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[madmarshman]

Thanks for your reply. I had done some homework before I posted, Ive been doing 2x2 embarks and trying to not have dead ends or excesive items in stock etc. I think my problem is I'm spoilt, I have a beast of a gaming PC and can run at max FPS continuously, so when I move onto my sofa with an old Laptop I notice the difference. I will just have to put up with reduced frames or get my ares up to my desk top PC. I have tried accelerated, but dont like regressing to older versions, also I like to have temp etc turned on as I would hate to miss out on burning to death. Thanks for your work and your help. Merry Christmas.

[madmarshman]

one last question, what are your views on using Masterworks just for the fps gains?

[Amostubal]

I can answer that.  masterworks has minimal FPS increasers, primarily DFHack item removers and item destroying reducing buildings such as the crematory, along with buildings to accomplish functions that normally reduce fps like the magma wells instead of using pump stacks.  Additionally mass creation allowing raw resources to be pushed into large batches of items through everything from Modest Mod inclusions and batch shops, all designed to make the game faster as the need for multiple jobs to accomplish the same task are reduced.  Other additions such as colored bricks and usage of blocks to make furniture means reduced mining and decreased rock needs for a sustained fortress.

all and all its not the mods you have that determine FPS.  Its primarily the complexity of the fortress, size of embark, age and size of the world, number of civs active in the world, etc.  The number of units and the number of jobs currently waiting to be completed also has a huge impact on a map.  As I have debugged many maps, the worst offenses are:
setting 1000+ stone to be smoothed,
setting every tree on a map to bee chopped,
digging out multiple (3 floor plus 100x100 plus) large chambers,
opening up the caverns and hell (which never made sense to me they were always open just invisible, suddenly they are a problem when you make them visible),
too many jobs not enough workers,
Fire,
Magma pumped to the surface,
Water dropping any distance,
mist, steam, miasma, any other form of gaseous flow,
overtly spread splatter including raining blood etc.
too many units whether idle or not.

and that last one is the worst problem... generally speaking if 50 units drop your fps from 100 to 50; 100 units will drop your fps to 25; 150 units will drop your fps to 10.  and that includes all units, including the pets, attacking armies, random creatures roaming around.   And some units cause more havoc to the FPS especially if they cause any of the stuff above that such as fire etc.  The only way to compensate is to have a system that works faster, more cpu power to do the path computation faster.  everything else, item count etc is minor, you can fix that.  I work on a laptop on DF all the time, It doesn't matter how much other stuff I'm doing at any moment.  The FPS is going to decline at a steady rate with the increase of units on any given map. i.e. deal with the other stuff the best you can, but it wont matter if you are getting to the 10s by the time you hit 100 units, it wont matter if you have 100 items or 100 million items.  Unit FPS reduction is the biggest frame killer once you avoid the other stuff.

[madmarshman]

Thanks for your input.

[fluffyshambler]

Was reading about pigs and found out that they (along with honey badgers, mongooses, and hedgehogs) are immune to king cobra venom. Thought that would be a good little fix and would fit in this mod.

[Taffer]

Was reading about pigs and found out that they (along with honey badgers, mongooses, and hedgehogs) are immune to king cobra venom. Thought that would be a good little fix and would fit in this mod.

To be honest, this is the kind of fix I'm trying to avoid. Sorry! I actually stripped a number of these little fixes out of Revised already. I just don't see much value in bringing things closer to real life, especially when what I'm fixing isn't something most people will notice or care about.

Thank you kindly for the suggestion, though! Perhaps you can suggest it to Toady instead, if you haven't already.

[☼Another☼]

Goblins are already playable in vanilla, that's not a feature of this mod.

Thank you kindly for the correction!

This is only partial true (at least to my knowledge). Goblins are only playable if they have integrated into non-goblin civs (generally short history worlds have goblins unplayable).

opening up the caverns and hell (which never made sense to me they were always open just invisible, suddenly they are a problem when you make them visible),

Amostubal, this is likely because that is now a valid area for dwarves to path, whereas it was previously treated just like a layer filled with stone.

[Taffer]

The final batch of completely unfinished descriptions is going much faster than it normally would, thanks to the contributions I got for them already. My final round of editing and polishing is going quickly as well. ETA for it all is by the end of the month, I estimate (and that's a pretty conservative estimate, I edited/polished the descriptions of 4 files this weekend alone)

To quote a favorite author of mine:

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

I've been working on this a ridiculously long time, and I do think I'm nearing completion, but the end of the month was too hopeful. The major reason for all the delays has been editing rounds: going over the descriptions already done yet again. I think I've had three or four in total.

