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Show posts MenuIt's my feeling that a lot of optimization of the graphics engine could be done; for instance, optimizing the terrain rendering as mendel mentioned. I'd be happy to offer any sort of assistance in getting the game to run faster.
(Edited by Entroper at 5:24 pm on Oct. 23, 2001)
Anyway, beaujob has created a level with varying tower designs, and it basically verifies that the more beams that intersect at a single point, the worse the 'exploding factor' of the tower. I'll have him upload it to the Serious Fortress server so you guys can all see what's going on firsthand without having to reconstruct our designs.
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht000.jpg" border="0">
At the beginning of the simulation (note that "pause" is activated), the tower looks like this:
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht001.jpg" border="0">
Immediately after unpausing, the tower looks like this:
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht002.jpg" border="0">
Now, it occured to me, as I'm sure it will occur to many of you, that perhaps the tower is too heavy to support its own weight. But you would think it would have to "settle" first, and then only the bottom links would be destroyed. I further studied this by creating a simple box in midair, so that it would freefall toward the ground, and should have no stress whatsoever. Results:
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht010.jpg" border="0">
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht011.jpg" border="0">
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht012.jpg" border="0">
Perhaps this is some sort of quirk in the physics? If I were to take a stab in the dark, I'd say that floating point errors are accumulating... I had the same problem in a 3D program I wrote, where a series of rotations screwed up a model's orientation, and really funky things happened to it on the screen. Maybe if too many beams are putting pressure on each other at once, the same sort of thing happens, and instead of putting insane stretches on a model, it puts those stretches on the beams, causing them to snap almost immediately.
That, and Direct3D isn't portable to any other OS. So if CL wants to make a Mac version and a Linux version, OpenGL is the (only) way to go.
My theory is that links are allocated dynamically, but that there's an array of pointers to link objects which overflows at around 16,000. Interestingly, pointers are 4 bytes, and 4x16,000 is roughly the size of a 'segment' in memory. The stack used to be typically limited to a single segment due to interesting issues with x86. http://www.pontifex2.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'> So that's why I thought it might have something to do with running out of stack space. But it may have nothing at all to do with the stack, and just be a freak behavior of segments and such. I don't think the array of links would be statically allocated. http://www.pontifex2.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'>