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[treczoks]

Fellow Dwarfherders,

I sincerely hope that one day, ToadyOne will load the water flow model off on the GPU. I'm currently emptying out two lakes and the fort has come to a near stop.

Shall I just leave it unpaused for the night? I don't know...

One lake is down to about 4/7, the other one between 5/7 and 6/7. Oh my...

Slowly,
Christian

[Haedrian]

Turn off weather and temperature from the ini file. Set the process priority to high (or realtime if you're really desperate)

See if that works a bit.

[Jenniretta]

For stuff like this I usually put on a movie or something to watch and have DF running, check on it to make sure there's no sieges or auto-pauses every now and then *shrugs* helps pass the time. Draining a lake will bring your FPS crashing down no matter how much you change your init files normally, it should quickly recover once the water has finished draining.

Right now my fort is running at 8FPS at the best of times (normally closer to 5), so I've got it running on one machine while I surf the 'net and watch videos on my laptop Thats how I deal with low FPS usually, just multitask, lol.

As an aside, Toady has made a lot of progress optimizing the game's performance over the years, try playing 23a, I get 100 or so FPS on a new fort with this version, but in 23a I get about 51FPS, and 40d I get about 90FPS.
For a fort the same age as my current one (which is 5-8FPS now) in 40d I was playing at 3-5FPS, and 23a was running with 2-3FPS usually.
So I am quite happy and impressed with the progress Toady has made improving performance while adding so many new features, and I am actually pretty thankful to have 5-8 FPS with so many dwarves and jobs happening, as when I first started, a fortress this size, this busy, I was lucky to get 3FPS.

[Jacob/Lee]

Turn off weather and temperature from the ini file. Set the process priority to high (or realtime if you're really desperate)

See if that works a bit.

I can't seem to set anything to realtime on Windows 7.

[treczoks]

Turn off weather and temperature from the ini file. Set the process priority to high (or realtime if you're really desperate)

Temperature is already off. This nearly killed my last embark, as my dorfs dug right into a volcano, without a "warm stone detected". This nearly drowned my forge-level, with all the stockpiles of steel and other metals...

[Sutremaine]

You should still be getting warm stone warnings even with temperature off. Warm stone warnings only happen when the warm tile is revealed, and with a volcano much of the warm stone is pre-revealed. Maybe you accidently designated one of the warm tiles?

How are you draining the lake, anyway? I was under the impression that it could be done instantly with water pressure, since it's possible to flood a fortress in a couple of ticks if the ocean is dug into.

[Irenices]

Does changing the process priority really help?  I thought i had tried doing that before and i didnt see a difference.

[Jacob/Lee]

Does changing the process priority really help?  I thought i had tried doing that before and i didnt see a difference.

It definitely gives a few FPS at least.

[BigFatStupidHead]

You could use DFhack's liquids module and just destroy the water.

[treczoks]

You should still be getting warm stone warnings even with temperature off. Warm stone warnings only happen when the warm tile is revealed, and with a volcano much of the warm stone is pre-revealed. Maybe you accidently designated one of the warm tiles?

No, not always. There is "warm stone" over the magma sea and around the volcano shaft (propably pre-marked during creation), BUT judging from the layout of the shaft, some part of the volcano turned into obsidian lateron (but without my intervention), and this has not been marked as warm. So my dwarves dug a three-wide corridor right into it, and all they told me was that they found cave layer three (which I missed with my staircase) through all the magma. Quite a hot situation that cost me some dwarf.

How are you draining the lake, anyway? I was under the impression that it could be done instantly with water pressure, since it's possible to flood a fortress in a couple of ticks if the ocean is dug into.

I am trying two different methods at the moment:

In "Cave 2"  I build four screw pumps on the shore, added walls to build a channel and thus led the water into the next door lake which happens to have an off.map connection. On top of the channels walls, directly behind the pumps, I set up some gear boxes and four water wheels to power the pumps. This seems to be quite fast, but the pumps stopped working when the average level was at about 3/7, as it drained the water near the pumps so low that there was not enough flow for the water wheels. I waited for the water to level out again, and restarted the pumps. I'm looking into options to fix this.

In "Cave 3" I dug a trench to an open cave at the edge of the map, and let it flow passively. Basically, not a good idea, as this is dead slow.

[Sutremaine]

judging from the layout of the shaft, some part of the volcano turned into obsidian lateron (but without my intervention), and this has not been marked as warm. So my dwarves dug a three-wide corridor right into it

Good old-fashioned bugginess then, possibly bug 0001610.

I had a quick go at draining a small lake by digging a shaft under it and caving in the floor, but either it requires some extra engineering or it just doesn't work with one level of water. I'm thinking it might be easier to build a magma pump stack and obsidianise the lake.

[helf]

I can't seem to set anything to realtime on Windows 7.

You have to disable UAC before it'll let you set priorities to real-time.

[Leif]

I have an I7. Lag? Never heard of it.(Aside from the 8year old pc that was running on jury-rigged parts that I used to use.)

[thisisjimmy]

Don't bother setting the process to realtime priority. It won't help, and it could potentially cause your system to become unresponsive.  In fact, if you aren't running any other CPU intensive processes, even setting it to high won't make much difference (probably less than 1% improvement).

[treczoks]

The End Is Nigh!
Well, at least one part of the lake in "Cave 2" is almost dry, and the lake in "Cave 3" is down to about 2/7.
I learned a bunch about U-pipes and water in this fortress. Some of it the hard way - "Dwarf" is just another word for "idiot", it seems. I had to use traffic restrictions to keep them from just wading across the partially emptied lake.
Hopefully the FPS will rise again when the lakes have dried off. I'd hate to abandon this fort, there are two adamantine spikes protruding into Cave 3 that are just waiting for me.