Croquet is in what I would call a pre-alpha state. Very little work has 
been done to optimize the engine, as one would expect at this stage. Still, 
I am quite pleased with overall speed and I am pretty certain we will 
achieve close to (and perhaps even exceed) modern game engine performance - 
with all the usual bells and whistles.

Remember to run in 32 bit color. This is because we utilize a stencil 
buffer for portals and most graphics cards don't seem to support this in 
hardware except in 32 bit. What happens instead is they resort to software 
rendering for anything viewed through a portal. This means that a mirror 
will render the scene once in HW and again in SW. VERY bad. Of course, the 
software engines are extremely poor - but that's not their business. I am 
looking at alternatives based upon the z-buffer.

Regards,

David

At 03:27 PM 11/8/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 03:05:09PM -0500, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > I've been seeing things like that guy with the 1.9ghz Athlon and
> > Geforce4ti 4200 card talk about talk about how fast and smooth croquet
> > is.
> >
> > I just dropped it on a dual 2.4GHz Xeon machine with a gig of dual
> > channel RDRAM (I'm not sure what that means, I just use the machine,
> > didn't research and buy it) with a Quadro4 700XGL video card, and
> > Croquet feels rather slow and sluggish.  I didn't see anyway to turn on
> > a FPS counter, but subjectively I'd say it was running between 12 and 18
> > frames per second.  Does that sound at all normal to other peoples
> > expectations?  This machine is running Windows 2000 Professional.
>
>It runs a bit slower than that for me on a laptop with a GeForce4 and
>a 2GHz Pentium IV.  That seems quite in line with what you're seeing.
>When someone says "fast and smooth", they're comparing it to what they
>previously thought possible in Squeak, not to Quake 3.  Keep in mind
>that Croquet is not even in a beta state yet.
>
> >
> > Also, I noticed when running the task manager in the background that
> > Croquet doesn't appear to make any use of the 2nd processor, even when
> > doing that large amount of data loading and conversion at the
> > beginning.  It seems it would make sense to thread that part of the job
> > at least.
>
>The Squeak VM current only utilizes a single processor.
>
>Joshua
>
>
> >
> > --
> > Joshua D. Boyd