Blog

Archive
| All posts |
  • What do you get if you combine Planestate with a game of Pong?

    published on 8/1/2006 10:14 PM

    Well now my last vacation week is also over so back to real work. We have some major milestone coming up so I'll see how much time I will have to work on the screensaver.

    I have however made some nice progress on the project in the last few days. Finally figured out a way around the crash on my HTPC. It's because it's a dual core machine. It shouldn't affect it in anyway because I'm not using multiple threads. But I know the nvidia driver are using multiple threads so I guess somehow the texture gets used on the wrong thread. I'll look into it more in the future but for now the simple solution is to just lock down the application so it's only uses one core. This also helps with another very bad problem. It's a known problem but there isn't any good solution for it yet. Some motherboards that has dual core CPUs can sometime mess up their timing. The QueryPerformanceCounter to be exact. It's a high performance timer that gives the actual CPU clock cycle count. But on these faulty motherboards the time given can change between the cores. To put it simply. It can mess up your frame timing and make you application jump or worst freeze if you don't expect this to happen.

    Another problem I was looking onto was the CPU usage. It used about 15% of my CPU. A bit too much for my taste and found out that the SwapBuffer function took all my time. Must be that it waits for all draw commands to complete before he swaps the buffers and shows the new image. Changed the main loop a bit and now it runs at 5% CPU usage.

    But enough with the technical stuff. I'm still not done with the screen dialog but it's starting to take shape. I had some sidetracks like doing an IFS (Iterated function system) node. So now we can create a particle fern leave. I'm just not sure how I can allow anyone to configure it in a good way but that's a problem for another day.

    Now for the thing you have been having trouble sleeping over. What DO you get when you combine Planestate with a game of Pong? Well now you can sleep well again because this is what you get. ![http://www.plane9.com/forumimages/2006-08-01-planestateAndPingpong.jpg) Let's just say the movement patterns on that one is a bit freaky.

    Something for you to wonder over until next time. What do you get if you combine Planestate with a Starfield?