Bay 12 Games Forum

I have a Vampire who is so miserable she babbles and runs around naked. I locked her in a cell behind a glass window. My question is what will happen to her? Normally dwarves will die of old age but do vampires die of old age? Do I have a perpetual babbler?

So I had vampire problems and was too lazy to track down the offending dwarf by hand. Luck has him sucking the blood of a child with 4 witnesses. So I check the v-z-Enter screen and Bingo! hasn't had a drink in a long time, no eating thoughts, no drinking thoughts, this is definitely my vampire. Did I mention he was also the mayor. I assign punishment from the Justice screen and he is almost immediately replaced as mayor by some other schmuck. So I give him a nickname of Vampire to keep track and disable ALL labors. Step 2 I dig out a tiny room for him to be locked in behind a glass window as an exhibit. I designate a burrow and assign the vampire to it. Next I go check on him to see what he's doing. He's standing in his old office (now assigned to current mayor) having a Conduct Meeting with nobody around. I tried re-enabling labors and messing with his burrow assignment and he won't budge or change jobs. It's been a while now and I really want to separate him from the other dwarfs. Any suggestions on how to get him moving again so I can lock his ass behind glass?

Before deciding if a dwarf is going to carry the bin or carry the object he should compute his speed with both options and multiply out by tiles-pathed. Shortest time should be used. So if the object is close and the bin is far or heavy it would take the object to the bin, but if the object is far and the bin is close and light it would take the bin to the object.

I have a hospital set up with plenty of beds places right next to a table and a traction bench on either side. I currently have 1 other guy in the hospital being treated, 1 guy that has had his pinky toe in traction for about 2 years, and 2 loungers using the beds. Plenty of plaster, thread, soap ect... hospital has been working as expected for a few years now. I've just never seen this before ever.

I found that using 3 wheelbarrows in my metal bar stockpile significantly improved hauling time for that pile. I recommend that for metal stocks as the full bins are causing significant slowdown and a wheelbarrow can remove the penalty.

The only way to be sure is to hook up a performance counter for L2 cache misses. Unfortunately my place of employment does not offer us such high level tools so I am in the process of cobbling together some intel libraries and a .net service to add performance data for the low level cpu functions. More information to follow.

The comment about P4 running DF the best is mostly because that was the highest ever clock speed attained on a single core, not because it was an awesome kick ass chip. Really a modern chip at 4Ghz+ is going to do a better job in other areas.

I do agree that the size of your cache is going to really affect processing speed, however I believe that Toady is pretty good at keeping his algorithms from cache thrashing.

The best hardware to take advantage of DF is as follows 
Fastest mhz chip speed. number of cores doesn't matter as DF can only utilize one of them. This is the primary bottleneck in DF for modern hardware. Basically it would run faster in DOS with a single core pentium 4 than on modern hardware. (basically you would get worse performance from a multi-core processor because they are usually clocked slower.) I have a quad-core clocked at 2.3 and I think the fastest P4 was 4.2 IIRC.
Fastest memory speed. this will help with memory bottlenecks, which from my experience is not the issue.
64bit will not help DF nor will the LargeAddress flag (except in rare worldgen crashes)

Your proposed upgrade would probably close to double the speed of DF as you would be trading the 2.4ghz for the 4.2ghz clock speed.