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If you want to prevent frame-rate issues, Limit your population of animals and dwarfs, sell or destroy frivolous items and old clothing, and set areas that you don't need your dwarfs entering (i.e. mined-out metal veins, caverns, areas of the fortress no longer in use, etc.) to "low" or "restricted" traffic.
Also, if you want to have dwarfs move through a grand hallway (or cavern, or outside), designating a traffic area through the hallway will limit framerate loss but won't prevent dwarfs from doing work in that area. Traffic controls are a great way to have large, stylistic areas and not experience framedeath.
The most critical part is play style, though. There's a very common 2008-era meta of mass-producing decades worth of meals and trade goods, moving it from stockpile to stockpile, and wondering why oh why the fortress has slowed down so much. These people often play one fort, very badly, for each major release, and then declare the game's still too unoptimized, and then spread a host of other bad advice to new players before vanishing for a year.
Meanwhile people who keep up with development have large, happy forts at decent FPS. Zach Adams, one of the primary two developers, has shown an 8 year old 220 dwarf fort where everything appears to be moving around at decent speeds, a thing many say is impossible.
https://youtu.be/uE-FCtGdwMI?t=2656
The time stamp didn't work, he shows it starting at 44 minutes in.
Consult this link here for more information:
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Maximizing_framerate#Fortress_Design
dfhack has some fairly useful utilities for this too, that cause old useless clothing to slowly decay and eventually disappear entirely, or you can just manually obliterate things, or use a dwarven atom smasher (drawbridge that drops on things and destroys them) or if you are a purist, there's always magma.
There's also selling garbage to elves, who will buy anything, but if you have enough junk it's actually presenting a framerate issue, then so will a zillion little hauling jobs.
Big invasions slow everything down too, but this is usually actually to your benefit to some degree. Similarly with if you release the candy clowns. I generally don't mind the latter much since I might as well just amuse myself by watching the !!!FUN!!! going down when that happens.
Moving water and other liquids is really the one I've tended to notice.
My personal opinion is that anything above about 25fps is cozy enough to deal with. Anything much below that starts to become boring.
Fast single core and fast memory are the only things that helps.
A fast HDD or SSD will help during save/load.
That slowdown you experience as you progress with generating the world is going to scale in your fort and adventure mode gameplay as well as the number of historical figures piles up.
If your game can't support someone who is unfamiliar with your game then it might not be an optimized game... It might be too unoptimized if (as I'm hearing from other threads) that the game only uses one CPU core... Why can't the game utilize more of the GPU? Old School RuneScape has a plugin to let it do just that.
And, from what I recall, multi-core threading will make bugs far worse because you will have conflict between the positions of items between threads, and that would cause serious issues in a game like Dwarf Fortress. A Dwarf that dodged one direction in one thread and another direction in a different thread, could end up in a wall or in magma. And that would be unacceptable.
Right, but all a GPU is, is a CPU with cores that work together. Not really understanding how a dwarf can end up in a wall due to multithreading.
I'm told there are Rimworld mods that let you play with multiple z level maps, and others that allow hundreds of pawns, for example, and it immediately runs like crap. There are always many people arguing that "the dev should just do x!" but I'm not aware of any other game like DF that runs better without massive restrictions.
We can argue endlessly about what the devs should do, and believe me, you'll easily find people to argue with you about it, because half of us seem to have CS and/or EE degrees, and press for a major refactor of the code to make it run on a graphics card like the probably very similar Old School Runescape, or, alternately, you can learn to play the game in a modern manner, like the people running 400+ year old forts and so on. It'll probably be quicker to learn to play better.
I have even trouble in 80-100 pop 2x2, small world forts where I destroy excess items and I sunk many hours into reading and following performance improvements, hundreds of hours ingame trying better layouts and such.
It runs acceptable for a few years but basically lategame slog is inevitable.
I guess I am too stupid to have 200 pop high FPS fort. That said even though there are no explicit performance improvements I still hope that the simplified work systems and my possible change of playstyle will improve some of the issues I had in the past.
Plus you don't need 10+ year forts in DF to have fun you can always start a new one.
Ouch. I hate that I'm coming across like that, and you do seem to keep up, but fair.
My biggest pieces of advice for someone like you are to eliminate stockpiles whenever possible. Just leave stuff in workshops, gather to trash zones, and so on. Stockpiles create hauling jobs, which create pathing. Some stockpiles like food are unavoidable. The other major one is longer term players often feel a need to keep the dwarves busy. It used to be, busy dwarves were happy dwarves, but now they'd just as soon listen to a story in the tavern and chat up a cute lady dwarf, with just the occasional job. I like to make sure I have many dwarves who can do any job I might need done quickly, in particular I have mining turned on for any dwarf without another uniform. Projects like libraries are good for older forts, they provide lots of activities that please dwarves without creating too much overhead.
That sort of thing saves the FPS for the occasional period of sheer terror, like dust spewing iron forgotten beasts and so on.
For example, take a look at Archcrystal: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?PHPSESSID=450281188dd9283921815b8c2eece142&topic=156319.0