Optimation By Lower Quality Enviornment

[Fishirboy]

I do love the way Rim World looks. Its a great way to expand on the environmental survival that is quite empty. The way the game is set up at the moment makes it a different beast entirely. Distancing Rim World from DF(Dwarf Fortress) it is truly a great game that I hope keeps adding and expanding to be just as big as DF. But I have an issue, where a limit is reached for the amount of units that can be on screen at one time. This makes a time limit for me to keep playing until the value of my base rises to high and there is too many units on screen.

The one big turn off for people that play DF is the style it is portrayed at, yet is its biggest advantages. The game does not need to render many different images and can have hundreds of units in game without slowing down the game to dramatically. Would there ever be a way to lower the quality of the games environment to the minimal? I would love this option to so I can keep playing much longer.

(If lowering the quality of the sprites on screen does not help, disregard this post as if it was blank  )

[Draecesstra]

Performance optimization is already on the to do list.
Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_rCdGYp3nbSUXFG4Ky96RZW1cJGt9g_6ANZZPOHyNsg/pub

Jan 4
AI optimization on hauling: a system that caches a list of items that need to be hauled (not forbidden, undesignated, or already in optimal storage).

Jan 3
AI optimization. Lots of AI optimization.

Jan 2
Optimized power nets tick.
Continued performance testing, optimization, and auto-test work.
Cached buildings in need of repair to speed up repair WorkGiver.

Jan 1 2015
Misc bugfixes and balance changes.
Started work on automatic generation of colonies for performance and other testing.

[milon]

I'm really happy to see these optimizations taking place.  I also agree with the OP - I'd like a way to lower the graphics quality to improve performance.  My PC is pretty crappy.  It handles RimWorld okay, but I'd gladly trade some effects for better performance.

[Tynan]

I'm really happy to see these optimizations taking place.  I also agree with the OP - I'd like a way to lower the graphics quality to improve performance.  My PC is pretty crappy.  It handles RimWorld okay, but I'd gladly trade some effects for better performance.

The graphics are almost wholly irrelevant to performance. The game is entirely CPU-bound, mostly from AI decision-making.

[milon]

The graphics are almost wholly irrelevant to performance. The game is entirely CPU-bound, mostly from AI decision-making.

In that case, I'm even MORE happy to see the AI optimizations! 

[Amaror]

The one big turn off for people that play DF is the style it is portrayed at, yet is its biggest advantages. The game does not need to render many different images and can have hundreds of units in game without slowing down the game to dramatically. Would there ever be a way to lower the quality of the games environment to the minimal? I would love this option to so I can keep playing much longer.

That's not really how it works, though. You have two main things responsible for getting good performance: Your graphics card and you processor.
The thing is that textures and visual quality overall is handled by the graphics card. AI and game entities on the other hand are handled by your processor, so reducing the visual quality would only free up power for the graphics card. But more AI actors would require more Processing power from your processor.

Rimworld will most likely never be able to handle as many AI on screen as Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld is developed with C#-scripts in Unity. This makes it possible to run the code on a lot of different machines without many issues, but at the same time doesn't offer as much performance as other programming languages might. That being said i don't think rimworld requires to have as much AI on the screen as Dwarf fortress. They are very different games and the lower amount of actors suits it just fine in my opinion.

[Nasikabatrachus]

I'm really happy to see these optimizations taking place.  I also agree with the OP - I'd like a way to lower the graphics quality to improve performance.  My PC is pretty crappy.  It handles RimWorld okay, but I'd gladly trade some effects for better performance.

The graphics are almost wholly irrelevant to performance. The game is entirely CPU-bound, mostly from AI decision-making.

I find that performance varies by machine in a way unrelated to what any AI decision making seems to be doing. Before I got my macbook air, I used to play RW on a couple of imacs, one from 2007 and one from 2010 or 2011. Whenever I would start a colony on the imacs, the game would be fairly slow until I panned around the whole map, so my routine was to pause the game on startup and do that. Now on my laptop I simply don't need to do that.

[woolfoma]

I find that performance varies by machine in a way unrelated to what any AI decision making seems to be doing. Before I got my macbook air, I used to play RW on a couple of imacs, one from 2007 and one from 2010 or 2011. Whenever I would start a colony on the imacs, the game would be fairly slow until I panned around the whole map, so my routine was to pause the game on startup and do that. Now on my laptop I simply don't need to do that.

your problem is you're using a mac, get a PC and all your issues will wash away (except when windows decides to update in the middle of a csgo comp match GRRRR)

[milon]

This fire is reserved by milon

* Beats fire out *
Whew, that was close.  It's a good thing that we're not going to have a flame war now, right? 

EDIT - I've got a crappy Win7 PC at home with an Atom processor (sigh).  I'm goingto try the panning trick and see if that helps.