Bay 12 Games Forum

I wouldn't have just put ""Oh, look, it's crazy world now. Nothing makes sense! Alligators live in houses!"" into my work diary.
I'm bugfixing

Speaking of fractals, I used to use this as my dual-monitor-spanned background.

It's from my own Mandelbrot renderer, so I'm quite proud of it.

Too true. You'd definitely want to eliminate cache thrashing from the pathfinder before you multithreaded it.

Quote from: Thief^

Are there any plans to remove the "brook tile" hack and replace it with sloped banks and less than 7/7 water?

[...] Another obstacle is having new moist tiles or tiles with some water without having them having floors on a different Z level.  Brooks are currently handled that way.  I don't like the idea of having 3/7 water a Z level down, although a lot of the streams should probably connect up with the aquifer.  This would make fewer places inhabitable by digging creatures unless the stream were smoothly lowered a bit, but I'm not for turning them into rivers with less water in them since that introduces problems with connecting rivers (would all 3/7 rivers connect to 7/7 rivers in waterfalls?  Otherwise you'd have reverse waterfalls, or you'd have to introduce a 4/7 ground square, which feels like a can of worms) and people walking across a brook should not be in a separate Z level with respect to projectiles/LOS, etc.  People swimming on the surface of a river should probably also be vulnerable to archers, but having an ankle-high brook hide you is worse.

I hadn't thought of joining brooks to rivers, that's a tough one.
This is obviously why you develop DF and not me

You need to use the 'o' menu to allow dwarves to gather things like that from outside IIRC.

Disabling services is all bullcrap janglur...
CPU/cache etc isn't reserved for every process/service etc, it's pretty much just used by the currently active thread.
The majority of a pc's services/processes/threads are actually asleep, not using any cpu or cache. Hell, Windows is pretty aggressive about swapping them out to the pagefile, so they're often not using RAM either. e.g. Antivirus software will be asleep until a file access happens, and DF doesn't do file accesses while running (except autosave, which doesn't really count), so disabling antivirus should make zero difference to the speed of DF.

I strongly suspect you're right about the performance difference on your machine being due to tight ram timings and large cpu cache, and DF doing a lot of random-access stuff. I suspect the way data is organised in memory will cause cache thrashing when pathfinding in some directions, most likely up/down and north/south.

Good cache performance really is a black art.

Sure. It's using the freetype2 renderer, which supports a variety of bitmap fonts as well as truetype.

Will we be able to just use a separate tileset file too? Many tilesets are available as both a "with accented characters" and "with object pictures" download already, so it would be good to just be able to specify both files and have both accents in text and levers etc that look like levers etc.

One oddity I've noticed with PARTIAL:


I have Windows Vista. Normally I have the appearance set to Windows Aero. PARTIAL:0 does not cause flickering.

However, if I change the appearance to Windows Vista Basic, then PARTIAL:0 causes DF to flicker between the current frame and some previous frame. I have no idea why.

I haven't tried with other numbers.

I believe with Aero enabled applications render to an offscreen buffer, which Windows then blits to the screen. With Aero off I think applications render directly to the screen, XP-style. If Windows double-buffers the screen, then having aero disabled means you are rendering to a double-buffer and need to use Partial of 1 or more.

Just a theory.