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[zazq]

I got burned out on xx.18 months ago because i found it impossible to control the lag.  Now i'm loading up xx.25 and i'm praying not to run into the same problems.  So here's the story:

I said "screw this lag stuff, I'm going to build a lag free fortress!"  And so i went about doing that.  I picked a flat, 40z level, no water, featureless desert, 3x3.  I used reveal to make sure it contained no underground water, and 1 layer of caverns, which contained no swarms of units.  I disabled temperature and weather, and started digging.

I built a fortress which grew mushrooms and had no animals.  The only drink was mushroom wine, and the only food was prepared meals made from mushrooms.  There were no engravings and the population cap was set to 30.  Each dwarf had his own cabinet to keep clothing in, and I atom smashed everything i could get away with, including any stone i didn't need right now.  I littered the surface with atom smashers and smashed any caravans/invasions/wild animals, and tried hard to keep all my dwarves alive so i didn't have to deal with ghosts.  I monitored my farms so there was never an overflow of food, and I atom smashed all my refuse, all loose clothing, all crafts and tradegoods.  I never breached the magma or the caverns, and restricted my digging only to necessary areas. 

I made each z level about a 20x20 room, with multiple stockpiles and workshops and whatever placed in a roomlike pattern, just missing the walls between them.  there were many stairways, so that there would be absolutely no traffic jams at doors or stairs.  I used cleanmap all over the place, and monitored the dirtiness of my dwarves, spawning water to rinse them occasionally.

despite all this, i got reduced to 1/4fps by the 5th year just as if I wasn't trying to prevent lag at all.  The different draw procedures didn't seem to do anything to the frame rate except break the game on the opengl modes.  this is with g_fps already reduced to 20. 

So now i come to you people.  It seems that every trick in Maximizing Framerate is trivial.  Is it just the case that lag can not be prevented and there's just a 5 year limit on fortresses?

It was fun to have 25 atom smashers on the surface, i've never had so many before.

[Necro910]

It was fun to have 25 atom smashers on the surface, i've never had so many before.

Problem solved?

[zazq]

I considered that actually.  lag didn't go away when i stopped pulling the lever, nor did it go away when i deconstructed the inner 2 rings of them.  If they were the primary source of lag, then removing half of them would have had a noticeable effect.  My decision to use atom smashers was that i considered them less objects for the game to keep track of instead of an area of traps.

[EmperorJon]

Wait... a 40 z level for with no water, no animals, 1 cavern layer, all items atomsmashed, and you're on 1/4 of a frame per second...? I think the only solution to this, is buy a computer. Stop trying to play DF on your calculator.

[zazq]

I play Mass Effect 2 and Bulletstorm on this computer, it is hardly junky.  No, i'm down to 1/4th starting fps, which is about 25/100.  That's too slow to get things done.  I guess i'm begging someone to set me straight on how to prevent lag, because my best attempts fall short.  Isn't the primary source of lag the large amount of objects (including blood stains, squares of grass, masterwork mushroom roasts, cats) that a fortress accumulates?  I tried to minimize those but i get no results.  The fortress didn't change much in the final 3 years, yet lag continued to increase.  The only visible variable that was also increasing was the list of deceased things in the units menu, and there's no way of getting rid of em. 

[Ilikor]

get a better fortress layout.

[zazq]

Isn't this the absolute least lag layout I could get?  There are no traffic jams anywhere, and the direct line pathing is hardly ever interrupted by a wall or something they need to go around.  dwarves walk in straight lines to wherever they need to go.

[psychologicalshock]

I have a complete mess of a fortress with stuff spawning and dying everywhere and I get around 35-40 fps on the surface and 60 fps subterranean, sounds like your PC sucks man.

[thegoatgod_pan]

Yeah, I had moderate lag issues with .18, but since I got .25 it seems like I can run it with 160 dwarves with little to no issues.  I felt like lag problems got solved.

1. How many pets do you have?
2. How many dwarves do you have?
3. Do you use dfclean?
4.  Do you have other programs running in the background?

Otherwise no clue

[bobhayes]

Isn't this the absolute least lag layout I could get?  There are no traffic jams anywhere, and the direct line pathing is hardly ever interrupted by a wall or something they need to go around.  dwarves walk in straight lines to wherever they need to go.

No. The game doesn't understand that it has a direct-line path; it tries to find lots of different routes and then pick the best one (or so it seems). Big open rooms are fps-killers, as are multiple paths to the same place. Try walling up your big rooms and leaving one corridor as the only way to get to high-traffic places.

That said, it seems weird that your FPS goes down so fast. My machine is nothing special, and I've got 25 fps with 180 dwarves, 3x3 embark, shaft all the way down to the bottom, and several completely excavated z-levels, on year 10.

[ullrich]

You can lower your gfps more, I run it at 300 fps, 10 gps will norm drops to 150ish fps at year 3 would say 75ish+ by year 5, this is on a laptop (2gb of ram, 2.1ghz duel core, nvidea 256mb? work card) with a 4x4 embark pop capped at 100 and retarded amounts of animals.

[zazq]

When i drop to 10g_fps, the dwarves start leaving contrails behind themselves, which is interesting for a while, but gets annoying quick.

My box is a 3gb ram, 2.1 dual core, with a blinding Radeon 6850.  How can you get so much better fps than me?  It isn't background programs or anything like that, as I check for malware and annoying google/apple/evilsoft background programs often enough.  It just has to be some check box in the init files that makes it work right.  anyone got any ideas?

[jaxad0127]

Are you using traffic zones? Those are reported to help path finding for dwarfs.

[psychologicalshock]

I have a dual core 3.3 ghz each, I think the game only uses one core so running stonesense on the other core does nothing to fps for me.

[Razonatair]

It's probably your computer, zazq, or something about your computer. 2.1 isn't amazing anymore, plus there is always the chance something could be faulty, RAM issues,  some other hard/software-specific issue, possibly drivers(unlikely), etc.

Dwarf Fortress uses up to two cores. One core is used most of the game(computational stuff, pathfinding, etc), the other core is used for graphics. Number of cores hardly matters, I have a 2.8ghz 6 core, and DF will only use two of those cores. What matters most is the speed of your cores. Your graphics card isn't really going to change how fast the game processes, simply because DF is processor intensive. RAM probably won't make too much of a difference either. I've got 8 GB DDR3 and it probably helps, but it's difficult to measure how much it helps.

As you have only two cores, you don't have the luxury of designating two cores solely for DF like I could out of my 6.

Have you tried not screwing with the settings and just playing a default version of DF? Honestly it's probably your computer, or the way its set up, don't really know. As a side note, what's your OS?