Print

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

[Grand Sage]

I was wondering what I need to look for in a PC to optimize DF. I once read someone bragging about playing DF on there work computer, and not having fps problems. I know DF is limited to 1 (2?) threads multithreading-wise, so that limits the never PC's a lot, right?

[Starver]

Two cores (one for graphics, one for everything else, and background computer stuff/stonesense/etc can probably stuff itself alongside the first), as fast as you can make them, but most improvements would probably come from having good cache memory on that chip, a lot of RAM to hold that which can't be cached and sufficient swapfile space/speed just to mop up the RAM overflow after you start playing with stupidly large 16x16 embarks or such.

Apparently, going 64bit is useful, but I don't know how much of that is just better L1..3 caches and more RAM support in the newer architectures (newer anything is likely to be more responsive in all these ways and more) and how much is magic 64bitty performance boosts, given that development seemingly isn't being optimised specifically to 64bit, merely a version made available for it.  I have no problems on a lowly 32bit machine, but maybe I just don't stress it in the right/wrong way to reveal the faults.

Although the amount of time I spend with the game paused for management of things, I don't think much of the speed of a newer computer would leak through into my experience for a better game.  I remember way-back-when there were coding improvements to something (pathing?) and suddenly I found my little dwarves all suddenly rushing around much faster (but same distance per game tick!) on the same hardware, and I actually found it bewilderingly fast compared to the slow and steady speed of before.  DF is not a real-time game, although if you're a "sit and leave it running" type person then having less time staring at the screen may be something advantageous to your daily schedule... or it might just mean you spend exactly the same amount of time not doing other things you need to do, or even more, whilst tied up micromanaging your fortress more.

All the above IMO, I'm willing to be corrected by the community over any or all the details. 

[Grand Sage]

Yes, well, I can certainly feel the game slowing down through the first 2-5 years (dropping from 100 to 50-40 fps), but it is mainly for the lage embarks and generational fort purposes that I ask.

thx for the quick response!

[Chase]

Yes, well, I can certainly feel the game slowing down through the first 2-5 years (dropping from 100 to 50-40 fps), but it is mainly for the lage embarks and generational fort purposes that I ask.

thx for the quick response!

DF is terribly unoptimized, it's best to work around your computer rather than attempt to build one for DF. I set a max of 100 dwarves on a 3x3 embark and have no problems. DF isn't really a game you can play as fast as you like, rather you play at the game's pace. It takes time getting used to.

[Grand Sage]

Yeah, I have been playing for a while, so im used to dropping to 50- fps, but thats without large embarks, and as soon as the population cap is full + visitors im usually VERY low on fps. Now, im not exactly planning on buying a new pc just now, but i was wondering how to optimize on for DF, as it sounds possible since the main limitations are all about CPU and RAM, right?

[Thisfox]

I am playing with 70+fps on a 7-year-old Macbook Pro. It's the recent version of DF, no add-ons, and having practically no fps issues with a 5-year-old fort, with three aquifer-fed waterfalls and about 70-80 dorfs at a time. There were versions which didn't play well on Mac, but this version works fine. I often play a movie in the same machine whilst playing, or run various other things on the machine, without slowing it down any.

[Grand Sage]

... And its Thisfox again!

Guess the problem is that i really want those 200 dwarves + visitors... mainly because im not a fan of editing the init file, i always play games on default settings. that might just be my problem though... But we are going for a fast dual-core computer with a lot of RAM, right?

[Starver]

I play (largely¹) default settings, habitually, on a 2-core 2.66Ghz Pentium D with just 1GB of RAM and the FPS can be low, but (unlike the problems you'd get in a lagging/stuttering FPS or driving game, especially multiplayer) it does not cause me problems that I'd care to complain about.  FPSs for 200+ entities are low (can go to single figures) but not in any way inconvenient.

The long enforced pause during the Seasonal Backup Save (another non-default) is a definite punctuation to play (there used to be also significant pauses just prior to immigrants, invasions, caravans, etc, as the incomers are derived from the global geography/history records beyond the fortress, but that seems to have been smoothed out in later revisions), but I use that time to move away from DF and do whatever else it is that I have on the go, knowing that it'll sit patiently on Paused once complete if I get overly distracted.

This fits my playing style, with the aforementioned mostly-paused-whilst-micromanaging.  YMMV, and all power to your elbow in getting better hardware. Because it's not just gling to be a DF-playing-machine, and it might improve your experience of other programs, for at least as much enjoyment or personal pecuniary profit.

