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[shachar2like]

The world is 1050 years old, generated on the new version.
The embark is large (6x6 or more I don't recall)
but for a text game with minimal graphics I was expecting 10MB uses max...

I'm guessing that the game isn't optimized what so ever

There's absolutely no way DF can use 10 MB of memory, even with a small world (and your world is on the large end, both in terms of history and embark size). Graphics are far from the only thing DF simulates, and everything else requires more memory.

Assuming your embark is 100 z-levels tall (an approximation), you have around 8294400 tiles on your map (6x6x48x48x100). If each tile took one byte to store (and it takes several times that), your local map alone would take around 8 MB to store. Also, the game is definitely optimized some, at least in terms of memory usage - otherwise, map data (and everything else) would require even more memory to load than what you're seeing.

don't give me that bullshit I'm not that dumb
even with 8294400 (8 million) tiles you simply do not save the texture in memory for every single tile which it appears what the game does.
you save the texture once in memory and reference every tile to that texture.

a text game that's barely 20MB and even with textures that are another 20MB big is not suppose to take that much memory.
it just means that the game isn't optimized which is reasonable since this is a one man's project, be it the original game or the add-ons or pack or whatever you call it

[Rose]

You think textures are the only thing that takes memory in a game?

Oh you sweet summer child.

[lethosor]

Like Japa said, it's not storing textures for each tile. It's storing data about each tile.

you save the texture once in memory and reference every tile to that texture.

That's exactly what DF does.

According to DFHack, a map block (1x16x16 tiles) takes 7584 bytes to store (on 64-bit Linux/OS X - it may vary slightly on other platforms/builds). It includes data such as the type of each tile (floor, wall, track, tree, branch, open space, etc. - 695 possibilities total), what kinds of flags it has, whether it's traversable, whether a unit/item/building is occupying it, whether it has an aquifer, its temperature, the IDs of any items present, and some other things I'm not sure about. Some of it is pretty well-optimized in terms of memory consumption, but storing some of these things in memory is necessary to avoid recalculating things to draw every frame. Anyway, your map alone takes roughly 7584*3*3*6*6*100 = 245721600 bytes, or over 200 MB, to store.

[PatrikLundell]

I suggest taking a look at DF's data structures as deduced by DFHack. If you still think DF is completely stupid in its memory usage you can bring it up for discussion in a thread of your own, as that topic has nothing to do with the Starter Pack.

[PeridexisErrant]

Let's stay on topic everyone, and don't feed the trolls.

[Salkryn]

Under the advanced tab of the launcher, there's an option for processor priority. I was just wondering how much difference changing that makes. I'm trying to figure out ways to get better performance out of DF. My computer claims it's not using that much processor, hd, or memory space, but the game tends to slow to a crawl once a few years go by. I know there are some things that can be done from a fortress design perspective to help with that, but I'd also like to know about options to allow my computer to allocate more resources to DF, since it seems to be using very little now.

[Snafu]

Priority is processor time/speed over RAM, as that's what drags FPS down. Multicore threading would help a lot, but Toady would have to rewrite the entire engine + game code & he's said (repeatedly) he's not going to do that; neither will he release the code to other devs under OSS license (I think - needs checking) for them to work on it as a community project. Fairynuff: his choice & understandable given that this is pretty much his entire income

Forget GFX speed/RAM as they don't contribute much (if anything) to the engine. On a modern system OS sounds (eg Soundsense) should be farmed off to another thread anyway, & they're not that engine-intrusive in vanilla LNP..

I may be wrong in some aspects of the above, but I think I covered the major areas (I am /not/ a s/w dev, but I picked up a bit from reading historical (& some hysterical) posts)

[Salkryn]

Ah, that makes sense. I notice that it never uses more than like 13% of my processor speed, which makes sense if it only uses one core.

[ab9rf]

Forget GFX speed/RAM as they don't contribute much (if anything) to the engine. On a modern system OS sounds (eg Soundsense) should be farmed off to another thread anyway, & they're not that engine-intrusive in vanilla LNP..

