While Dwarf Fortress looks and plays like an old game, its resource footprint is far from it. Get your fortress’s population up to around 70 and fps drops are unavoidable on even the newest and fastest processors. Note that in Dwarf Fortress fps is actually the rate at which the game’s logical ticks are performed, not graphical updates.
Many mods have been created to cope with this problem, such as fastdwarf or teledwarf which causes your dwarves to walk faster or teleport to their destinations instead of computing a path and walking down it.
I saw your other article submitted and liked your site, read most of the non-electronic articles and found the DF article to be cool.
I do need to update the website, I’m not building clouds anymore, almost a year into embedded C(++) now. Just hardware, valves, pumps and current for me. I like it way better than the sysadmin stuff.
Although it certainly wasn’t anywhere near the specs of that computer, this post brings back good memories of using my Eee PC netbook (is that really the correct capitalization, Wikipedia?) to run DF while waiting to tutor people in high school. I didn’t have to kill off any extraneous processes to even run it, thankfully, but I did have to live with low framerates. Also, with not being good at the game.
One of my favorite tricks with that netbook was that I installed a utility that gave me an expanded desktop, so I could have larger windows open and by pushing my mouse along the edges of the screen, I could move to different areas of the screen. Looking it up just now, I think I found the exact tool I used: “Infinite Screen.” This way I could keep my DF window larger than my screen size and still be able to see everything (though not all at once).
One of my favorite tricks with that netbook was that I installed a utility that gave me an expanded desktop, so I could have larger windows open and by pushing my mouse along the edges of the screen
When I first installed Linux in the late 1990s it came with FVWM (or maybe this was a feature of XFree86?) with a “virtual desktop” exactly like you described. Of course being used to Windows 95/98 at the time it was the first thing I disabled.
I’ll have to look that utility up. I think I accidentally triggered similar behaviour in Xorg many years back, but I’ve never been able to recreate it.
My laptop screen is 1366x768, which can sometimes be annoying if I want to screenshot things taller than this. My favourite workaround:
Oh, to be clear, that’s a Windows-only utility. I should have said that originally.
The only place I’ve seen that resolution is a Thinkpad T420 with the larger screen mod. Any chance that’s the same for you? I’m lucky in that, when I had that laptop and needed to take large screenshots, I either had a big external monitor or a friend with a retina display.
That xrandr trick is neat! I just tried it out and visually it works well, but my mouse didn’t want to move into the bottom right corner of the screen, interestingly enough.
My favourite Windows change is to install bb4win, so I get proper virtual desktops. I have not tried it on Win10, but presumably it’s a reliable way of keeping cortana away as well. I used to use Asuite for a program-launching menu, because the one built into BB is pretty crappy.
The only place I’ve seen that resolution is a Thinkpad T420 with the larger screen mod.
1366x768? It’s the standard for almost all cheap laptops these days. Mine is an 11.6” (small) so it not’s a bad option here, but sadly it’s also used for bigger screened laptops.
my mouse didn’t want to move into the bottom right corner of the screen
Eep, that’s a bug.
Are you on Nvidia by any chance? If so: you probably have to stick to using Nvidia’s utilitiy for screen management, not xrandr. I remember having this problem in my days of ATI Catalyst.
I may be wrong, but wasn’t this the default behaviour on X11 (maybe XFree86 before Xorg took it’s place) at some point?
I recall often accidentally running into this problem many times when my graphics card drivers weren’t properly installed yet, and my card only reported basic 640x480 or 800x600 support through the BIOS.
While Dwarf Fortress looks and plays like an old game, its resource footprint is far from it. Get your fortress’s population up to around 70 and fps drops are unavoidable on even the newest and fastest processors. Note that in Dwarf Fortress fps is actually the rate at which the game’s logical ticks are performed, not graphical updates.
Many mods have been created to cope with this problem, such as
fastdwarforteledwarfwhich causes your dwarves to walk faster or teleport to their destinations instead of computing a path and walking down it.The universe of Dwarf Fortress attempts to self-correct localised time dilation by throwing goblin hordes and mythical creatures at the problem.
Fastdwarf and teledwarf seem like interesting workarounds. They effectively add ‘frameskip’ to the entity logic, if you want to think of it that way.
Thank you for the explanation, I had no idea why this might be challenging.
I wasn’t expecting this article from my site to be picked up.
*looks up submitter raymii’s profile & website*
Ah, so you’re no stranger to the HFS. The further you are away from it the better.
But how do you deal with the mosquito men?
I saw your other article submitted and liked your site, read most of the non-electronic articles and found the DF article to be cool.
I do need to update the website, I’m not building clouds anymore, almost a year into embedded C(++) now. Just hardware, valves, pumps and current for me. I like it way better than the sysadmin stuff.
Although it certainly wasn’t anywhere near the specs of that computer, this post brings back good memories of using my Eee PC netbook (is that really the correct capitalization, Wikipedia?) to run DF while waiting to tutor people in high school. I didn’t have to kill off any extraneous processes to even run it, thankfully, but I did have to live with low framerates. Also, with not being good at the game.
One of my favorite tricks with that netbook was that I installed a utility that gave me an expanded desktop, so I could have larger windows open and by pushing my mouse along the edges of the screen, I could move to different areas of the screen. Looking it up just now, I think I found the exact tool I used: “Infinite Screen.” This way I could keep my DF window larger than my screen size and still be able to see everything (though not all at once).
When I first installed Linux in the late 1990s it came with FVWM (or maybe this was a feature of XFree86?) with a “virtual desktop” exactly like you described. Of course being used to Windows 95/98 at the time it was the first thing I disabled.
I’ll have to look that utility up. I think I accidentally triggered similar behaviour in Xorg many years back, but I’ve never been able to recreate it.
My laptop screen is 1366x768, which can sometimes be annoying if I want to screenshot things taller than this. My favourite workaround:
2732x1536 is where it’s at, take that 1920x1080.
Oh, to be clear, that’s a Windows-only utility. I should have said that originally.
The only place I’ve seen that resolution is a Thinkpad T420 with the larger screen mod. Any chance that’s the same for you? I’m lucky in that, when I had that laptop and needed to take large screenshots, I either had a big external monitor or a friend with a retina display.
That xrandr trick is neat! I just tried it out and visually it works well, but my mouse didn’t want to move into the bottom right corner of the screen, interestingly enough.
Ooh, I might have to try this on Windows.
My favourite Windows change is to install bb4win, so I get proper virtual desktops. I have not tried it on Win10, but presumably it’s a reliable way of keeping cortana away as well. I used to use Asuite for a program-launching menu, because the one built into BB is pretty crappy.
1366x768? It’s the standard for almost all cheap laptops these days. Mine is an 11.6” (small) so it not’s a bad option here, but sadly it’s also used for bigger screened laptops.
Eep, that’s a bug.
Are you on Nvidia by any chance? If so: you probably have to stick to using Nvidia’s utilitiy for screen management, not xrandr. I remember having this problem in my days of ATI Catalyst.
I may be wrong, but wasn’t this the default behaviour on X11 (maybe XFree86 before Xorg took it’s place) at some point?
I recall often accidentally running into this problem many times when my graphics card drivers weren’t properly installed yet, and my card only reported basic 640x480 or 800x600 support through the BIOS.