Spoiler: A little more about me, that doesn't help you much at all (click to show/hide)

I reserve my best hardware for image/video/sound editing, prototyping programs (in inefficiently interpreted Perl) to get principles in place before compiling for cross-platform, occasionally that compiling (but!) and maybe something like KSP that's starting to judder (not just my rockets!) on my mid-range hardware...  Maybe I should also worldgen on the higher hardware, but half the fun of that process is the anticipation, so I really don't mind...

But then the very first few runs of DF I ever did, back when I was first pointed to the game a number of years ago, needed overnight Worldgens (default or minimally differentiated settings), and I mostly just enjoyed the creation process, it taking me a while to even start a fortress.

¹ Liquid depths in numbers (doesn't affect things), music off (a pity, as I like it, but I'm often taking in other audio from another source), and often I increase the inter-cavern layer heights (if anything, makes for more resources necessary to handle the increasingly demanding maps).

[Grand Sage]

Thank you Starver, that was quite elaborate and helpful, but i would probably have a problem with single figure fps... Im glued to the screen when playing also, i dont do the backup (bit risky, i know) so i have no problems there.

[Kirkegaard]

Does people generally only play 0-5 years on a fort before restarting?

I like to keep my forts waaay longer than that, and that gets very hard due to the nature of the game code. I don't think hardware is really ever the issue, it is a software problem. And it will stay that way until Toady takes some time to study/re-code etc. unfortunately it is way more fun to code new features. So that may take some time.

[Grand Sage]

Yeah, id like that too, and i do do that, but it does tend to slow down quite a lot. I guess some people cant handle that.

[azrael4h]

Does people generally only play 0-5 years on a fort before restarting?

I like to keep my forts waaay longer than that, and that gets very hard due to the nature of the game code. I don't think hardware is really ever the issue, it is a software problem. And it will stay that way until Toady takes some time to study/re-code etc. unfortunately it is way more fun to code new features. So that may take some time.

My average is probably that, though that's as much not finding anything FUN at a site as anything else. I went 17 (15+2 after a reclaim) years at one with constant attacks, considerable terraforming, and building a mountainhome. I only retired because I wanted to see what happened after it was left alone for some time. I'm still playing that world 30 years later.

Quite honestly, processing migrants/newborns is more of a chore to me than most things; most of the time once I have a functional fortress I just let it run in the background and let them build on my projects. But the way I process new civilians, I end up renaming them, tracking down spouses and children and tying them together with a surname change, then going through their labors and changing it to what I need.

[Thisfox]

Does people generally only play 0-5 years on a fort before restarting?

I like to keep my forts waaay longer than that, and that gets very hard due to the nature of the game code. I don't think hardware is really ever the issue, it is a software problem. And it will stay that way until Toady takes some time to study/re-code etc. unfortunately it is way more fun to code new features. So that may take some time.

Nope, but I often get bored with a fort if it's ten years old or more.
It's not an fps thing, it's just the realisation that I want a new challenge, and that my current fort can't offer that challenge. I might let the fort run in the background for a while, or I might move on to a new fort with new challenges. I'll usually keep playing that world, in a different fort, sometimes even a different civilisation, but I've got a lot more worlds to choose from now that I've been trying to mess with cooking "the perfect world" for me.

[oldmansutton]

I tend to match my DF games to the computer I'm playing on, rather than the other way around, real world financial priorities being what they are.  On my desktop, I don't hesitate to run a medium sized world, and embark on any dimension up to a 25 tile area.  My current fort is on a basic 3x3, but 4 years in I'm already down to 18 FPS, mostly because of a stream cascading down 20+ z-levels to a river below, and countless other drains from the fortress making their way to the river as well. 

When I play on my netbook (I travel a lot), I'm usually on a small or pocket world, in up to 4 square tiles, and I still find it playable.

But then, running down to 15 FPS really isn't so bad, as it gives me time to think about what I'm going to do next.

[Rusty Shackleford]

I would also suggest running DF on 64 bit Linux.

In my experience its made a huge diffrence.

A solid state hardrive and as much RAM as you can fit on a fast two-core processor.

I have an utterly gutless HP netbook running linux and I've had 100fps with a 30 dwarf fort on a 1x2 embark after 17 years and hundreds of items in conventional stockpiles.