I may be wrong in some aspects of the above, but I think I covered the major areas (I am /not/ a s/w dev, but I picked up a bit from reading historical (& some hysterical) posts)

I honestly don't know why Toady includes the priority option; it will not have any effect unless the system running DF is insanely overloaded. I think it's just there to satisfy people who have magical attitudes toward scheduler priorities (a common enough problem in the gaming community). I suppose there might be some merit for people who do livestreaming, especially on systems with a relatively small number of cores, and thus might have been slightly useful in rare cases more than five years ago.

The factors that most clearly impact DF performance are single-core CPU speed, the size of your CPU caches (mainly L3 cache size) and the speed of your system memory. GPU performance is almost totally irrelevant. It's generally quite safe to heavily overclock with DF (at least on Intel chips) because the thermal manager can shuffle the single high-load DF thread from core to core and thus avoid overheating the chip as a whole. My system usually runs DF at max overclock (35T vs baseline of 24T) without making the rest of the CPU really break a sweat.

[mifki]

I honestly don't know why Toady includes the priority option; it will not have any effect unless the system running DF is insanely overloaded. I think it's just there to satisfy people who have magical attitudes toward scheduler priorities (a common enough problem in the gaming community). I suppose there might be some merit for people who do livestreaming, especially on systems with a relatively small number of cores, and thus might have been slightly useful in rare cases more than five years ago.

Well, back then multicore CPUs were not so common, I guess.

[DAOWAce]

Hey, you're all wonderful.

That is all.

[Salkryn]

Forget GFX speed/RAM as they don't contribute much (if anything) to the engine. On a modern system OS sounds (eg Soundsense) should be farmed off to another thread anyway, & they're not that engine-intrusive in vanilla LNP..

I may be wrong in some aspects of the above, but I think I covered the major areas (I am /not/ a s/w dev, but I picked up a bit from reading historical (& some hysterical) posts)

I honestly don't know why Toady includes the priority option; it will not have any effect unless the system running DF is insanely overloaded. I think it's just there to satisfy people who have magical attitudes toward scheduler priorities (a common enough problem in the gaming community). I suppose there might be some merit for people who do livestreaming, especially on systems with a relatively small number of cores, and thus might have been slightly useful in rare cases more than five years ago.

The factors that most clearly impact DF performance are single-core CPU speed, the size of your CPU caches (mainly L3 cache size) and the speed of your system memory. GPU performance is almost totally irrelevant. It's generally quite safe to heavily overclock with DF (at least on Intel chips) because the thermal manager can shuffle the single high-load DF thread from core to core and thus avoid overheating the chip as a whole. My system usually runs DF at max overclock (35T vs baseline of 24T) without making the rest of the CPU really break a sweat.

I've never tried overclocking, and I'm not sure I trust myself to do it without irrevocably messing up my computer.

For an actual pack-related note, I've noticed the hide engravings option is now off by default. I'm not sure when that change occurred, but it wasn't that way in the last version I played very actively. I thought some sort of massacre had gone on in my dining hall the first time I saw the engravings. Didn't help that the stone that made up most of the floor was red.

[DAOWAce]

I've never tried overclocking, and I'm not sure I trust myself to do it without irrevocably messing up my computer.

Overclocking has never been as easy as it is today.

It's basically changing one setting (the multiplier), and hoping it works.  If not, no harm done (well, besides your BIOS resetting because the overclock failed, but unless your board is crap that should only be until reboot since it boots stock but keeps all your settings so you can tweak them to lower the OC).   Hell, even some boards have built in overclocking presets, or automatic overclocking.  Literally anyone can do it now.

Course, this all depends on your hardware, namely motherboard and CPU.  If you're knowledgable you'll be able to tweak things perfectly, but even as a total novice you can do quite a lot just by finding some overclocking guides for your motherboard/CPU.

The only irrevocable damage you could cause is increasing the voltage too much to the point where it damages the chip.  Other than that, it's just long term degradation (lower lifespan) from running over spec, which all of us OCers deal with.

[PeridexisErrant]

Quick question I just remembered. Is there a reason that the init.txt setting MACRO_MS either isn't A) just set to 0 or B) able to be set from the launcher. I always forget to set it and then the first few macros I use end up being at the stupid slow default speed.

Huh.  I could have sworn it was, but apparently not!  Anyway, it'll be set to zero by default in all future releases.

[mross]

DT that comes with this can't set nicknames, everything else works though.