Dwarf Fortress - An Adventurer Emerges + SDL2 Upgrade and more 🗺️ Dwarf Fortress Update News - Steam News
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This month we have several goals. We're going to start by getting the experimental branch moved over to the main line. The update of the engine from SDL to SDL2 is stable, and there will also be a multithreading option. It's off by default until we get some more testing done on the experimental branch, but the speed gains are significant, so it will be available in the settings as well. The update to SDL2 was the most important change for ports, so Linux and Mac versions are much closer now.

This was announced earlier this month. Pretty exciting with the implications of simultaneous multi-threading. Hopefully it mitigates FPS death.

What are your thoughts?

  • JengaEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Does anyone know how significant the update to SDL2 is? Are we talking a big performance boost?

    • Dax87@forum.stellarcastle.netOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I can’t say for sure. And I don’t think all of DF will be affected, but I know single threaded operations are one of the biggest bottlenecks when a fort gets more complex. So I believe if the more they leverage SMT the better. It should provide a huge improvement.

    • Peter_EH@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I believe Putnam’s work is tied in with the SDL2 transition as well. There have been a number of mentions in interviews that they’re doing a lot of profiling and cleaning up Tarn’s legacy code to get some good optimizations. I’m expecting some noticeable improvements.

    • addie@feddit.ukEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Answer for me is; it depends. Putnam wrote a message in The Other Forum where she said that SDL2 is required to provide ‘any kind of hardware acceleration at all’. So it depends how many pixels you’re pushing, and with what.

      For me on my 1920×1080 laptop with onboard graphics, no noticeable change.

      For me on my 2560×1440 desktop with discrete graphics card, scrolling goes from very noticeably choppy to absolutely buttery smooth.

      • JengaEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That’s good to hear. I play on the same resolution with a 2070super and I had awful interface FPS pretty much from the start of every game. I haven’t tested the game in a few weeks though.