I'm on the "final" one now: that editing round is done up to creature_other. Then there's files that I haven't started yet, but most of those have had contributions from another person already that I can edit, and I'm getting better at writing them in any case. Any more editing rounds will be done for future updates, not for this one.

Fun question: is Today's "fox squirrel" a fantasy creature, or an actual fox squirrel? The wiki has a picture of an actual fox squirrel, but the description and file it's in (creature_other is otherwise all invented creatures) imply a fictional creature. I've chosen to interpet it as a fox/squirrel hybrid, because that's more fun. Fox squirrels are hardly distinguishable from red squirrels in any case.

While I'm wary of very minor bug fixes, I'll be making an exception for cave dragons: they'll lose their (flightless) wings. Today's description strongly implies they're just cave adapted dragons, and regular dragons don't have wings. The inconsistency bugs me, it affects the descriptions, and I prefer my dragons wingless in any case. Toady seems to agree, considering neither of them can actually fly.

This is only partial true (at least to my knowledge). Goblins are only playable if they have integrated into non-goblin civs (generally short history worlds have goblins unplayable).

Thanks for the correction! I was confused at the time myself: I should have looked into it further. I'll add looking into this to my list.

[Taffer]

A medium-sized woman dedicated to the ruthless protection of nature. She has smooth, hairless skin and searching, eldritch eyes. Her kind have a reputation for grace, beauty, and cruelty.

Still progressing slowly. A sincere thank you to everyone who likes my mod enough to read this: modding should publicly speed up dramatically when I'm not dealing with writer's block, and I can do mass editing and fixing on the command line rather than description by description editing in a plain text editor. It's especially helpful that the artifact release didn't change the raws much at all (easy to catch up), and that at least a few of the bugs I deal with are likely to be fixed sometime this cycle.

I thought I'd take a moment to complain about kobolds, because there's little clear artistic direction from Toady in this regard other than a bad drawing and the RAWs. The intelligent species require more care than normal and there's high probability of deviating from Toady's vision slightly (like the eldritch eyes referenced above), but this is especially the case with kobolds.

They're supposedly "reptilian mammals", but the only reptilian traits in evidence are that they lay eggs. They don't at all resemble cutebolds. My head-canon has always had them resemble this or this (with yellow eyes), but they don't have floppy ears and they aren't even covered in hair like most mammals (BODY_HAIR_TISSUE_LAYERS). Apparently they're brown hobbits that lay eggs and have yellow eyes, which is...well, I can't admit I'm terribly impressed by the image.

I might be modifying them accordingly. Big, floppy ears, a tail, and large eyes it is, and probably either fur to match my own vision or scales to match D&D and the egg laying. Then they'll at least be cute, which better matches fan canon. Or just write something that matches Toady's lore better.

[KillzEmAllGod]

Wasn't Toady going for the whole snake flying dragon and just left out the wings for dragons because flying was silly?

[Taffer]

Wasn't Toady going for the whole snake flying dragon and just left out the wings for dragons because flying was silly?

Probably, yes. I don't know that I've read him state that anywhere, but it's reasonable to infer.

[Taffer]

Been working on this more, slowly preparing for release. The description is getting cleaned up, some of the final descriptions are being done, and I've started going through the files to update them for the new version.

I've also been tearing things out of the mod, now that I have a better idea of what kinds of fixes I want to include. Most of the plant changes have been removed, for example. Sorry Button!

[Taffer]

So I ran into the hake fish's description while working my way through creature_small_ocean, one of the last files on my list for the description update.

An oceanic fish.

Sorry, Toady, but this one is particularly bad. This is about as bad as the eagle's description.

A small bird of prey.

Just a point of amusement, as it humors me and reminds me why I'm working on this.

[flyteofheart]

Do you think this mod would work with other mods? Specifically ones that add new creatures, civs, etc.

I really love the attention to detail this has on improving vanilla. And iv always agreed that bite attacks from humanoids were silly and agree with most of your other flavor changes.

Iv been using your tileset since I started playing DF, so thanks for that too! Its consistently the most faithful to ASCII and nice looking. Feels right.

[Taffer]

Do you think this mod would work with other mods? Specifically ones that add new creatures, civs, etc.

Yes, but you'll have to get comfortable with something like Meld or WinMerge. This will make it easy to see exactly what my mod changed and what another mod changed when we edit the same file, and merge both sets of changes together. Much of the time it will be fine, provided you do this.

I really love the attention to detail this has on improving vanilla. And iv always agreed that bite attacks from humanoids were silly and agree with most of your other flavor changes.

Iv been using your tileset since I started playing DF, so thanks for that too! Its consistently the most faithful to ASCII and nice looking. Feels right.

Thank you kindly for the show of support! I hope you enjoy the next version, whenever it comes out!