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[Lav]

It has been demonstrated reliably that a larger world means significantly lower FPS in Fortress Mode, as the game needs to keep track of many more factors, objects and events worldwide.

So what I'd like to see in the game is "Static World" option which would essentially turn off the dynamic world calculations during Fortress mode gameplay.

This option probably won't be useful for people who like to play many games in the same world, with reclaims, bouts of Adventure mode and the like. But I suspect that a large majority of generated worlds are only ever played once. Tracking world events for such gameplays is simply not that important, while FPS improvement can be quite noticeable.

I really don't mind if my events will be generated by a RNG instead of a deeply sophisticated world simulation code. In fact I would gladly exchange all that sophistication for a 50% FPS increase in later years of my fortress. Because really, all that sophistication is mostly wasted - I only ever interact with 0.00...01% of what the game is calculating behind the scenes.

[wilsonns]

I guess the game doesn't keep calculating everything every single time increment. It is all calculated at once during the season change... I guess so.

[NullForceOmega]

I can understand the desire behind this request, but this simply isn't going to be viable in the future.  The long-term plan has always been for the players actions in fortress and adventure mode to have actual impact on the generated world, and for the world to change around the player.  If such a feature were added it would be, to all intents and purposes, gutting the core aspects of the simulation.

[Lav]

I guess the game doesn't keep calculating everything every single time increment. It is all calculated at once during the season change... I guess so.

Game FPS on larger worlds are lower. Which means that yeah, it's happening every single time increment. Or at least hogging the memory, resulting in hugely increased amount of paging data from memory to disk and back again.

If such a feature were added it would be, to all intents and purposes, gutting the core aspects of the simulation.

And that would be the player's choice to turn world simulation off or keep it. Because not every player cares about his impact on the generated world. In fact, I suspect only a few do. But every player cares about FPS.

[NullForceOmega]

If such a feature were added it would be, to all intents and purposes, gutting the core aspects of the simulation.

And that would be the player's choice to turn world simulation off or keep it. Because not every player cares about his impact on the generated world. In fact, I suspect only a few do. But every player cares about FPS.

And this suggestion has been brought up numerous times since the world was activated, and Toady has shown no sign of being interested in implementing it.  Toady wants world activation, and none of us here have any idea what it would take to separate those systems again, it seems like a waste of time and effort that could be more productively spent continuing to improve the game.  The faster DF reaches feature complete, the faster it gets optimized and the less problems it has running.

And I for one don 't give a damn about FPS, unlike most players I don't have FPS problems, even with large worlds with long histories and large numbers of dwarves running around on my map, producing vast numbers of items and excavating whole z levels for materials.  I don't shut off temperature, invaders or anything else, and my rig runs at 70-100 FPS all the time.

[Shonai_Dweller]

There are other site management games out there, you know. Plus all the old versions of DF. Your suggestion amounts to, please stop making dwarf fortress and make a different game.

Also, think about what you're asking. You turn off the simulation. Now you no longer have invasions, visitors, animal populations, forgotten beasts, titans. Just two hard coded migrant waves and that's it. Sounds like complete crap to be honest. Or are you also insisting that Toady stop work on DF to implement new systems to randomly generate sieges and stuff? Um..no. At that point you really are better off playing something else. A lot of us would like to see work on DF continue (including a lot of those who donate, probably).

Fps loss is caused by far more than just the active world. It's funny how no matter how much that evil outside world ticks on, whenever I start a new fortress my frame rate goes back to what it was originally. What happened to all that new stuff it had to keep track of? Oh, still happening.

Here's a thought, if you don't care about the outside world, and are never going to do anything but play a single fortress into the ground, why not generate a pocket world?

[StagnantSoul]

Die heretic!

[Hinaichigo]

Why don't you just generate smaller worlds?

[StagnantSoul]

Why don't you just generate smaller worlds?

Or play with 0 civs.

[Reelya]

There's also another reason Toady might not want to work on a stripped-down version of the game. Bug testing. If lots of people turn everything off, then that makes rare bugs come up less often which would reduce the frequency and quality of bug reports. Wait until the game is Beta not Alpha for the options to begin being pared-back.