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[yaymeh]

Hello!

This is the second fortress I have this problem with (abandoned the first one): 100 Dwarves, 5 fps.

I started out with 200FPS.

The following features, all combined bring me down to 150FPS:
- Discovering the 3 caves
- 100 cats (free / roaming)
- About 100 more random creatures (penned livestock + idling monsters from below)
- waterfall in central stairwell over 15 lvls (including the waves this causes in the brook above an the drain below)
- Magma under lowest level
- DFHACK plugins (workload, autobutcher etc)
( I tried removing all those things with dfhack, floodgate, etc - that brought me up to barely back up to 25 FPS)

The 100 Dwarves suck the rest of the FPS; Tried most of the advice from the wiki: DFHACK tweaks, Burrow restricts the Dwarves to the fortress, set high traffic on central stairway etc. Didn't notice the slightest difference.

The only thing that brought my FPS back up to 150 (with the features above active) was "slayrace DWARF". FPS went straight back up to 150 even with all the roaming cats + other creatures around (again).

Any ideas what to do about that? Would it be likely to help if I threw what's left of my sense for aesthetics over board and removed all the walls + rooms from the inside of my fortress to make it just one big square above another? Or maybe stop storing things properly and creating one single big quantum stockpile tile? Or something?

[Baffler]

Shut down the waterfall. That alone should bring it up tremendously. Butchering livestock should help too, especially if they are free-range.

[yaymeh]

I tested removing all those things with dfhack, floodgate, etc - that brought me barely back up to 25 FPS.

[Sutremaine]

Can you post the save? It'd be interesting to see how much framerate can be clawed back.

[yaymeh]

Nope, internet connection too slow & unstable :/

Think tomorrow I'll try to make another copy of the region and fill everything except the fortress itself with solid walls using dfhack... then turn all lvls of the fortress into big square rooms without walls... remove all unnecessary stairs... remove workshops + storage lvls one by one, see what happens. Without dwarves, I barely notice the impact of everything else including a generous waterfall, so I guess there must be something wrong with my layout. Maybe I left too many weird wall pieces etc standing (was hoping I'd be able to engrave all of those later + increase the value of the fortress tremendously :/). *sigh* that's gonna be a whole different kind of "fun" -.-

Unless someone has a better idea?

[Sutremaine]

...Did I ask you that question before...?

Anyway, there a few other things you can try, especially with DFHack. "clean map all" and "fix/fat-dwarves" may help. Playing around with fast-heat and stable-temp might be useful.

Sealing off the caverns is a good start, and also you want to seal off any areas that consist of long, narrow tunnels. These bottlenecks are a major drain even if nobody is nobody is actively using them. Locked doors will be sufficient, if there are areas you want to occasionally allow access to.

[Paaaad]

...Slaughter all the cats that aren't pets? (I suppose you could keep a breeding pair if you wanted.)

[itg]

Turning temperature off is a surefire way to increase your FPS by 50-100%. The dfhack tweaks help but don't approach turn temperature off altogether, in my experience

[yaymeh]

...Did I ask you that question before...?

That's possible. I do keep breaking things in weird ways. T_T

Anyway, there a few other things you can try, especially with DFHack. "clean map all" and "fix/fat-dwarves" may help. Playing around with fast-heat and stable-temp might be useful.

Already tried all the DFHACK tweaks that seemed adequate... clean all, fix/fat-dwarves, that stockpile / cloth fix, cleanowned, some more. Also used autodump to get rid of scattered items - none of those made a difference.

Sealing off the caverns is a good start, and also you want to seal off any areas that consist of long, narrow tunnels. These bottlenecks are a major drain even if nobody is nobody is actively using them.

Yes, I made quite extensive use of narrow tunnels + walls between shops etc in my fortress layout... will try to get rid of all that and maybe even most of my defence / moat  -.-
[/quote]

..Slaughter all the cats that aren't pets? (I suppose you could keep a breeding pair if you wanted.)

Killing all the livestock with dfhack / slayrace was the first thing I tested and that's what irritates me most - It barely made a difference. After killing all the dwarves but one, I was back to ~140-150. Then, killing all the cats: still 145, just slightly more stable. What's such a drain on FPS that dwarves do but cats don't? I have a lot of vermin in that region (it's half terrifying tropical broad-leaf, half joyous tropical swamp with a brook trough the middle), and judging by the remains lying around everywhere the cats should be constantly working...

Turning temperature off is a surefire way to increase your FPS by 50-100%.

Guess I'll have to try that too, then. But first, because I'd like to leave as many mechanics as possible intact:

- Removed all walls inside fort => still 5fps
- Walled off everything outside the fort => ~5 fos (maybe 1-2 more )
- slayraced livestock => ~7 fps
- replaced all stairways but the centre one with walls => ~ 7 fps?
( This means, from this point on I have a default "big squares with stairwell in the centre" layout...)
- replaced the centre tile of the centre 3*3 stairs (+ the waterfall) with a big solid column of obsidian => still ~8 FPS
(... aaaand waterfall / mist are gone too).
- removed all liquids from the whole map => maybe 10 FPS
- Replaced all air tiles outside my fortress with obsidian => ~13 FPS
- filled all the fort with obsidian => suddenly: 120 FPS.

