On Wed, 31 Oct 2001 10:10:57 +0100, Bruce ONeel <beoneel at bluewin.ch> wrote:

> Along these lines there was a fairly funny post on comp.lang.c a 
> few years ago between someone who KNEW that it was impossible 
> to write DOOM in ANSI Standard C because ANSI C was way way way 
> to slow.  He got a response from some one named dmr at research.att.com
> who was complaining that it had absorbed all of the leisure
> time in his lab and yes it built with their ansi c compilers.

Be that as it may, I still stand by my (corrected) post saying that you
will probably not be able to write a "state of the art" first person
shooter (i.e., one that is directly comparable with id's latest game) in
Squeak, at least not unless Squeak gets an order of magnitude faster than
it is now (through software, not hardware).

Yes, hardware and graphics hardware gets better exponentially. But "state
of the art" is a moving target, and as the processors and graphics chips
get faster, the best games out there use it all up.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if you could write Doom right now in Squeak
on today's hardware. When Doom came out, it ran really well on a 66 Mhz
486. A 1.5 GHz PIII is probably, what, 50 times faster?

I'd even be willing to bet you could write the original Descent game in
Squeak right now. When it came out, it screamed on my Pentium 166.

But, like I said before, Doom and Descent are hardly state of the art...

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Seeker (Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle)
           http://www.huv.com