David,

    Thanks for the insider info. It would be very cool to have
    a game engine in Squeak that can beat C++ counterpart.

    My boy showed me DOA on his Xbox.
    It's very impressive. It made me 'wow'.

    Xbox has a very good Nvidia video card,
    Intel P3 800+ MHz and 64 MB RAM.

    Linux was ported to Xbox, I hope sometime soon
    we will be able to play Croquet on Xbox.

    Cheers,

    PhiHo.

    P.S: For those not familiar with Xbox games,
    DOA is 'Dead Or Alive', not 'Dead On Arrival'.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David A. Smith" <davidasmith at bellsouth.net>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 9:08 AM
Subject: Re: Croquet alpha release(s?)


> PhiHo,
>
> There is no real answer to your question. Performance is extremely
> dependent upon the problem you are trying to solve, the nature of your
> implementation and the constraints you are willing to live with. One of my
> goals was that I could build a game world that would be competitive in
> performance with anything I might be able to do in C++. With that in mind,
> I designed the system to have direct access to the OpenGL calls at any
> level, yet still be very much a retained mode engine. Very flexible, yet
> you can usually let it do most of the work for you. On the other hand, I
> wanted general purpose solutions to most of these same problems, hence,
the
> picking and floor following method is extremely clean and general. I know
a
> way that would run about 1000 times faster for floor following (using
> bitmap height fields), but it simply isn't general purpose enough at this
> stage. That doesn't mean I won't use it later for specific environments -
> or that you can't do the same. I just haven't got to that point yet.
>
> Most of graphics programming is dealing with large data sets with simple
> transforms. To that end, we will be incorporating our general purpose
> n-dimensional Matrix class which is intended to be used to access the VPUs
> in a clean way. The goal here is to exceed the performance of C++. That
> will probably be a project for next year.
>
> I simply don't know what the final performance of the system will be, as
it
> is very dependent upon what you do with it. My goal is to make it
extremely
> competitive. The current engine has not been optimized in any way (though
I
> am looking at a few things right now), and frankly, I am quite excited
> about the performance I am getting now. I attribute this to a number of
things:
>
> - Squeak is pretty fast - faster than you might think.
> - We try to push as much into the hardware as we can - with decent
results.
> - The traversal and picking mechanisms are fundamentally sound.
>
> All this means is that performance is pretty good, and should get a lot
> better. The architecture should not change much, so you should be able to
> build some things without too much fear that I will break it - though I
> reserve the right to do so :-)
>
> Regards,
>
> David
>
>
>
>
> At 02:19 AM 12/4/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >Hi David,
> >
> > >  I don't expect the graphics engine to change much
> >
> >     How would you compare, performance-wise, Croquet to
> >
> >         1/- RuneScape http://www.runescape.com
> >
> >         2/- WildTangent http://www.wildtangent.com
> >
> > > but the addition of the TeaTime collaboration object model/protocol
> > > and the new scripting architecture will have a dramatic impact
> > > on the nature of how you program for the system.
> >
> >     Does it have any impact on performance ?
> >
> >     Cheers,
> >
> >     PhiHo.
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "David A. Smith" <davidasmith at bellsouth.net>
> >To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> >Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 9:25 AM
> >Subject: Re: Croquet alpha release(s?)
> >
> >
> > > Joshua,
> > >
> > > Current plan is to have a true alpha release sometime early next year.
I
> > > don't expect the graphics engine to change much, but the addition of
the
> > > TeaTime collaboration object model/protocol and the new scripting
> > > architecture will have a dramatic impact on the nature of how you
program
> > > for the system. If it looks like the release gets pushed out too much,
we
> > > may have an interim release along the lines of the previous one.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > >
> > > David
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > At 12:48 AM 12/3/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> > > >Dear Croqueteers,
> > > >
> > > >How closely does the Croquet update stream track Croquet development?
> > > >Are there large rewrites (particularly within the graphics
> > > >architecture) going on behind the scenes that will replace the code
> > > >that is currently there?  Or will code that I write be able to evolve
> > > >along with the update stream?
> > > >
> > > >Do you plan to make available other alpha releases of Croquet, or is
> > > >this the only tantalizing taste that we get until the Big Release?
> > > >
> > > >Thanks,
> > > >Joshua
> > >
> > >
> > >
>
>