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Author Topic: Tips for recoverying FPS (game speed)?  (Read 1541 times)

cancel.man

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Tips for recoverying FPS (game speed)?
« on: July 28, 2011, 05:46:12 pm »

So typically by the time I get a nice mature fort that I'm really proud of and have working like clockwork... my FPS is in the teens (13-18 FPS). So by the time my fort is awesome and attracts the King... it's no longer fun to play because it's so slow.

Any tips on recovering game speed? Please provide some suggestions for improving FPS!
There's a good wiki article here but I'm wondering if there's anything I can do beyond what's in there.

Hardware:
    I'm running DF on a laptop with a Core i3 2.3Ghz and basic video card so mind you my system is no powerhouse and I know that's going to ultimately be the clincher, but even recovering 10FPS (getting back to 25+) makes the game a lot more playable.

Game Parameters:
    On a 4x4 embark games typically get to 80FPS after the first year (digging down to magma & attracting a couple waves of immigrants). Mining, production, and population increase chip away at it and I think I was still at ~30FPS when I hit 100 dwarves and the caverns are fully explored. By the time I'm at 140 dwarves my FPS is 17-18.

    Ambushes and sieges take their toll as well, but FPS recovers when no attackers are on the map. FPS can drop as low as 5 during some sieges (modded in race of giants), but most attackers don't affect game speed more than 2-3 FPS.

    Current game is on a site with no rivers and no winter freeze. Nothing in the environment (natural or dwarf-built) that seems to suck processor power.

    All animals are pastured or caged (a cage full of cats & dogs)

    I use dfcleanmap often

I'm gonna start experimenting with my current fort to see if I can recover some speed. What I'll be trying initially (as I wait for the community's suggestions):
  • Walling off the caverns & any areas the dwarves should never need to go thereby reducing pathing options
  • Slaughtering all animals & getting rid of my pastures
  • Destroying inventory & reducing stockpiles to minimum (magma dumping everything)
  • Reducing food production to a minimum sustainable level
  • Hiding &/or destroying unused stones laying around the fort
  • Setting baby cap to 0 to stop reproduction of those
What do you think will any of that help recover my game speed? What other things should I try?

What about abandoning the fortress & starting over (with a smaller/clean game file)? Will that have a positive impact?

Ultimately I'd love to get my FPS back up around 30 then breach the adimantine spire and create some !FUN!, but I'm not gonna do that if I have to watch it go at 2 FPS...
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IT 000

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Re: Tips for recoverying FPS (game speed)?
« Reply #1 on: July 28, 2011, 05:59:26 pm »

Try using traffic designations. Putting low traffic over your stockpiles and restricted traffic over the open space of caverns or places that you seldom go may increase FPS.
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Nil Eyeglazed

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Re: Tips for recoverying FPS (game speed)?
« Reply #2 on: July 28, 2011, 06:08:55 pm »

I'm not certain that DF clean actually cleans your dwarves and animals, think it's just the floor.  Check their inventories after the next time you run it.  All of those splatters add up.  Consider a dwarven bathtub if dfclean isn't doing it.

Temperature and weather granted me maybe +40% framerate, because I had something in the caverns lighting fires.

Drawmode in the init file can give a decent improvement.  I'm using Partial:0 despite some display glitches associated with it.

Lots of stray items, including forbidden but visible items, can lead to slow-down-- check FPS at entrance as compared to FPS much deeper, you might be able to see what I'm talking about.  DFHack also has a utility to aid in item destruction/dumping.

Get rid of excess stockpiles.

Obviously, flows are bad; DFhack also has a utility to check for number of flowing tiles, to see if you have a problem.

Meeting areas under your animals can prevent them from doing as many pathing checks.

Supposedly, traffic designations can help, although I've never got the hang of it.
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cancel.man

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Re: Tips for recoverying FPS (game speed)?
« Reply #3 on: July 28, 2011, 06:14:15 pm »

I'm not certain that DF clean actually cleans your dwarves and animals, think it's just the floor.  Check their inventories after the next time you run it.  All of those splatters add up.  Consider a dwarven bathtub if dfclean isn't doing it.

dfclean doesn't clean the dwarfs/items- only stuff on the floor/walls/water. I typically make my dwarf dips with flowing water so I avoided that this time- maybe I'll make one with still water.
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cancel.man

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Re: Tips for recoverying FPS (game speed)?
« Reply #4 on: July 28, 2011, 06:27:50 pm »

Wow- reducing G_FPS to 20 and disabling temp & weather got me back to ~50 FPS.

Temp seems to be biggest culprit- re-enabling it took me back to 18FPS. So I guess G_FPS and weather don't affect it that much.

With temp turned off, though, magma dumping probably wont work, will it? Will have to atom smash excess inventory...
« Last Edit: July 28, 2011, 06:29:56 pm by cancel.man »
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Nil Eyeglazed

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Re: Tips for recoverying FPS (game speed)?
« Reply #5 on: July 28, 2011, 06:33:59 pm »

Magma dumping works, but that's because "magma flow" tiles eradicate anything dumped on them, not necessarily because of the magma itself.

If you were able to get rid of magma-proof materials (nickel, iron, bauxite, tons of others) with your previous magma dump, you will still be able to use it.  If your magma dump was a little more artificial, a channel to the magma, then it might not.  Not sure, because I believe there are a few temperature hacks to simulate temp, regardless of temp working (like magma forges, for instance).

The biggest game-changer, assuming you don't build magma swimming pools for your dwarves or other things just because you can, is with creatures made out of fire.  With temperature off, they are much less scary.
« Last Edit: July 28, 2011, 06:41:42 pm by Nil Eyeglazed »
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Sutremaine

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Re: Tips for recoverying FPS (game speed)?
« Reply #6 on: July 28, 2011, 10:43:05 pm »

Traffic designations work by halting the pathing until the pathing cost has been made up elsewhere. So let's say you have a bunch of areas that can't be walled off but are rarely visited -- prison area, furniture or stone stockpile, the great outdoors... Let's start with outdoors, in a fort with a single entrance in the middle of a 3x3 map. With no traffic designation, a dwarf standing right next to the entrance and looking for an item deep within the fortress will check the outside tiles for the quickest path as much as it checks the inside tiles. From the entrance to any map edge is roughly 75 tiles, which is worth a three-deep ring of restricted tiles. Now the dwarf by the entrance has to be looking for an item as far away as the map edge before it will even look at any of the tiles outside. Depending on the layout of your fortress this might or might not be enough.

Wide open spaces and narrow corridors are both FPS drains, though I think it's for different reasons. Open spaces offer many alternate routes to a destination, and things trying to get down a corridor that isn't big enough to take them all is also a drain. Immediately after ordering everyone through the longish narrow entrance for post-siege cleanup I get massive slowdown for a few seconds even though nobody's there yet and they can almost all get through without having to lie down.

(I wonder if this is what causes the slowdown associated with careless mining? I haven't suffered too much because between that particular area and the fortress there are about two dozen tiles total of one-wide corridors.)
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