From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id SAA13571; Thu, 1 Aug 2002 18:38:44 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id SAA14035 for ; Thu, 1 Aug 2002 18:38:43 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from sunny.pacific.net.au (sunny.pacific.net.au [203.25.148.40]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g71Gcer28149; Thu, 1 Aug 2002 18:38:41 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from wisma.pacific.net.au (wisma.pacific.net.au [210.23.129.72]) by sunny.pacific.net.au with ESMTP id g71GccSs014129; Fri, 2 Aug 2002 02:38:38 +1000 (EST) Received: from ozemail.com.au (ppp55.dyn17.pacific.net.au [61.8.17.55]) by wisma.pacific.net.au with ESMTP id CAA08764; Fri, 2 Aug 2002 02:38:36 +1000 (EST) Message-ID: <3D49640B.7050500@ozemail.com.au> Date: Fri, 02 Aug 2002 02:38:35 +1000 From: John Max Skaller User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2.1) Gecko/20010901 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Damien Doligez CC: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: ocaml, simd, & fftwgel RE: [Caml-list] Caml productivity. References: <200208011536.RAA0000012229@beaune.inria.fr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk Damien Doligez wrote: >>From: John Max Skaller >> > >>Huh? Which parts of a real time interactive game aren't real time?? >>The whole thing, from gameplay interaction to graphics and sound, >>must be done in 'real-time'. >> > >I'd say no part of a real-time interactive game is real-time. To me, >real-time means something like the Ariane 5 rocket, where you have a >deadline every 36ms for the 12 hours of the mission. And if you miss >even one deadline your 100M$ rocket will crash. > Heh! I suppose I have to agree. My Real Time work involved phase control lighting systems, where timing is even tighter than your Ariane's 36ms. Surprisingly, switching phase controlled lighing circuits require precision measured in microseconds -- a single machine extra instruction on a 2Mhz microcontroller can turn an acceptable performance into an unacceptable one. >With Objective Caml on a fast machine, if you're not doing heap >compaction, GC pauses should be somewhere between 1 and 10 >milliseconds. Quite workable for an interactive game, I'd say, but >then again it's not the future of my company that is at stake. > Well, games like Diablo freeze for much longer than that: Baal's minions, 5-15 second lockup, fighting Diablo with perspective on, on a 800Mhz machine: frame rate of 1 frame per second or worse with a lag of up to 5 seconds. ARGGG!!! Totally unacceptable: lag is responsible for at least half the deaths on the internet servers. As I commented in another post, Ocaml could only improve the quality of these games by allowing the programmers to actually get the structure of the real time operation right. -- John Max Skaller, mailto:skaller@ozemail.com.au snail:10/1 Toxteth Rd, Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia. voice:61-2-9660-0850 ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners