It actually is a concern as DF in game (dwarf mode anyway) does a huge amount of pathfinding for the little buggers and other creatures. Not to mention item tracking and other bits.
This means that once your fortress gets somewhere around 200 dwarfs you start getting into FPS death because it doesn't scale. So it actually as is a problem, and development of the game is going against the grain of modern computing.
I'm not downing on it at all, DF is Tarns forever project, and a damn good one. He, by design, doesn't owe anyone anything. But the reality of it is that it only gets less and less playable over time and will not be able to reach the mass civilization simulation that many of its players want as more features are added and core speeds remain relatively unchanged.
A commercial game would have a tutorial mode and other bells and whistles to make it more approachable.
Thing is, I have one hour a day before sleep to screw around, so is it Bob's Burgers or Dwarf Fortress?
> A commercial game would have a tutorial mode and other bells and whistles to make it more approachable.
Does Jackson Pollock have a tutorial? Duchamp? The beauty in Dwarf Fortress is that it doesn't cater to the lowest common denominator. It's the vision of Tarn and Zach Adams manifested without the filter of commercial interests.
Back when I was hacking on DF ~4 years ago I believe it was actually the item tracking that was ruining performance in big forts. The main loop had to touch every item in the game every frame, including things like every rock mined by your dwarves. You can usually get significant speedup in big forts just by destroying all the spare rocks (I think the best way to do this in-game was put them under a bridge and then close it on top of them).
I ended up having more fun hacking on DF than playing it, but it is an interesting game.
This is the only thing that disappoints me about Dwarf Fortress, my CPU has gotten more and more powerful over the years and despite that my FPS crashes faster and I have to drop to smaller and smaller worlds every release.
It actually is a concern as DF in game (dwarf mode anyway) does a huge amount of pathfinding for the little buggers and other creatures. Not to mention item tracking and other bits.
This means that once your fortress gets somewhere around 200 dwarfs you start getting into FPS death because it doesn't scale. So it actually as is a problem, and development of the game is going against the grain of modern computing.
I'm not downing on it at all, DF is Tarns forever project, and a damn good one. He, by design, doesn't owe anyone anything. But the reality of it is that it only gets less and less playable over time and will not be able to reach the mass civilization simulation that many of its players want as more features are added and core speeds remain relatively unchanged.