Bay 12 Games Forum

Great suggestion. Not so sure if the autonomous move algorithms work great for DF as they can't always guarantee reaching your destination they might actually lead you in circles.
Having "incomplete" pathfinding and validation might only be part of the solution. But once you use it you can do multithreading because you are not fully sync anymore anyway..
I am not a game developer but I am a programmer. If I would have to solve it I would probably roughly do it this way:

• Make static snapshot of level data at time t in memory.
• Hand over pathfinding of objects for origin a to target b to seperate threads
• Give path back to main when finished
• Make new static snapshot when all threads have gone to zero or frame limit l was reached and start over

You'd need some kind of movement validation and if it fails spawn a new pathfinding.

Its probably doable when all dwarfs are able to pass through each other. It becomes insanely more difficult once you have actual colliding, moving objects.
That said if you are able to keep the frame limit l down by scaling up on many cores then maybe only tiny differences happen between real level and snapshot.
Probably hordes of dwarfs moving close to each other or something like a goblin siege massive battle would be brutal. But for prototyping you could try it with disabling collision on all moving objects first.

That said I am way out of my line of work here and you usually encounter all the real problems when you are superdeep in the details so anyone who knows more about pathfinding or how DF works feel free to point out if this is total BS. So I am in no way suggesting this is easy on the contrary just wanted to speculate some
Ideas are cheap actually doing it and solving the myriad of problems coming up is the hard work.

Hello everyone,

I created a new world with advanced parameters (not villains release but the one before).
I added more rainfall and temperature because I wanted a savage shrubland+jungle start (want Giant Rhinos I don't know why only that I want them).

Then I also reduced the caverns to 1 to hopefully improve FPS (2x2 embark) and increased the number of levels above first layer to have some more room.

What I realized is that my whole ground is not very deep. There is not many layers until I reached the magma sea. Does everyone know if that is tied to the cavern layers number setting or was that just random because of elevation?
Also don't have Iron only copper and silver but I guess this will be more interesting of a game try going leather armor (and many deaths) with the surviving veterans getting better traded stuff and relying on war animals. Animals are also bad for FPS but I try going low numbers and put them on restraints.

Side question: Can you pick fallen fruits and other items out of murky pools without draining them? Can I do it with trained swimmers? It looks ugly with all the stuff inside the pools.

Thanks for any feedback

I saw some post ages that it is very bad for FPS to divert rivers and brooks because of some heavy flow calculations.

Are Aquifers also bad for FPS? Just using for hospital supply no insane water projects.
In past versions I always fully disabled Aquifers. If they arent too bad for FPS I might go with them again else I better get my hospital water from first cavern layer. Usually disable caverns2+3 as well for FPS.

I think the Were-creature change was great to save the noobs. Once you get some experience its not an issue anymore but I remember it causing me some great pain when I started. Sure fun is a part of it but it was probably a bit too scary for new players when a Weregiraffe kills everyone 5 minutes after you started the game.

Have to agree with huge migrant waves being overwhelming for noobs. I think smaller waves would be better or make a setting to limit them max and set the default low.

Overall the defaults are also bad for FPS death. Default embark size should be 2x2, world size small and pop cap 80. If theres no revolutionary change for FPS death that is but it seems there isn't.
Multithreading seems to be outside of the scope of this project. And pathfinding seems to be the most expensive but I guess if there would be a magical solution to this like doing pathfinding less frequent then he would have gone for it already? So I guess we get only tiny constant FPS improvements balancing out the FPS increases for the new features? When I regularly stop playing DF its usually because of FPS death even when I am taking all the precautions (small fort, small world, destroy items QSs...).

Isn't low productivity actually beneficial?


There are so many high productivity jobs pumping out thousands of items that mean either FPS death or unemployed dwarfs.
Used to start with a turkey egg farm not doing that anymore because the number of eggs is just too high and I only use very small farms now.

Thinking of setting up a beekeeping industry just for keeping some dwarfs working. When the basic needs are met and all military set up etc then it gets a bit boring in the fortress.

edit: as for more uses for wax yes that would be nice. Next to the obvious candles maybe you could also use it for coating clothing to make it wear out a little bit less and also maybe to protect against blood/water splatters etc.

Yeah certain design patterns may not make a huge difference in FPS, but every little bit can help if you're dealing with larger forts.  I'd like to see how more efficient ramps versus stairs are, because that's a pattern I use all the time.   

But to be clear to the OP, the quirks you're finding with the Workflow plugin and equipment pickup loops are not a result of fortress design or pathfinding errors.

Looking a bit more into this it seems the problems were from me trying to put all civilians into leather armor with uniforms and there being occasional miners in the squads which I should have prevented. It did not just mess up the 3 miners who were in squads but created equip loops for everybody.
Still does not explain why I can't see some items in my trade outpost (and that was before Mayor appeared and I had no locked doors items were pathable just far away) that happens to me every game. But next fort I keep it simple not doing strange stuff until everything is working then I make a save and I go crazy afterwards. And I am now learning to use manager orders and don't use the Workflow plugin anymore. Will try to use stockpiles only for raw materials and keep everything at the workshops.

Question regarding Miner and Hunter Uniform. Do they exist if they have been a hunter at any point before or is it enough to disable them? I guess I will disable Autolabor/Labormanager again and go back to Dwarf Therapist never had these miner/hunter uniforms issue when I selected workers more carefully.

Having worked on many obsolete legacy business software that one guy wrote over years theres probably only one person on earth who roughly understands the DF source code and that might never change