Re: [Sheflug] General Ramblings

[Alex Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, Will Newton wrote:

> > AI doesn't need much processor power at all. Usually, it's not the
> > processor that's a factor in game development anyway - the processor is
> > *never* the bottleneck.
> On a tangent somewhat but I would like to see rather more research into
> game AI seen as there are a few spare cycles available in some games that
> seem to think great graphics == great game.

There are *loads* of spare cycles. Apparently, the guy iD hired to do the
AI for Q3 was hired just 'cos of a mod he did for Q1/2 (can't remember
which). There are a lot of simple techniques which apparently work very
well. I remember (years ago!) the first Amiga magazine I bought was Amiga
Shopper, precisely for the AI series they ran back then ('92), it was
extremely good.

> The processor sometimes is the bottleneck, it depends on a very many
> things including game design, texture usage, graphics card, engine
> features etc. But that is way off topic. :)

On a serious games machine (playstation, Pc w/3d card etc.) it's usually
the bus to the graphics card that's the problem. 3d cards do an *awful*
lot these days ;)

> > So should a UP 500MHz system, SMP doesn't gain you anything in terms of
> > performance. It's just CPU RAID.....
> I would have thought if you had a high load, say a kernel compile, an SMP
> system should keep the user interface latency of other tasks down a bit.
> Having never tried it I don't know though. :)

I just nice 19, no latency on the UI at all ;))

> That is a dodgy change. I never could figure out the reasoning behind
> that. unmount IMO should make sure the disk has a mount count of 0.

Well, the mount count can no longer be guaranteed to be 0. You can mount
as many times as you like, in many places, it could be that the various
bits are in various caches & don't all sync on a umount, but I don't know.
Seems like a good idea to me, but it will take some getting used to.

Cheers,

Alex.

PS. 
Richard - got your message. There's no point me emailing you yet, 'cos
obviously if I'm not getting your emails something is wrong at this end &
it would be like e-mailing a black hole ;)) I'll try and find the problem
and get back to you shortly!! I imagine I've dropped a clanger somewhere
;)



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