> Isn't one of the goals of Squeak Central  to be able to create animated
> games with Morphic? Seems to me that the fastest cpu available wouldn't be
> too fast.
> 
I entirely disagree - you can make fast running games from Morphic since
there are basically two things to minimize:

a) The overhead of traversing huge morphic hierarchies
   (easy to do in a game - just cache your guys)

b) Minimizing overdraw
   (again, easy to do if you know the particular type of game)

We're currently not doing an extremely good job on both parts since Morphic
is designed to be general and not just another game API - but as a matter of
fact, simple *drawing* in Morphic is not at all slower than in MVC. The
difference in the speed you *feel* when using Morphic vs. MVC comes
basically from three points:
a) Using 1 bit deep bitmap caches in MVC for windows in the background
b) The pretty long turnaround cycle for the interaction loop (e.g.,
HandMorph>>processEvents)
c) The interactivity pause (20 msecs in Morphic vs. 10 msecs in MVC)

In a game, you usually don't have multiple windows so point a) doesn't
count. For point c) you can simply turn off the interactivity pause (nobody
expects a game to leave some processor cycles for other apps ;-) and while
there is no such easy solution for b) I found that in itself this doesn't
hurt that much.

  Andreas
--
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+===== Andreas Raab ========= (andreasr at wdi.disney.com) ==+
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