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[Riemann]

In terms of features the last few builds have rocked. Humans are back, the new info when chosing a fortress site is great etc... Awesome work.

I just wanted to point out that since fire started being introduced the game has slowed down dramaticially. It's not noticable on my desktop (Athalon 64 3000+) but on the laptop (1.7 GHZ Pentium M) it's almost unplayable.

Since the first fire build, by winter of year one (still just 8 or 9 dwarves) it runs at abount the same speed that older builds would run a fort with 150 or so dwarves.

[segmose]

Riemann, I noticed that the game has slowed down a lot too, 16 fps on a Athlon 2800+, Radeon 9600.
115 dwarfs, 215 animals, 3636 food and unending amounds of other goods.
This is now my main concern for the game.

[ December 16, 2006: Message edited by: segmose ]

[Carlos Gustavos]

It the same for me. It seems to run about as slow as if I had a hundred dwarfs when I've just started a new fortress.

[Toady One]

For the version I'm putting up in a bit, I've added a few init options to remove temperature and weather effects.  When I'm starting out, I get a change of about 15 FPS from turning off the weather, and maybe 2 FPS from turning off the temperature, if anything.  There aren't a lot of game objects when you are starting out, so I'm not sure where this slowdown is coming from.  It makes sense that temperature slows it down in larger fortresses.  Turning it off made a slight difference here, maybe it'll be more effective when you try it.

In general, it's not an easy thing to optimize -- there are just a lot of numbers to crunch.  The current version already skips updates when it doesn't need to make them, but I might be able to squeeze a little more out of it.  Weather is the same way.

[Toady One]

New fix version up.

[OldMiner]

I'm afraid I've seldom actually neded to do any complex optimizations, so this is more parroting advice I've read and not tested...  But, what sort of profilers do you have available?

You had said previously you were using MS Vistual Studio to edit the project, but I know I've seen VS set up to compile using mingw before, so it's possible you're using partially a gnu toolchain.  And, if that's the case, you can always compile dwarf fort with gprof support built in.  Although a little crytpic, gprof logging doesn't slow down most programs noticably (especially for just testing purposes), and it can give a pretty good idea of what's occupying most of the processing time.  (And gprof's output can be used by the compiler in future compiles to improve optimization a little.)

In the case of using a straight Microsoft toolchain, are there any free or cheap profilers available? (Or profilers Toady might have access to for free due to his educational duties?)  I know I've heard of some tools which run in the area of multiple thousands of dollars, but they clearly didn't leave that strong of a mark on me as I can't even remember a single name. =/  Perhaps I'm too Linux-centric.

[Toady One]

I'm using MSVC 6 by itself.  The profiler that comes with that does not function...  I've heard that it has trouble with OpenGL in general, though I'm not sure exactly what's going on.  I don't know of any profilers that work with MSVC 6 that I can grab, other than clunky/slow copy paste stuff that isn't much better than the things I've written myself.

[Riemann]

I turned on the FPS counter and the framerate in the recent versions seems ok. But I cannot help but think the pace of the game is somehow much slower. By that I mean while the number of frames per second is normal, the number of actual game steps per second seems far less. The dwarves all seem to move at a slower pace and actions take longer despite the framerate staying up at 30-45.

Ah, I dunno. Maybe it's all in my head.

[AlStar]

Are you giving them booze? Dwarves that havn't had a drink in a while will move and work more slowly.

[Griz]

I haven't played since a few versions ago and everything definitely seems slower now. high-agility guys no longer zip around the map, legendary miners are mining slower, and it seems to take longer to run through a month. it's not a lack of alcohol because I have plenty, and it's not being CPU-limited because the game is only using 15-20%.

edit: projectiles in flight are also considerably slower than before.

[ December 19, 2006: Message edited by: Griz ]

[John Hopoate]

quote:Originally posted by Griz:
<STRONG>I haven't played since a few versions ago and everything definitely seems slower now. high-agility guys no longer zip around the map, legendary miners are mining slower, and it seems to take longer to run through a month. it's not a lack of alcohol because I have plenty, and it's not being CPU-limited because the game is only using 15-20%.

edit: projectiles in flight are also considerably slower than before.

[ December 19, 2006: Message edited by: Griz ]</STRONG>

It's about 15% slower because you didn't edit the init.txt file and disable the temperature and weather features from the game which IMO slow the game down by approximately 15% (I have a P4 1.8 and 512mb ram). Toady's planned bloats seem wonderful in theory but the question must be asked, "why can't an ASCII game run properly on a semi-modern computer?". I'm worried that the Dwarf Fortress will be "bloated" to the extent that I can't run it once I get to 150+ dwarfs.

[Pod]

Don't judge a book by it's cover:

aka, just because it's draw (with openGL) in ASCII, it doesn't mean there's a huge amount of calculation going on underneath the hood.

[Capntastic]

I have a 'decent' desktop by last year's standards, and DF has been running fine for me alongside Firefox, AIM, IRC, and winamp- at an average of about 35fps.   There's occasional slowdown, but nothing drastic.

I can imagine Toady eventually cleaning up the code, and generally oiling some joints to make the game a lot smoother- like he did with offloading stuff in world generation.

[lumin]

Building a world seems to go much faster now, especially during the offloading data part.

[Riemann]

World building is much faster, but I am quite sure actual gameplay is much slower. My machine is an Athalon 64 3000+ with 2 GB of RAM. I think there must be something wrong under the hood because the game is nowhere near pegging CPU usage.

I think, as has been noted above, the most glaring example of the slowdown is the speed of projectiles. Catapult shots just ooze through the air now. And it takes much longer realtime to get through a couple years of gametime.