Performance

[Gregory Alan Bolcer]

I have some performance comments that
I'd like to throw out. We enjoy using really
big maps, with lots of robots, and lots of
missiles and mines flying around. This
of course uses up a lot of cpu cycles,
so we tried running the game on different
machines. We have a single-processor sparc10,
a couple of 4 processor SparcMP's, and
an assortment of Sparc2 GX's and one GT.

It turns out that the best performance we get
is running the server on the sparc10 while
running the clients on each of our GX's repectively.
The MP's perform equal to running a server on a sparc2,
and the Sparc GT (graphics tower with 21" monitor)
runs slower than both a client and server running on
a sparc 1 (GO FIGURE!). Has anyone experiemnted
around with any optimizations using
threads packages under Solaris or SunOS running
on an MP or sparc10 MP? Any other optimization
advice would be greatly appreciated. We're
pushing the xpilot limits with customized side
effects and "pressure-so-high-your-palms-sweat"
server setups.

Greg

[David Smith]

An observation I've made about performance, or rather about
responsiveness to keypresses, is that it depends largely on your
*display* speed, rather than the grunt power of the box you are
running it on. For example, it would seem that keypress events are
only processed each time a frame is processed. If you are running at a
low fps rate, or your client is dropping a lot of frames, the
granularity of keypress events can be quite high. A typical example I
have seen mentioned here before it that of simply tapping the thrust
key: is there is a long delay between processing the keypress and
keyrelease events, your ship will go shooting off into the nearest
wall. Similarly it becomes difficult to orient your ship in the right
direction, or activate shields in time to block a bullet. All in all,
if the display is slow, the game becomes unplayable.

Dave.