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Author Topic: FPS death  (Read 21541 times)

NW_Kohaku

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #30 on: June 03, 2015, 05:26:44 pm »

I did not speak clearly enough.  We can have thousands of items in the game at one time without tanking FPS, so the FPS impact of a single item is basically nil.  To gain significant FPS reduction via items would need to create tens of thousands of items.  So cleaning out 10 here 100 there is counting pennies, unless you are talking about rotting items (clothes, remains).  Did food in stockpiles reduce FPS less than food sitting on the floor rotting? In 18 pages I didn't stop to read every word >.>  It also seems like save/quit and reload is required after destroying a large batch of items to properly "reclaim" the FPS.  By and large, empty spaces, repeating bridges, and caravans were the real FPS bandits (unless you go hog-wild on item creation). 
 
If I understand your science correctly, you were creating batches of the same item.  Thus, each time you tried to do something with a goblet/stone, EVERY goblet had to have a path check for it.  In a proper fort, we don't have 10,000 of a single item- we don't even have 1000 of a single item typically (outside of stones).  Did you ever try a test where each sweatshop produced a different (non-rotting) item, but kept the overall item count the same? Would 10k goblets create the same FPS issues as 1k goblets, 1k stone, 1k logs, 1k (stacks) of bolts, 1k shields, 1k picks, 1k bags, 1k mechanisms, 1k blocks, 1k soap.  For just idling I'd doubt it would be so, but it would mean that during play limiting the total list size of any one category would be more important than total item count.

That isn't the case. 

Nobody was pathing for these boulders or goblets. 

They were simply sitting in place when the tests were taking place.  I did not count the FPS drop-off from the need to pathfind, as that was not the purpose of the test.  This was purely the existence of the items, themselves, all of which were sitting in just 16 piles, which is perfectly consistent with an undump or quantum stockpile, so your claim that it would have been better with a quantum stockpile is unfounded.  I was not moving any of these items to some giant stockpile area and back, they were simply sitting there, not being pathed to or used in any way. (At least until mass dumping and elimination, whose main point was to test "contraction", and whether the game recovers FPS after items are destroyed, where FPS measures were primarily taken after all dumping and atom smashing was complete.)

In short, a quantum stockpile with 10,000 items on it will have a noticeable impact on FPS even without anyone trying to pathfind to it at all.   This does not have to all be of the same item.  This is merely the effects of memory size bloat on tens of thousands of total items that have quality.  (Qualityless items like boulders are less notable by about an order of magnitude, while rottable items like corpse parts are significantly more lag-inducing than mere qualitied items. Dead creatures are never removed from the list, and eat significant FPS forever.)

That said, there is certainly a significant improvement in performance when a quantum stockpile is used with regards to pathfinding, which is certainly capable of being the single largest drain on FPS in many forts that are not optimized for pathfinding or which do not have significant item quantities, and if you are worried about FPS, quantum stockpiling what you need helps a great deal.  However, saying that it is "A common myth is that more items=lower FPS, but this just isn't so," is just plain false.

Also, if you look over Loud Wispers's Silentthunders, he was talking about how his drink supplies had dropped from lack of trade to a "mere" 5400 from previously keeping over 12k drink, alone.  (One of his screenshots posts over 50k drink...) (And he reports a consistent 3 FPS for the past few decades of fort time, so...)  I have seen people with hundreds of thousands of boulders from positively huge megaproject excavations. 

There certainly are people who will produce 10k cloth items "just to keep their dwarves busy" and clear out whole z-levels to stockpile it all, and hundreds of thousands or even millions of items total, and then wonder where their FPS went. 
« Last Edit: June 04, 2015, 10:27:22 am by NW_Kohaku »
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Alfrodo

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #31 on: June 03, 2015, 06:02:12 pm »

Quote
There certainly are people who will produce 10k cloth items "just to keep their dwarves busy" and clear out whole z-levels to stockpile it all, and hundreds of thousands or even millions of items total, and then wonder where their FPS went.

Happened to me once, kept trying to make a perfect triple masterwork black dress. (Masterwork cloth + Masterwork dress+Masterwork dye)

I abandoned about 3 minutes after I got it, with like 10 FPS. (I normally work with 100-200, keep in mind.)

To this day I still have no idea why I did that, the dresses were also worth upwards of 2,000 dorfbucks.
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Loci

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #32 on: June 03, 2015, 10:15:52 pm »

However, a common myth is that more items=lower FPS, but this just isn't so.  Items that degrade (corpses, socks) will incur FPS penalties, but static items like logs, boulders, crafts, etc won't.

