground tiles, but with only about half of the slowing effect.

[Veroule]

Hidden and sky tiles are definitely bad, that seems to be what really did it for both the looking at different levels and explanding the play view.

Also I am pretty sure about the issue with water that I mentioned since I just ran a decent rate on a waterless area.  I will have to do 1 more test to confirm this.

[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

For me, adventure mode towns with rivers = huge fps drop. Everything else in adv. mode runs fairly well but when I visited a capital with a river it was taking about 5 sec. per 1 tile moved avg. Another smaller town on a river still had an fps drop but not so godawful.

[JT]

I get a big FPS hit every time two dwarves meet in a narrow corridor.  Presumably one of the dwarves is trying to find another path (as in the previous version) to clear up the corridor, but scans everywhere and fails to do so.

[Deto]

Already said though, but... The FPS drop I get comes from seeing mountain side, no matter if its digged out, visible or not visible, the more mountain tiles (grey, both wall/ground/undiscovered) I see, the lower the fps drops.

Someone said running the screen as small (tabbed to see map and menu) helps game run faster. It does, when you see less mountain side in view, but its still relative to amount you see, if I run as small so that I see mountain (more than few tiles really) I get the same framerate as running in full view.  

[pasiniem]

In adventurer mode I went to sleep: ZOOOOM, FPS drops to 1.
I spent nearly 20 minutes sleeping (the ZZZZZ text scrolling) before I could do anything.
Yeah, my computer sucks, but anyway. I'm able to run DF in adventurer mode with FPS 10-25 normally.

[Toady One]

I've figured out the sky-based slow down, and that rewrite should be trivial.  I haven't observed or figured out a hidden tile slowdown yet.

[FFLaguna]

Toady One, when I put my view so I am only looking mostly at the outside landscape, I get great FPS. But when I move the camera so that most of my view is of the inside of a mountain (whether it is my dwarf halls, or some random hidden-squared mountain, or Z level -10 or anything inside a mountain) the FPS drops from 65-70 down to 25.

[Name Lips]

All I know is that I get 1/5th my normal framerate when I change the z-axis to anything other than the ground level. Underground, it drops to 10-20fps, in the sky it also drops to 10-20fps. On the ground level it's 60-70fps.

[axus]

I get better frame rate in my dwarf halls than untouched mountain.  If everything is mined out then my FPS is maybe 50-60.  Unmined mountain (black) is 15fps or less.

[Slartibartfast]

Allow me to quote myself from another post (from before I saw this thread)

The FPS things is definitely a display problem.
I performed this simple test:
1) Pause the game.
2) Go up and down levels, each time waiting for the FPS to stabilize.
Results:
(game FPS is capped at 100, display FPS at 30)
When on level 0 of the map, the FPS is 100 when I'm cruising along random places on the map, however (and I think this is the important part), as soon as I'm looking at a place that isn't instantly visible (ie, there's a layer of rock above my current viewport), the game slows down to 38-40. I move aside and it instantly climbs back to 100. If there's only small amount of rocks visible than it can stay on 70 or 80. If the entire view is just "there are rocks above" (like if I go to a completely undug layer, or on layer 0 I'm looking under a tall mountain) its 30. If I'm so "high" that I can only see the blue mist, its 30 again, ditto for just being high enough to barely see the layer below, with the exception that it doesn't happen when I'm on layer 0.

To sum up for Toady One:
The game runs properly when I'm looking at layer 0.
The game runs crappily when I'm looking at any other layer, but the amount of crappiness is directly related to the type of area I'm looking at:
I) If I'm looking at ground that is really on the current layer (ie, no blue mist, no undug-blackness and no its-just-one-level-below-dots), it runs properly
II) Otherwise it runs like crap.
III) The overall speed at which it runs depends on the ratio between I and II. If its mostly type I then it will run at 70-100, if its mostly type II then it will run at 40-50, if its just II than it will run at 25-30.
EDIT: Changing the display FPS limitation has no effect on the FPS at which the game plays.
EDIT: What I said in the part before the summation is slightly self-contradictory. The summation is the part that's got it right.
Yet Another EDIT: minor spelling mistakes and improved comprehension.

Some More Editing:
1) Well, I just noticed that the 0/+1/+2/-1/-2 layer height indicator changes even when your view doesn't change. (change depends apparently on the height of what you're viewing) So to give a more "unique" measurment of height, by 0 I mean height 136 when I can go from 119 to 151.
2) I have a really crappy GPU (since my old one was burned), though the previous version runs properly on it, the crappy GPU might be slightly "exaggerating" the problem. (Its a proper GPU though, nothing built-in or that sort of crap)

[ October 30, 2007: Message edited by: Slartibartfast ]