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[ffaerie]

/rant

It's getting to the point where there's no much reason to invest time into a fortress if even on a 3x3 shallow not even 40 z-levels embark with serious abuse of dfh autodestroys and removelitters and dumping from stocks and DAS' and no moving liquids at all the FPS drops down under 100 and then never recovers by the year 20. This without going into the whole 'exploring caverns' stuff (I wonder if I should just danger-room-insta-legendary military into godly skills and go there by year 3 or something so the game doesn't turn into a silly slideshow) and only a few magma forges with stale lava underneath the impassable squares. Megaprojects? Hope you have fun having the game on alt-tab for hours every day for months upon months at your 3 fps and maybe your grandchildren will see it through.

The whole thing about 'your civ's king is dead; you should've checked beforehand in legends' is getting kind of old really, also. Then again, if I need to temporarily add [aquifer] tags to sedimentary stones in order to embark in the first place, I am maybe expected to also check for monarch availability with a third party tool like prospector or something. While on subject of finding a suitable site, it's rather surprising, to say the least, to see types of stone layers replaced by vague 'Shallow metals' = copper everywhere, 'Deep metals' = copper everywhere variants. 'Flux Stone'? You might get it or you might not, no Flux Stone in biome? You might very well still get it if the cards on hand say so. Adding NOEAT to kobolds manually wasn't a good idea of mine either, now that I think of it, too. Ridiculousness of the whole constant struggle with pets and their owners and their litter and their movement is pretty much madness on the level of every 200 billion of thousands of body parts of every god forsaken creature or dwarf getting covered in blood, or pus or water.

Add to this some demands by nobles like 'make aluminum beds', miserable justice system that works against all that is just and hospital silliness with infections abound and you get a blood-red exclamation mark in the place of a serious dwarven fortress. The unit list that's going for decades is also kinda old, though Runesmith and Therapist and whatever helps some. The names of risen ghosts of entirely unfamiliar entities missing from slab engraver menu is just a nice touch to it, what can I say.

fake-edit:

It's just occured to me that maybe if we do need to view legends to see if there are any monarch figures available to the chosen civilization, perhaps it should also somehow recognize the fact the civilization in question is only known for the incredible feats of their Wood Burners and Lye and Potash and Cheese Makers and other generally useless rejects.

[Justin In Oz]

Do you feel better now?

[ffaerie]

Yeah. Just like it's in the game. When your rant is met with dismissal and disinterest by dwarves of no social skills yet higher rank you feel better about yelling on someone in charge and feel better afterwards (about the punishment being delayed, at the very least).

[Darkmere]

You forgot that dungeon masters don't show up, dwarves won't wear clothes, civilian jobs interfere with military uniforms, crystal glass can't be made despite the exact cause and location of the error in question being documented more than a year ago, obliterated hearts not killing dwarves, fluid flow errors, temperature calculation hyper-lag, no economy, broken ammunition setting for marksdwarves, some animals can't eat enough to survive, unrealistic simple trap configuration, smelting exploits, obsidian being forbidden as economic stone unless you embark on some, skewed foreign weapon damage, disabled diplomacy settings, the truetype font crash, cavern fishing being broken, burrow-restricted moody planepacking, creatures teleporting on top of walls, nonfunctional animal caretaking/fish dissection/animal dissection/alchemy, non-food items listed as food on the stocks screen, some distance errors on workshops, contaminated buckets not being emptied, hospitals not gathering stocks correctly, metal bar requirements being off for certain items, finicky cheesemaking, finicky lyemaking, archery range room designation troubles, creature leather yield oddities, muddy tiles not displaying cave moss properly, and the inability to decorate certain manufactured items.

[ffaerie]

You forgot that dungeon masters don't show up, dwarves won't wear clothes, civilian jobs interfere with military uniforms, crystal glass can't be made despite the exact cause and location of the error in question being documented more than a year ago, obliterated hearts not killing dwarves, fluid flow errors, temperature calculation hyper-lag, no economy, broken ammunition setting for marksdwarves, some animals can't eat enough to survive, unrealistic simple trap configuration, smelting exploits, obsidian being forbidden as economic stone unless you embark on some, skewed foreign weapon damage, disabled diplomacy settings, the truetype font crash, cavern fishing being broken, burrow-restricted moody planepacking, creatures teleporting on top of walls, nonfunctional animal caretaking/fish dissection/animal dissection/alchemy, non-food items listed as food on the stocks screen, some distance errors on workshops, contaminated buckets not being emptied, hospitals not gathering stocks correctly, metal bar requirements being off for certain items, finicky cheesemaking, finicky lyemaking, archery range room designation troubles, creature leather yield oddities, muddy tiles not displaying cave moss properly, and the inability to decorate certain manufactured items.