*sigh*

Now what should that tell me?
Probably should start over with the incremental destruction of the Region and start with Stockpiles (/workshops) this time?

Turning temperature off is a surefire way to increase your FPS by 50-100%.

Uhm, yes, turning off Temperature + Weather raised my fps from 5 to 7.5, which I must admit, is 50%... Yay...
Turned it back on before continuing with testing. Or is there any reason I should let it turned off (doesn't look like the problem with my region / FPS increase probably not worth loosing the features)?

[Larix]

How old is the fort? If it's old enough that most clothing is worn to some degree, the constant casting around for fresh clothes by each dwarf could possibly murder FPS. And i've noticed that making new clothes is something very few overseers bother to do.

[smjjames]

Even if you can't upload the fort save itself, would you be able to upload it to the DFMA? That way we can still see the layout.

Bad layout and pathing can really slow things down. You say you use narrow tunnels extensively, how narrow do you mean, one tile?

Try closing off unused areas.

How old is the fort? If it's old enough that most clothing is worn to some degree, the constant casting around for fresh clothes by each dwarf could possibly murder FPS. And i've noticed that making new clothes is something very few overseers bother to do.

I make new clothes, but I manage the old clothes vs new with stockpiles specifically only for the new ones only and a refuse/finished goods that the dwarves take the old clothes to. The stock of new clothes is managed by workflow and I keep each value to a max of 50 and so it's self regulating.

I still put a refuse stockpile in the communual bedroom to remove some scattered clothing and occasionally use cleanowned to clear out worn and scattered clothing.

[yaymeh]

Can't get that map conversion thing working ATM... mono doesn't want to compile properly / trying again later.

Did some more experimenting with DF though...

The following actions do NOT significantly or not at all raise FPS (maybe +5 FPS all combined):
- Destroying all items on the whole map (including those owned by dwarves & clothing)
- Killing 100 free roam cats and every single unit in the lists that isn't a dwarf
- Deactivating all labors for every dwarf and waiting until they all have "no job"
- removing all walls & narrow passages from my fort

The following actions only raise FPS slightly ( all combined, those make the game run @40-50FPS):
- Locking all 100 dwarves in a 20x20 room with no exits (dfhack walls above, below, all around)
- Removing all liquids from the map
- Deactivating temperature and weather
- filling everything below my fort (including caves/hell) with obsidian walls (courtesy of "paint liquids cheat")

The following actions raise FPS significantly (by 50 or even 100 each, up to my set maximum of 200FPS even without any of the other measures I tried)
- killing all Dwarves (except for one)
- Filling the whole map with solid obsidian

I don't understand what could be doing this -.-

edit: Mmmh, does anyone know how to remove all syndromes and other stuff I can't see directly from the whole population with dfhack? That's something else I could try... not much left I think :/

[smjjames]

Did you ever mess around with the DFhack liquids plugin? I actually caved in my FPS once messing around with it. I did manage to fix it though. Prior to filling the map with solid obsidian that is.

For removing all syndromes, you can't remove all syndromes per se, but you can do 'clean all' in DFhack to remove contaminants.

If you use DT, you should be able to see syndromes that are affecting your dwarves, but syndromes alone wouldn't affect FPS.

[XXSockXX]

I'd second turning temperature off, also weather.
My computer is relatively old, so I always end up with 10-25 FPS at some point, with temperature and weather off.

I do have one fort with 550+ dwarfs and it's not much of a difference to what it was with 300 though. If a caravan, a siege and a harvest coincide it can drop below 5 FPS temporarily. It's still playable though.

I don't have any free-roaming animals, cats are just pastured in the food stockpiles.

Using DFhack to clean off contaminants and to destroy useless items helps. On the other hand messing around too much with other DFhack tools could possibly screw something up.

Removing walls seems not a good idea to me, open areas are a huge drain on pathing. Just make sure your hallways are wide enough, I'd say 3 tiles.

[yaymeh]

I'd second turning temperature off, also weather.

No need to I tried turning weather and temperature off a while ago already. That hardly made a difference.

( Also tried removing all the workshops in the meantime. Zero fps advantage. )

Did you ever mess around with the DFhack liquids plugin?

Didn't mess around with the liquids plugin before I was trying to figure out where all my FPS went.

So... don't know how syndromes work but I'm going to assume they're not affecting FPS then,
( removed contaminants a hundret times and deactivated weather etc - did not help ).

Besides that I couldn't find a way to count / kill all vermin. After I filled all emtpy tiles with obsidian, I noticed there's quite a little zoo around. Don't know how this could be linked to the dwarves (FPS go almost up to 200 without dwarves), but I guess it'd be worth a try since I'm running out of ideas...