Bay 12 Games Forum

Which sort of didn't happen for games, most games actually have a similar CPU load as DF, with one thread that taxing 100% of a CPU core and a few more sitting well below there (physics rendering beside).

A lot of game engines are three or less "main" threads thanks to the xbox 360, which effectively has a hyperthreaded tri-core cpu. It just wasn't worth redesigning for mass-threading when you could offload rendering and physics to other threads and use up all the available cpu power in the console. The PS3 was unhelpful in this regard also, despite being effectively an 8 core CPU its weird split architechture meant that code written for it wasn't ported to PC.

This is changing now, with the new consoles out the big AAA cross-platform game engines will restructure themselves to use 8 cores, as that's what both the XBOne and the PS4 have.

Incidentally they also both have an APU architecture, so I wouldn't discount APUs from PCs just yet, the high-end AMD APUs are already on par with the consoles (no surprise given the consoles contain AMD APUs). It wouldn't take much more advancement to render dedicated graphics cards obsolete for everyone except the "extreme" gamers. Graphics cards would go the way of sound cards...

correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think "cin >> totbooks;" will read an actual EOF character, so "totbooks == EOF" will never be true. I'm not sure feof will work either given it tests the C stdin not the C++ cin stream.

Supposedly the correct thing to do is:
if (cin >> totbooks)
{
 // read succeeded
}or
if (!(cin >> totbooks))
{
 // read failed
}

That looks like the recommended system requirements from a computer game box?

The laptop's WiFi likely has a very tall antenna each side of the screen. Much better than a raisin-sized USB thing.

As for the capture card, won't the onboard sound be fine? Dedicated sound cards are pretty much considered a great aste of money these days

I'd personally drop the soundcard and replace the WiFi USB poppet with a proper WiFi card with antennas. Or just cable the damn thing to the router for a fraction of the cost and better reliability.

The 660 is slightly old now, still good but you might consider the 750ti instead, similar performance IIRC and a hell of a lot quieter.

IIRC The game has a minimum grid size of 80x25, which works out as 16 pixel tiles for your resolution of 1280. The only way to zoom in is to use a bigger window and/or bigger tileset

There are some large tilesets here, listed with the minimum resolution needed: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Tileset_repository

Graknorke, what language are you using? If it's C++, the (new) C++11 random library has std::normal_distribution to do that kind of thing.

Incidentally, if you're still using rand() in C++ code, STOP. It's one of the worst random generators ever created. Do yourself a favour and learn the new C++ random library.