On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Jarrett Billingsley <jarrett.billingsley@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:24 PM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The video card you have, and which drivers you are using for it, might be more relevant factors than the speed of your CPU.
>
> GeForce 8600 512MB, version 181.22 of the official drivers.
>

Sounds like that should be capable.  If you're motivated enough you could try installing the 182.08 drivers to see if that fixes it.

--bb

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Mason Green <mason.green@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Blaze 2.0, a 2D game physics engine based on Box2D, is finally here.  The testBed examples have been completely overhauled with Hybrid and Dog!
>>
>> Project page:
>> http://www.dsource.org/projects/blaze/wiki/WikiStart
>>
>> Testbed examples (win32 binary):
>> http://svn.dsource.org/projects/blaze/downloads/blazeDemos.zip
>>
>> I've taken a stab at writing a `getting started` section on the wiki, with clear (hopefully) instructions on how to compile. Comments, suggestions, contributions, and bug reports are appreciated in the dsource forum.
>>
> 
> I get really strange performance.  It runs.. choppy.  Not slow
> framerate, just really choppy, in a nondeterministic manner.  The
> Hybrid controls are also incredibly sensitive - one button press sets
> them to absurdly large/small values, usually freezing/crashing the
> app.
> 
> My computer should be able to more than handle this.  It's a dual-core
> Athlon X2 4600+.

They seem to work just fine on my machine and it's a single-core 1.7GHz Centrino laptop with a Mobility Radeon 7500 GPU and 1.5GB of RAM... The heavier tests (Compound shapes, Domino tower) seem choppy, but I don't get any weird Widget behavior. The performance could be improved, cause my simple profiling attempts seem to indicate that Blaze is abusing the GC a bit.

Overall, great job, Mason! :D The demo is really fun and I'm proud that my crazy GUI lib can be a part of it :)


-- 
Tomasz Stachowiak
http://h3.team0xf.com/
h3/h3r3tic on #D freenode

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 7:38 PM, Jarrett Billingsley <jarrett.billingsley@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Mason Green <mason.green@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Blaze 2.0, a 2D game physics engine based on Box2D, is finally here.  The testBed examples have been completely overhauled with Hybrid and Dog!
>>
>> Project page: http://www.dsource.org/projects/blaze/wiki/WikiStart
>>
>> Testbed examples (win32 binary):
>> http://svn.dsource.org/projects/blaze/downloads/blazeDemos.zip
>>
>> I've taken a stab at writing a `getting started` section on the wiki, with clear (hopefully) instructions on how to compile. Comments, suggestions, contributions, and bug reports are appreciated in the dsource forum.
>>
>
> I get really strange performance.  It runs.. choppy.  Not slow framerate, just really choppy, in a nondeterministic manner.  The Hybrid controls are also incredibly sensitive - one button press sets them to absurdly large/small values, usually freezing/crashing the app.
>
> My computer should be able to more than handle this.  It's a dual-core Athlon X2 4600+.
>

I've tried messing with all my driver's 3D settings to no effect.

The framerate is like.. like it's running at 60fps, and then it'll just skip a bunch of frames.  Like it suddenly processed way faster than the screen was able to update.  It does this constantly - just switching between normal speed and super-fast a few times a second at seemingly random intervals.

Tom S wrote:
 The performance could be improved, cause
> my simple profiling attempts seem to indicate that Blaze is abusing the GC a bit.

Yes, I still need to dig a bit more into profiling.  Any suggestions, or contributions :-), for improving GC performance would be much appreciated!

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Jarrett Billingsley <jarrett.billingsley@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:24 PM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> The video card you have, and which drivers you are using for it, might be more relevant factors than the speed of your CPU.
>>
>> GeForce 8600 512MB, version 181.22 of the official drivers.
>>
>
> Sounds like that should be capable.  If you're motivated enough you could try installing the 182.08 drivers to see if that fixes it.

Ah, that fixed it!  Good idea, I didn't consider it since I only just updated my drivers a couple weeks ago.  Figures.

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Jarrett Billingsley <jarrett.billingsley@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Jarrett Billingsley <jarrett.billingsley@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:24 PM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The video card you have, and which drivers you are using for it, might be more relevant factors than the speed of your CPU.
>>>
>>> GeForce 8600 512MB, version 181.22 of the official drivers.
>>>
>>
>> Sounds like that should be capable.  If you're motivated enough you could try installing the 182.08 drivers to see if that fixes it.
>
> Ah, that fixed it!  Good idea, I didn't consider it since I only just updated my drivers a couple weeks ago.  Figures.

I wasted a few hours last week trying to debug a mysterious performance problem.  Finally I installed some new drivers out of frustration, and suddenly the performance problem was gone.   So the experience was fresh on my mind.

--bb

On Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:56:50 -0400, Mason Green wrote:

> Tom S wrote:
>   The performance could be improved, cause
>> my simple profiling attempts seem to indicate that Blaze is abusing the GC a bit.
> 
> Yes, I still need to dig a bit more into profiling.  Any suggestions, or contributions :-), for improving GC performance would be much appreciated!

I had GC issues with the old blaze as well, after some profiling i found some unnecessary allocations and .dups that I removed for a nice speedup. Before i fixed those spots, the GC would get so beat up that it would just crash after about 8 seconds of collisions.

I don't know how different Blaze 2.0 is from the version i had, but I'll take a look when I get a chance and see if I can be of any help.  I'm using Box2D for the time being because there were still GC issues, but I'm very excited about "smoothed partial hydrodynamics" and non-convex models/partitioning.

bearophile wrote:
> (I am sorry, the online forum has posted this email in the main D newsgroup).
> Stewart Gordon, all the older Blaze demos have worked for me, but this time it gives me:
> 
> ...
> Registering widget: Angle
> Registering widget: SceneView
> derelict.util.exception.SharedLibLoadException: Failed to load shared library devil.dll
> 
> And stops.
> The DevIL.dll is present beside the exe.
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

I had the same issue.  I didn't have any older blaze demos laying around.  This was on a fairly fresh install of Windows XP 64.

Mason Green:
> Maybe you have an older devil.dll somewhere on your system?

Nope.


>It works on both my work and home Windows machine...<

Good.


> If you're really interested, you can always compile it!<

I may try later.

Bye,
bearophile

I can reproduce this problem as well... I'm running wine-1.1.17 in gentoo. Figuring it was a capital name issue, I tried renaming, and it gave the same error. Then, I tried downloading the latest devil.dll, and got a different error...

bearophile wrote:
> Mason Green:
>> Maybe you have an older devil.dll somewhere on your system?
> 
> Nope.
> 
> 
>> It works on both my work and home Windows machine...<
> 
> Good.
> 
> 
>> If you're really interested, you can always compile it!<
> 
> I may try later.
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile