Life Goes On...

I would have posted sooner, but I had to put together my new beast. It has been 6 years nearly since I last upgraded my computer. I went from a 900MHz Athlon system to a 2GHz Dual Core Athlon system. This thing runs circles around everything I have ever used. It takes up no space (Shuttle case) and is extremely quiet even though it has 5 fans in it! It did not take long to get up and running with Debian Testing version. The stable version would not even get to the install because of the newer hardware. So far as I can tell everything in the computer has been detected and has drivers loaded. The only things I needed to do besides run the install was change the kernel to an Athlon kernel (to recognize the dual core) and install the NVIDIA driver. Well, almost everything. I had to install Firefox too since Debian is on some kind of crusade to purge the world from all copyrights... That is a subject for an entire blog unto itself.

Anyway, the cool stuff is that I was able to convert my code for the Conway Life sim I have been working on, to a non-sim based object so I can speed up the code and reduce the memory footprint. I based my new object on a vector object just like the simobjects. This made the code almost identical from the class API side. In the process of converting the code I found out the TGE engine has no many code gems in it that my efforts took days instead of weeks. My biggest trouble was trying to use the vector iterators for comparisons. Once I got that sorted out I was able to run the life sim with an ungodly number of objects.

To understand the numbers you need to understand my setup. I am running my sim iterations every 100mS. So all the numbers shown are per 1/10 of a second. The numbers represent a ballpark number when I noticed the engine slowed down a bit. Also, these numbers were on my 900MHz Athlon. I have not yet tested my new monster's numbers.
Here are the numbers:
1. 1200 sim objects created and destoyed
2. approximately 7200 objects used internally (the class I created) created and destroyed

Yes, that is 1200 sim objects being created registered, processed and destroyed every 1/10 of a second in addition to 7200 internal objects. Now, for my purposes this is way overkill for the simobjects. I plan on max having 100 to 200 objects in the 3D world at a time. These will have to be lightweight objects like particles of course.

The neat thing about this game/exercise is that I took the concept from well, concept to script, to code, to optimized code within 2-3 weeks part-time. I plan on going way further and this is an excellent start. I am still working the details of how I will use this technology in my game, but I believe this is going to be a really fascinating deviation from the status quo.

Thanks,
Frank

P.S. I will post some screen shots in my next blog.