getting dwarf fortress to play on a net book

[gabado]

i just downloaded dwarf fortress onto my net book and it is having trouble running, i heard from a friend that he was able to get df to run on his net book but unfortunately was unable to give me any specifics as to how. it would be great if someone could tell me how to make it run speedily, right now it takes about ten minutes just to generate the world map.

[factotum]

Netbooks are not exactly powerhouses, and Dwarf Fortress is an extremely computer-intensive game. I don't think you'll be able to get it to run faster at the world generation stage. You might be able to get the actual GAME to run faster after deployment by reducing the area you're deploying into, though.

[Esser-Z]

Yeah, I'm going to agree with factotum here. DF may not look intensive, with the ASCII and all, but it has a LOT going on (and, though I'm not an expert, may not exactly use the most efficient processing methods. Not sure on this one).

[Studoku]

I know someone who has DF on a netbook. It works, albeit very slowly.

If it's just a frame rate issue, there are ways to reduce the problem. The DF wiki has some advice here (http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Frame_rate). You could also ask in the Dwarf Fortress thread here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=148553); there are a lot of players who will be able to help.

Make sure you're using the newest version- it's a lot more efficient than the first release of DF2010.

[Rockphed]

10 minutes to generate the world map? How big of a world are you making? Is that 10 minutes to finish world gen, or just 10 minutes to start the history making part of world gen?

If it is 10 minutes to go through an entire world gen, it is actually doing rather well. If it is 10 minutes to get to the point where it something like


The Age of Myth
Year 51
Hist Figs 3487
Dead 818
Events 14997


Then you are either generating too large a world, generating a world that contains mutually exclusive requirements(or rather almost mutually exclusive requirements since it did actually make you a world), or pretty much doomed. I'm currently generating a medium world, and it looks to be taking about 20 minutes to finish on a rather beastly laptop. If you have a world made already, go into the init file(it is in [DF]\data\init where [DF] is the directory containing the Dwarf Fortress Executable), and find the entry that says [FPS:NO], and change it to [FPS:YES]. Then start up a fort and see how much you get.

If you are getting 100 at embark, you can probably run DF fine on your netbook, though if you want to really see, set the entry in the init that is [FPS_CAP:100] to something like [FPS_CAP:10000], and see how high it goes right when you load a new fort. If it goes into the 1000s, you are pretty much set. If it is more than 500, you can probably get everything DF has to offer. If it stays at 100 or goes below 100, then we can try to walk you through turning features off(or turning features on, there are a couple that are supposed to save FPS that don't always work and thus are off by default. I think.), though you will probably need to accept that the game will be quite slow.

This is pretty much all I can say thanks to my lack of any knowledge whatsoever about net books.