Hello Everyone,
Firstly, this is my first message here, so please correct my etiquette if it is not appropriate, or if I am mailing the wrong list.
I discovered smalltalk a few months back and i've been growing excited with use. I read through a few books like the squeak by example book and others. I now think it's time to take on a project of substance to really gain some experience.
I was really impressed with the multimedia/liveness of squeak and the stepping system of morphic. I thought to myself that this would be a perfect environment for some game development and thats where my current professional skills are being used. Cursory research showed others with games projects, even some with 3d to my surprise. I suspect those 3d engines are using the FFI to bind to c libs to achieve acceptable performance.
My desire would be to build a 2.5d rendering system inspired by the doom engine. I figured it might be a better candidate performance wise then a full 3d engine and since its a software render, entirely self contained. (im not interested in external bindings yet.) However, I discovered the FPSMorph when exploring and to my dismay saw my system running at 47 fps on average simply idling.
My specs are pretty good, Intel© Core™ i7-8705G CPU @ 3.10GHz × 4. So I thought surely this is a stepping concern, perhaps they have limited it. I changed the update interval and was guaranteed no additional frames. Im going to dig in further to see if implementation details are the issue, but thought it might be a good idea to consult the experts in tandem.
So, is morphic really that slow for everyone else? Im concerned that if I take on such a project it may never actually be usable beyond learning. Would anyone willing to share their experience doing games? Perhaps maybe bypassing morphic and using direct Form + BitBlt would be faster? Any advice, experience or wisdom would be greatly appreciated. Im more then okay with being told this wont work etc.
Sorry for the long mail and thanks for the great system!
Kind Regards, Cody Sevier