It's not like dungeon master was more than an excuse (like the Arms Dealer whatever noble back in 31.0x) to poorly implemented social situation, I guess.. The clothes I destroy by heavily utilising dfhack tools. Raw crystal glass can be bought from caravans and doesn't enrage me nearly as much as whole '1 ash per lye' part of soap and potash making (too bad, nowhere to apply your skills, guys and girls who just migrated). Switching off temperature gives me like +200 fps (to my measly 75 with my second and still running fort, a huge clash of many design concepts), yet it's not really helpful to negate lag, if you want to play the game to it's fullness. It's like toggling between water and magma when you need your smelters upon a brook running for a while smelting things. Hospitals are okay as long as I don't give them too many coffers I gathered. Finnicky stuff deserves to be there just because, I guess, that's name of the game 'Just Because'. Archery Range simply doesn't work, and anyway they do a good job as ambushers being all legendary marksdwarves in some 3 seasons. The other thing I dismiss as playable through. Actually, everything can be played through. If you don't have a stupid moment when the game just randomly cripples your modern computing machine and makes it crawl unreasonably. I can post you a dxdiag file or something, but never ever no single core of my processor had got loaded more than 30%. That's annoying me more than flies or being in the rain. That outright stops me from being reasonable and yet again I need to throw a tantrum like this first one.

[The Dog Delusion]

I'm actually quite content with the game in its current state.

That's not to say that I don't look forward to particular bug fixes and improvements, but honestly, I guess I just try to enjoy the game for its good points, and avoid the things that cause problems. Even FPS isn't an issue for me - on a 2x2 embark with over 100 dwarves (and like a bajillion turkeys) I'm still getting FPS rates on par with what I had at embark.

I'm not saying that your complaints are unfounded, but even crazy stuff like demands for rose gold beds (that's the one my baron keeps giving me) and the wacky justice system and infection just adds a level of "workaround" to the game that I think a lot of people enjoy.

My advice? Take a break, perhaps. I took a break right after 2010 made my head explode following an infection-caused tantrum spiral. I came back just in time to enjoy some eggs, and all is well. I dunno...I'm rambling, but seriously, relax.

[ffaerie]

I'm actually quite content with the game in its current state.

That's not to say that I don't look forward to particular bug fixes and improvements, but honestly, I guess I just try to enjoy the game for its good points, and avoid the things that cause problems. Even FPS isn't an issue for me - on a 2x2 embark with over 100 dwarves (and like a bajillion turkeys) I'm still getting FPS rates on par with what I had at embark.

I'm not saying that your complaints are unfounded, but even crazy stuff like demands for rose gold beds (that's the one my baron keeps giving me) and the wacky justice system and infection just adds a level of "workaround" to the game that I think a lot of people enjoy.

My advice? Take a break, perhaps. I took a break right after 2010 made my head explode following an infection-caused tantrum spiral. I came back just in time to enjoy some eggs, and all is well. I dunno...I'm rambling, but seriously, relax.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the game to the point I have multiple forts running that are past 15 years old (and one is 22 but dying FPS death ffs). But I am getting old too, I am afraid, and anything less than 100 fps makes me a panda without a bamboo pasture. Dwarves are slow, even trained with pumps and generally agile, I can bear with this. What I cannot for along time accept is how a siege situation reduces my FPS to a quarter. I play DF since the early 2d days with chasm-lava and only started because of famous let's plays and I feel something needs to be done about performance (if in expense of stability - I don't mind). When the game crashes after a season at searing 300 fps, I shrug it off. If it was a season at 50 fps, boy am I despised and hateful.

[ffaerie]

How can you even play if whatever dangers you endure in the depth of the Earthmother you will inevitable succumb to the cold touch of the game slowing down?? And that'll happen mostly because of the riches, it's like some phylosophical duality. You have much stuff = you will not last long. I understand that game may not have enough content to satisfy average player if they don't face the FPS torture and quit and rave how fun it was. But for me the game is about building a 1050 years empire, not having my fort last 50 years at max. In fact I just downloaded a save file from somethingawful with a fort with 46 years played, childless with magma, it had been quite unnerving, around 40 fps with temperature and weather on. The game can be slow how it handles dwarves and everything. It should run fast on this little computer I assembled with my spouse to not have me twiddle my thumbs every time a road needs to be built.

