Chad J wrote:
> 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.

I would recommend compiling it on your machine, with your own system's drivers.

Brian wrote:
> 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.

Blaze 2.0 is 90% Box2D, using all the same algorithms for the CPU intensive tasks.  All I did was add smoothed particle dynamics, and force generators from the Motor2 engine. The new version is much, much different from Blaze 1.0.

Motor2 has a few other features that I may eventually incorporate, but as I mentioned, for all practical purposes Blaze 2.0 is pretty much a straight port of Box2D.

Performance should be on par with the Java and Action Script variants of Box2D, aside from their more efficient garbage collectors. If there are D specific tricks I can use to speed up the engine, I would definitely appreciate the help and/or contribution.

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

Good to hear it wasn't a graphics card conflict with Hybrid!

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Mason Green <mason.green@gmail.com> wrote:
> Brian wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Blaze 2.0 is 90% Box2D, using all the same algorithms for the CPU intensive tasks.  All I did was add smoothed particle dynamics, and force generators from the Motor2 engine. The new version is much, much different from Blaze 1.0.
>
> Motor2 has a few other features that I may eventually incorporate, but as I mentioned, for all practical purposes Blaze 2.0 is pretty much a straight port of Box2D.
>
> Performance should be on par with the Java and Action Script variants of Box2D, aside from their more efficient garbage collectors. If there are D specific tricks I can use to speed up the engine, I would definitely appreciate the help and/or contribution.

Using value types where possible would probably help.  Porting the SOA from the C++ version of Box2D would probably also give a tremendous speedup (and fewer GC pauses), though I don't know what effects that would have on the API.  The way it is now is really noticeably GC-bound.  On some of the more complex testbed scenes (like the compound bodies test), there's a noticeable pause every two seconds or so.

On Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:54:23 -0400, Mason Green wrote:

> Brian wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Blaze 2.0 is 90% Box2D, using all the same algorithms for the CPU intensive tasks.  All I did was add smoothed particle dynamics, and force generators from the Motor2 engine. The new version is much, much different from Blaze 1.0.
> 
> Motor2 has a few other features that I may eventually incorporate, but as I mentioned, for all practical purposes Blaze 2.0 is pretty much a straight port of Box2D.
> 
> Performance should be on par with the Java and Action Script variants of Box2D, aside from their more efficient garbage collectors. If there are D specific tricks I can use to speed up the engine, I would definitely appreciate the help and/or contribution.

That sounds good. I'll see if I can do a nice 3 way comparison between box2d and blaze 1.0/2.0 and also see if I can find any speedups. I don't have much time to spare unfortunately.

Brian wrote:
> That sounds good. I'll see if I can do a nice 3 way comparison between box2d and blaze 1.0/2.0 and also see if I can find any speedups. I don't have much time to spare unfortunately.

Great, if you can find the spare time it would be greatly appreciated :-) I think a comparison with box2d would be very enlightening...

Actually, a performance analysis of box2D vs. jBox2D vs. Blaze 2.0 would be quite useful.  It may prove helpful for other folks who are considering porting c++ or Java applications to D.

Would anyone consider a set of memory management best practices a good idea?