I invite anyone who thinks this is a "myth" to open up the stocks screen and navigate down past a category containing 1000s of items. The noticeable UI lag you experience is the result of walking and sorting those items (presumably only once) *while nothing else is happening*. That lag is much harder to detect when the simulation is actually running, but it is still there, eating at your FPS anytime a dwarf wants to select one of those items. 
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Molly Renata

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #33 on: June 03, 2015, 11:23:57 pm »

However, a common myth is that more items=lower FPS, but this just isn't so.  Items that degrade (corpses, socks) will incur FPS penalties, but static items like logs, boulders, crafts, etc won't.

I invite anyone who thinks this is a "myth" to open up the stocks screen and navigate down past a category containing 1000s of items. The noticeable UI lag you experience is the result of walking and sorting those items (presumably only once) *while nothing else is happening*. That lag is much harder to detect when the simulation is actually running, but it is still there, eating at your FPS anytime a dwarf wants to select one of those items.

This is something that happens a lot for me, mostly with wood and stone. It is excruciatingly annoying.

Also, I should probably clarify: I only really have FPS fluctuation issues with 40d. Newer versions (31.25 and 34.11) run quite smoothly most of the time, with only occasional issues like items and merchant pathfinding. (I leave the FPS capped at 200 most of the time, and it usually takes quite some time for a fort to drop below the cap.) My playstyle isn't that much different between versions (aside from the obvious version differences), so I don't see why that would be the problem...
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Molly Renata, also known as gyppygirl2021.
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Arcvasti

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #34 on: June 03, 2015, 11:45:10 pm »

I thought 10-20 FPS was normal. Then I realized most people don't play DF on a potato netbook. I play DF with a book in one hand and the other hand resting on the pause button so I can occasionally pause to check how things are going. The alternitive is me compulsively checking all the menus for signs of progress every three seconds and then getting frustrated because nothing's getting done because I keep pausing. I once tried playing DF on an actual desktop computer and was amazed at how fast the little buggers moved. The increased FPS led to the death of my largest and most successful fort because my reaction speed couldn't keep up with how quickly the invaders moved and I couldn't activate the drowning trap in time.
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gunpowdertea

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #35 on: June 04, 2015, 06:50:36 am »

I thought 10-20 FPS was normal. Then I realized most people don't play DF on a potato netbook. I play DF with a book in one hand and the other hand resting on the pause button so I can occasionally pause to check how things are going. The alternitive is me compulsively checking all the menus for signs of progress every three seconds and then getting frustrated because nothing's getting done because I keep pausing. I once tried playing DF on an actual desktop computer and was amazed at how fast the little buggers moved. The increased FPS led to the death of my largest and most successful fort because my reaction speed couldn't keep up with how quickly the invaders moved and I couldn't activate the drowning trap in time.

Yes... I also find too high FPS really stressful (netbook player...). My play stile is to let DF run in the background and check ever so often, when bored with other things - like reviewing scientific articles that would be an F if they were a lab report from a first year student, stop wasting my time already, you stupid gits!
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Libash_Thunderhead

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #36 on: June 04, 2015, 11:41:03 pm »

I used to play at 10 fps, until I figured out one year in game means 11 hours in real life (without pausing)...
« Last Edit: June 04, 2015, 11:43:44 pm by Libash_Thunderhead »
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #37 on: June 05, 2015, 02:54:01 am »

I used to play at 10 fps, until I figured out one year in game means 11 hours in real life (without pausing)...

Like the others who play at these FPS, I tend to simply leave the game running while doing something else, like sleeping or reading or, say, reading things on Bay12! (Only eats one core, anyway...)
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SimRobert2001

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #38 on: June 05, 2015, 03:34:39 am »

However, a common myth is that more items=lower FPS, but this just isn't so. 

It is so.

Could it be both? 3 to 4k of logs sitting out in the open, getting updated every time it rains, a few hundred open stock pile slots looking at eack of the 20k items at a few hundred calculations per second involving pathfinding,  temperature, coatings, ect.  It seems like lots of items will eat your fps. It just takes above 7k or so to start being an issue, depending on location, type, ect.

For me below 20 tends to be unplayable. things just take so bloody long.
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Tyyr

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #39 on: June 05, 2015, 09:08:00 am »

I keep the game locked to 30 fps at maximum just to keep things from going haywire. My home PC is a beast so a 60-80 dwarf fort will run at very high FPS. However when I take the fort to my laptop the fps will drop pretty hard. Limiting the game to 30 keeps it fairly consistent between them. That said, when I get down to 10 fps or lower on my laptop that's pretty much FPS dead as far as I'm concerned.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #40 on: June 05, 2015, 03:03:10 pm »

However, a common myth is that more items=lower FPS, but this just isn't so. 

It is so.

Could it be both? 3 to 4k of logs sitting out in the open, getting updated every time it rains, a few hundred open stock pile slots looking at eack of the 20k items at a few hundred calculations per second involving pathfinding,  temperature, coatings, ect.  It seems like lots of items will eat your fps. It just takes above 7k or so to start being an issue, depending on location, type, ect.

For me below 20 tends to be unplayable. things just take so bloody long.

It is certainly both.  Pathfinding en masse for large numbers of items like boulders will certainly tank your FPS, although that is not a constant behavior unless you have a megaproject going or tremendous amounts of masonry jobs. 

Pathfinding, in general, can be the single greatest drain on FPS.

However, FPS drain is the sum of the total number of things the game needs to process per-frame.  Total item number adds to this, even if not as much as pathfinding, so it shouldn't be ignored as though if you reduce pathfinding drain, you instantly recover all lost FPS. 
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Goatmaan

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #41 on: June 08, 2015, 01:51:35 pm »

See my "sub 5 fps quest" thread for some details

Bottom line was I had OVER 22 THOUSAND LOGS
20 thousand meals
30 thousand drinks
15 k cloth
5-15k leather
30 to 50 of every clothing item cloth/yarn/leather
10 to 30 masterwork steel armour (all pieces)
10 to 30 materwork weapons (steel/silver)
100 legendary military in all masterwork
506? Total dwarfs.

The only time I got 5 fps steady?
Having 30 +5 engravers go at a new housing block.
200 6*6 rooms, 2x thick walls, blocks of 10 rooms. back to back
2 and 3 wide hallways, with up/down stairs at regular intervals. 
Not sure of total space, lets just say I had to zoom
Out a lot to see all 200 rooms ;)           
Undesignating chunks
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #42 on: June 08, 2015, 02:02:48 pm »

See my "sub 5 fps quest" thread for some details

Bottom line was I had OVER 22 THOUSAND LOGS
20 thousand meals
30 thousand drinks
15 k cloth
5-15k leather
30 to 50 of every clothing item cloth/yarn/leather
10 to 30 masterwork steel armour (all pieces)
10 to 30 materwork weapons (steel/silver)
100 legendary military in all masterwork
506? Total dwarfs.

The only time I got 5 fps steady?
Having 30 +5 engravers go at a new housing block.
200 6*6 rooms, 2x thick walls, blocks of 10 rooms. back to back
2 and 3 wide hallways, with up/down stairs at regular intervals. 
Not sure of total space, lets just say I had to zoom
Out a lot to see all 200 rooms ;)           
Undesignating chunks

You need to spend more time walling off the HFS.  When I tried that, I had (thanks to modded creatures just to test things out) over 100,000 pieces of clown corpse littering my construction areas.  I had to eventually give up because dwarves, even modded to 0 speed, could not clean the clown body parts off the walls before more clowns spawned and were killed, spilling body parts all over the construction site. 

Thanks to using several thousand powerful pets controlled by meeting area as my main military, my FPS was about 1/4 a frame per second.  I would designate, then go to bed, and see what happened in the morning. 

(Keep in mind, every dead creature is still in memory, and still eating up CPU time per frame.)
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
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Goatmaan

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #43 on: June 08, 2015, 02:05:02 pm »

Sorry stupid phone wont let me back to bottom of post!

Anyhow I regained some fps EACH TIME. I undesignated
a chunk of that space!! Lets NOT talk about
The stupid pathing with dwarfs walking by 100+ tiles
Of designations just to get to the top left one!!!!




    Goatmaan
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Robsoie

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Re: FPS death
« Reply #44 on: June 29, 2015, 11:38:43 am »

just got a case of FPS death linked to pathfinding.

Some moronic dwarf climbed on top of a wall, despite there's nothing to do there.
Then suddenly "fey mood" for that dwarf. And for some reason that dwarf forgot he can just jump down from that 1 tile high wall he climbed on top.
Result : game is unplayably slow now due to buggy pathfind calls.

I managed to save this fort only thanks to the DFHack teleport script

with getting the ID of the unit under the cursor, then moving the cursor where i want to teleport and obtain the X/Y/Z coordinate, then effectively teleport that bugged dwarf.

Just doing that solved the unplayable slow problem and allowed me to play again instead of DF crawling so much under the buggy pathfinding calls.

DFHack is really awesome, thanks a lot to those devs.

I really hope Toady will find a way to stop those buggy pathfinding calls that cripple the game when you have even a single dwarf stuck, not everyone use DFHack and without it to teleport an unit out of its stuck location your fort is just dead when it happens (and considering df2014 dwarves will climb randomly to location they have nothing to do there, it isn't that rare of a bug).
« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 11:43:38 am by Robsoie »
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