When are they going to fix the FPS death?

[fabulousfreep]

Basically the game is about unplayable after the first year or 3 because no matter the size of the fort or the number of dwarves the fps drops under 5 and won't recover even if you kill every single thing in the fort except 1 dwarf. Are there any plans to address this?

[Fel]

I don't know how you manage to reach such a low FPS in just 3 years.
Even with nearly 200 dwarves and 16 years, last fort was still running relatively quickly.
And that was without limiting clutter all that much as well as plenty of flowing water.
I had made a decent amount of mist generators that were just using water from light aquifer, letting it fall and sending it out of the map a few levels lower.

Most of the fixable causes for fps death were adressed years ago and there are plenty of things we can do as players to limit the impact of things that hit the tick rate heavily.

For example, X shaped stairs instead of a 2x2 or 3x3

x x
 x 
x x

Walling off old "mining" zones where dwarves have no business going to in the near future (and perhaps not letting them access caves all the time) also contributes when trying to reduce path-finding costs.

Getting rid of useless items by selling or crushing them instead of letting them accumulate without limits as well.

[JimmyTheSaltyMelon]

LOL Never,

[Holyvision]

Sounds like an older CPU.

[fabulousfreep]

Originally posted by Fel:

I don't know how you manage to reach such a low FPS in just 3 years.
Even with nearly 200 dwarves and 16 years, last fort was still running relatively quickly.
And that was without limiting clutter all that much as well as plenty of flowing water.
I had made a decent amount of mist generators that were just using water from light aquifer, letting it fall and sending it out of the map a few levels lower.

Most of the fixable causes for fps death were adressed years ago and there are plenty of things we can do as players to limit the impact of things that hit the tick rate heavily.

For example, X shaped stairs instead of a 2x2 or 3x3

x x
 x 
x x

Walling off old "mining" zones where dwarves have no business going to in the near future (and perhaps not letting them access caves all the time) also contributes when trying to reduce path-finding costs.

Getting rid of useless items by selling or crushing them instead of letting them accumulate without limits as well.

I'm already doing all those things and/or i don't have them. Like no mining zones, no hording items, manual smashers, x pattern stairs, no running water, limited items on the map etc etc. I don't have an older pc, the game is just leaking and slowly but surly running worse and worse.

[Strurbury]

See if the answer lies in the most basic areas first.
What's your CPU single core speed?
What are your memory speed, timings and amount?
What model hard drive or SSD are you using?

[fabulousfreep]

Originally posted by bluntkrunk:

See if the answer lies in the most basic areas first.
What's your CPU single core speed?
What are your memory speed, timings and amount?
What model hard drive or SSD are you using?

AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor 3.40 GHz
24 gigs memory 667 mhz
500 gig ssd it's about a year old

[Flaming Badger]

Have you opened/ fully explored all the caverns? The only thing I can think of that would cause such a dramatic loss of fps even in the face of sensible measures is a large fire or perhaps a flood in some unexplored part of the map.

[fabulousfreep]

Yes but it's done this in Forts with minimal everything and less than 50 dwarves. Right now i'm getting rid of everything i don't need to survive killing all the animals throwing away anything i can and guess what? FPS is going down over time not up. It's a bug, the game leaks over time and just gets slower and slower till it's unplayable. My first fort started with 150 max pop and it did the exact same thing, no matter what i did after a few years the fps dropped to 5 (5) and would not go back up even if i only had 1 dwarf and 0 furniture/animals. I literally got rid of everything and sent away all the dwarves and it still would not go back up. Soon as you pause or open a menu that pauses the game you get max / max FPS but when you close it it grinds down to 5 and won't go up.

[Strurbury]

Originally posted by fabulousfreep:

Originally posted by bluntkrunk:

I asked him some questions and he answered them

AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor 3.40 GHz
24 gigs memory 667 mhz
500 gig ssd it's about a year old

As far as the processor goes it shouldn't be a game killer but I'm a bit hesitant to give the ddr2 kit a pass. The read/write speed of the SSD can also be a factor but that's just a guess.

I know that not all experiences are the same, but when I got my first kit of DDR3 ram and overclocked into the 3k mhz range I was blown away by the speed.

If I were you, I would create custom worlds with smaller map and population caps. Not just fort population, but world population as well. Less pieces to push through the world will help with the slow down.

[fabulousfreep]

The map i'm on now is tiny, 50 years tiny pop, no flowing water on the map etc etc. It doesn't seem to make any difference at all, i even updated the chipset drivers today because you asked all those questions. No difference, still driving down the entities list and the fps is down to 4.

[Strurbury]

Originally posted by fabulousfreep:

The problem persists when reducing the load on the system

I am curious. Would you be willing to apply the GPU/overlay patch, in the guide section, and see if this improves performance? Many people have claimed it improves issues like these.

I understand that many users are unwilling to apply patches not from the devs. This particular one is essentially something being worked on already in an official capacity.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2908354861

[fabulousfreep]

Ok i did that and it is running partly on the GPU but it did not help in the slightest. I imagine because it's a pathing or job allocation issue causeing the game to bog down rather than a processor power/speed problem. The game is trying to do something it can't get done and it's doing it over and over and over anytime the game is unpaused. Maybe it's telling that duck to walk through the wall 9 billion times per micro second who knows. I wish i had a way to look at a log of what it is trying to do just to see if maybe i could avoid whatever it is. I doubt i can though. OH also you can disprove the whole X shaped stairs thing simply by locking all your dwarves in 1 room. No one is going anywhere nothing is doing any pathing of any kind and it is still running at 4 FPS. All the animals are either dead or locked up all jobs are disabled.

[UnderTow]

ye happens to me also, fort runs fine then bam everything drops to 9fps, no obvious solutions seem to fix it either. lost too many forts to this alone

[FirestormXL]

Okay, not sure what is causing this for you. I run mine for a few years and even with a 1.5k seeds and a 70 dwarves running about along with fight teeth and blood spattering the walls it still seems to run well (I mean after my fort becomes a complete mess).

As far as helpfulness for fixin, try DwarfHack. Use the commands to autodump anything useless like your piles of teeth, broken mittens, useless robes, and such. Then use hack to just DELETE them out of the game. Also run autoclean to get rid of all contaminant and dirt and such. Do this once a year to keep your CPU cycles to worrying about tracking dwarves and such instead of fort trash.

[Flaming Badger]

Originally posted by bluntkrunk:

As far as the processor goes it shouldn't be a game killer but I'm a bit hesitant to give the ddr2 kit a pass. The read/write speed of the SSD can also be a factor but that's just a guess.

This is actually quite a good point. DF hammers the RAM pretty hard iirc, especially on things like temperature calculations and I think pathfinding. I vaguely recall some testing in the distant past that suggested RAM /latency/ affected performance more than frequency. You can't make that up with quantity.

in 13 years I've never played DF on anything less than DDR3, so I can't comment from personal experience.