And I want to reiterate I use all the lag-reducing tools, playing with simple wood proved to have counteraffect on my fps, so some magma channels and no water no running water apart from Pit/Pond filled up with water from a silly pond in caverns, which is now getting to 5/7 with my agily and indefatigable dwarves. I exterminate livestock, I wonder why do I have upon everything I care of need to also care about killing living creatures just to slow down the dying interest of mine to this fortress. Where everything goes fine, just nothing gets done as it used to. Things used to be different before, really. Dwarves were like quicker, disasters stronger, maybe yes I am not young enough.

[Darkmere]

All sarcasm from earlier aside, this game won't be optimized for years. It will only get worse as more and more features get added and Toady's basically said optimization will be the last thing done on everything. That's reality. If you really get into this kind of state over framerates more than a few people here would love to have, you might consider finding other entertainment options.

[ffaerie]

All sarcasm from earlier aside, this game won't be optimized for years. It will only get worse as more and more features get added and Toady's basically said optimization will be the last thing done on everything. That's reality. If you really get into this kind of state over framerates more than a few people here would love to have, you might consider finding other entertainment options.

Let us just hope some encryption-breaking quantum computing technologies are not 'almost here'. For those who aren't familiar 'almost here' is around when your grand-grandchildren bury their fathers and think the technology is almost there.

[ffaerie]

Really, what has me hopeful is for every BLOAT Toady implements another breaks down and another few slow the game down. And I think we are around the point where computers cannot really outpace the creative mind of One. That's why we love him, after all. So, rather sooner than later, he's going to have to mess with optimizing stuff or sourcing it to the few prominent coders around and the dwarves in the mines of Stormy Picks will rejoice.


edit: There've been many years before my Df days, and I always went into fury when something went wrong. Like, how hard it's to pass diminishing returns onto the Shattered Barried and stuff. With DF I don't think I have a say when it comes to 'how hard it is to do X in Y'.

[SirAaronIII]

All I can say is wow. You can actually get more than 100 FPS? Niiiiiiiice.
Also if 3x3 is slowing you down, try 2x3or 2x2.

[ffaerie]

It's like you either set a FPS cap at a reasonable number 200, and you always watch it and it is mean to you and you will be very sad if it dwindles to a point where 150 or 100 is maximum you can get. You should realize, that getting below 100 means to me as much as yours "twice slower" when I used to play at 200 fps. Or you don't (and you feel every second of your life that your dwarves are slow). Either shut yourself off in a fortress, or FPS imposed difficulties will haunt you just as well as they do me.

[ffaerie]

I am running a 4,2 i7 930. I played with hyper-threading and switching off all three other cores. Results are not explainable. I know if I have 2 cores runing and one is doing video and it's bound to DF it never goes higher than 30%. All other cores disabled. When I stop encoding, the core rarely goes above 10 (I see it very quickly because my case displays temperature both of qCore and qJunc displayed on a side) and never ever it goes over 60. It's now around 34 Celcium in my room ambient, around 45 I have my cores running bitmine or prime95. Here's the promised dxdiag, it\s only 46kb http://www.megaupload.com/?d=69CN32IW

What happens very often is Dwarf Fortress executable runs out of adressable space when generating and embarking onto really weird worlds. This I have no problem with. It could use some help to use 3gb of memory, but anyway who wants a cliff 5000z-levels high. I don't think it might help, but I have a non DirectX audio adapter (although I know it matters not) being Asus Sonar DX2 somethng with a midi input.

[thegoatgod_pan]

100 f.p.s. actually freaks me out when I start a new fort, after having become attuned to the rhythm and beat of one of my usual half-century behemoths.  When they aren't running at full speed you start to note minute interactions.  I never have fully fledged character emerge until the fort slows to 50 f.p.s. just because there is too much, too quickly.  In a 100 f.p.s. fort I've literally renamed an interesting dwarf to check back a second later and find him dying to a badger. In a 50 f.p.s fort I would see that badger coming (and the dwarf body parts flying) at a nice, measured pace.