Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[levraininjaneer]

Hi there

There are plenty of posts and reading material out there on improving FPS. Unfortunately, most of these do not speak to the relative impacts of stuff.

My experience is that number of dwarves outweigh most other factors quite heavily. I know also that a lot of flow can be quite significant, as well as temperature when magma is being moved about.

I recently started a fort on a map with a brook and a nice 10 level waterfall (which was quite a pleasant surprise). My FPS seems quite poor though, even though I have only 50 or so dwarves and not really any of the FPS taboos.

You guys think the waterfall is the culprit?

[Fleeting Frames]

If so, it'd be easy to check - just use dfhack's liquids plugin (default hotkey Alt-L when loo'k'ing) to prevent movement of water.

[feelotraveller]

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: it might not be the only factor but it will be a major contributor.

Grumbling comment: FPS woes really detract from the game for me.  For example, instead of making elaborate self-cleaning multi-leveled magnificent waterfalls/mist generators I find myself inevitably making closed minimal drop set pieces.  Similarly with fortress design - I still dream of the day I can make a fort with multiple major stairways and corridors connecting them on most levels; but with the current state of the game this way lies madness.   

[levraininjaneer]

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: it might not be the only factor but it will be a major contributor.

Grumbling comment: FPS woes really detract from the game for me.  For example, instead of making elaborate self-cleaning multi-leveled magnificent waterfalls/mist generators I find myself inevitably making closed minimal drop set pieces.  Similarly with fortress design - I still dream of the day I can make a fort with multiple major stairways and corridors connecting them on most levels; but with the current state of the game this way lies madness.   

I kinda enjoy FPS as part of the challenge of building a cool Fort. Standard in most of my forts are auto-garbage disposal units to keep item count lower, for example. I enjoy figuring out ways to make pathing more efficient, or optimizing materials transport for building projects.

A mist generator would have been nice, but it is really not necessary.

Anyway: the game sure has lots of quirks, and I suppose one could have pursued the above ambitions without being forced to so by FPS. Maybe someday it will be better...

[Melting Sky]

Is there anything else different about the embark? For instance does it have a labyrinth style cavern system, is the embark larger than normal, are there crazy numbers of trees?

The short answer is that waterfalls do hit fps but in my experience they aren't a huge hit. More like the sort of hit you would take from a half dozen dwarves. You should also take note that the river itself causes an fps hit, but unless you are running on a really slow computer it shouldn't be that noticeable.

I generally embark on a pretty big area consisting of 9 to 12 embark squares with some sort of fun FPS killing feature like a volcano or river and I don't really have to make any concessions for it when it comes to designing my fort. As you noted dwarves are probably the single biggest hit to FPS outside of the HFS. Keeping animal populations and item bloat under control is more important over all than limiting your embark to boring regions. Deciduous forests during fall are probably the single biggest natural embark fps hit you can find other than  maybe a big forked river with multiple waterfalls.

[levraininjaneer]

Cool, thanks man!

I was not actually aiming for a waterfall embark that time, but the idea appeals to me more because of the waterwheel potential than the mist generator one. Although both would be cool.

[StagnantSoul]

Short answer: yes.

Longer answer: it might not be the only factor but it will be a major contributor.

Grumbling comment: FPS woes really detract from the game for me.  For example, instead of making elaborate self-cleaning multi-leveled magnificent waterfalls/mist generators I find myself inevitably making closed minimal drop set pieces.  Similarly with fortress design - I still dream of the day I can make a fort with multiple major stairways and corridors connecting them on most levels; but with the current state of the game this way lies madness.   

With how pathing works at the moment, unless you designated parts of the fortress as wings sort of, with this wing being all the smiths, this one the masons, and so on, it's pretty much useless.