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[Keiseth]

Edit Warning: Minor layout spoilers. I doubt anyone really cares if they don't know already, though...

Out of curiosity, am I missing out on anything important (or will I miss out in subsequent versions) by disabling these two features?

I'm on a 1.4ghz Intel Pentium 4 with 512mb PC133 SDRam. It's an old machine, and while I understand Dwarf Fortress does some crazy calculations in the backround, it is sort of embarassing not to be able to run a game with ASCII graphics. XD. Yes, I know it uses OpenGL, I understand. =)

Anyways, With 50ish dwarves I get 30-50 FPS in dwarf fort mode with those two disabled. Temperature only helped a little  bit; weather doubled my FPS.

I noticed no rain. I'm not sure what effect that will have; will ash from lava flows outside still go away eventually?

Seems like DF is getting more and more complicated; unless some miracle of optimization takes place, it looks like eventually I'm not going to be able to run it at all. But I'm complaining; if I could get a job soon I could get a barebones computer and set it up.

Lastly... is it just me, or is it normal to have lower FPS when the screen is showing a lot of the cave river and surrounding areas? Towards the chasm my FPS is higher.

[ May 06, 2007: Message edited by: Keiseth ]

[Tamren]

Turning off weather is pretty much mandatory for adventure mode.

Displaying rain takes alot of cpu power, it has to decide whuch tiles get rained on, then stick the graphic there at the right time.

Not sure what temperature does, i didnt notice a change in adventure mode.

[NowhereMan]

i have similar hardware on my 4/5 year old puter.
when i first installed df, my dorfs looked like they were stuck in molasses, even with just the starting 7, it took them a second to move one square.
i had recently re-installed windows, and since the readme file mentioned openGl, i decided to download and install the latest drivers for my ATI Radeon (also 4/5 years old).
that made a HUGE difference. my dorfs were little blurs.  course now that i've got 100 of the little snots running around it's starting to slow down, but not to the point where its intolerable, yet.
anyhoo, all that to say, your video card/drivers can make a huge difference, up to a point, probably.

[Keiseth]

Hmm, yeah. I believe Toady mentioned that not having any 3D acceleration at all would be bad, but I do indeed have a video card and its latest drivers.

Which was painful, somehow I botched the install when I reformatted and everything was in a good 16 different colors. That was funny as hell. But yeah, it's in correctly now. XD

I'd make a suggestion but Toady works enough as it is. I was just curious, would it be possible to make "silent" rain? It wouldn't actually show up anywhere (possibly saving processor power) but people could still be affected by it. I don't think it makes a huge difference either way though. I'm sure my dwarves would be thinking "YES. KEEP THE RAIN OFF THANK YOU." XD

[JT]

3D acceleration shouldn't matter -- what should matter is hardware-based blitting onto a two-dimensional surface, which is how the 2D graphics of the OpenGL system work.

Just smile and nod if you don't understand. ;-)

[Keiseth]

*Looks down for a moment.* Blit - British word for "Draw." Found that out while I was messing around with Spidermonkey Javascript with the Sphere game creation engine.

I got it! I read up on all this. It just doesn't come to mind until it is far too late. =P

[Jaqie Fox]

The only 'problem' with thinking about the game as a 2D game... the best (and now just about only) good 2D acceleration comes on cards made for (3D) gaming.  things like the intel extreme (junk) video cards, trident cards (normally found in laptops) et al are just horrible compared to even low end 3D gamer cards like the geforce 6000 series (and up) and ATX x300 series (and up, including 9800 and up).

[Bien]

Youre wrong Fox my computer in an Intel Brookdale G (thats dated 2000 and still dosent need an update) I have 100 fps in the game

Specs are

Intel Brookdale G
4GB ram
1.7 GHZ Pentium 4
And i can run : DF:BHD MOHAA HALO and i dunno if youve heard of this yet Babylon 5 : IFH

[Keiseth]

All this talk reminds me heavily of a rather old joke article...
http://bbspot.com/News/2003/02/ati_ascii.html

quote: The 9500 ASC is very similar to the 9500 PRO, but it has an added ASCII Processing Unit (APU) on the card to handle the complex calculations needed to render creatures like the A and the M in Nethack.

[Jaqie Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Bien:
<STRONG>Youre wrong Fox my computer in an Intel Brookdale G (thats dated 2000 and still dosent need an update) I have 100 fps in the game

Specs are

Intel Brookdale G
4GB ram
1.7 GHZ Pentium 4
And i can run : DF:BHD MOHAA HALO and i dunno if youve heard of this yet Babylon 5 : IFH</STRONG>

You are having good luck with an intel extreme. good. most people don't. Don't assume your own personal experiences are the end all and be all of knowledge.

[Peristarkawan]

quote:Originally posted by Keiseth:
<STRONG>*Looks down for a moment.* Blit - British word for "Draw." Found that out while I was messing around with Spidermonkey Javascript with the Sphere game creation engine.</STRONG>

It's not British; I'm curious where you got that from. "Blit" is a technical term for efficient copying of arrays of bits. It's a distortion of "BitBlt", which is short for "Bitmap Block Transfer".

As for graphic cards, I also have an Intel graphics card in my laptop, and it seems to work fine for playing Dwarf Fortress. Note I'm not saying that I would try to play Doom 3 on it. It's a fairly new laptop, so that probably helps as well.

What's most interesting to me is that this laptop has a dual core; when I turn weather and temp off and set it in single core mode in the BIOS, then I get a steady 100 FPS frame rate. As soon as I change it to dual core mode, the frame rate starts oscillating between 50 and 100 FPS.

[Jaqie Fox]

And have you tried a fortress with 50 of several tame animals, 200 dwarves, and a raid or two coming in?

That is where things start getting interesting and different.

I have an athlon64 x2 3800+ and an athlon64 (?+) 2.2Ghz Venice core single core... and a multitude of lesser systems.
And I have these: geforce 6600 256MB PCIe, geforce 6100 built in (uses shared RAM, one of my a64 boards), ati allinwonder 9200 128mb, lots and lots of lower ones like trident cyberblade xp ai1, ati rage 128, ati rage pro/mobile, and more sitting around here, and that's just what i have right now.  I have messed with DF on many many cards, and I have gotten a very good idea over time of just what DF needs to perform under pressure, and what I said is prettymuch minimal for good performance.

[Peristarkawan]

No, I always get bored and abandon well before my fortress ever gets that large, so I have no idea how my laptop would perform at that point.

[JT]

Didn't see the reply earlier.

As far as I've known, yes, good DirectDraw / 2D hardware acceleration does tend to come on 3D accelerator cards, but people need to be very wary about that; some of the existing higher-end 3D cards are no better than yesteryear graphics cards in terms of 2D graphics capability, so buying a high-end card should only be a priority if you're going to be buying Bioshock. ;-)

[Fieari]

Turning off temperature will mean you can't set anything on fire, nor can you be set of fire.  It also means you'll never get frostbite, nor will anyone else.  That's pretty boring.  Pity it is CPU intensive...