Re: SDL interface reorg checked in

[Stan Shebs <shebs at shebs dot cnchost dot com>]

Hans Ronne wrote:
> 
> >The code is still in its early stages, doesn't have all the flexibility
> >that we've talked about, there are still no popups, and it hasn't yet
> >been tested on Macs, so it's probably broken there (sorry Hans).
> 
> Nice work. And everything works fine on the Mac. The Linux X11 fullscreen
> mode is broken, though. Fullscreen DGA and windowed X11 both work fine.
> Haven't tested fullscreen X11 for a while, so this problem may be unrelated
> to your latest checkin.

I haven't actually tried fullscreen myself...

> I still see a very poor performance under Linux, as compared to MacOS, even
> when using the DGA driver. It's not just that scrolling is miserably slow,
> the whole game is much slower. I just clocked the lord-rings game on
> automatic. Under Linux, each turn takes 50 seconds to complete, on the Mac
> only 2 seconds. Unit movement on the Mac is in fact so fast it is difficult
> to follow. Much faster than in XconqPPC.

Cool, clearly I need to get dev tools onto my new DP machine that
runs almost-the-last-build-before-GM of OS X, who will care about
Linux then?! :-)  It points up something else, which is that this
interface is going to need to have some timing machinery regulating
how fast things can happen.

> The Linux game seems to spend long periods when nothing is drawn to the
> screen. This makes me wonder if the slowdown is just due to slow graphics.
> Maybe something else is eating cycles in the Unix version?

Well, SDL isn't magic - you're still doing protocol to the server,
and too many packets will kill the interface.  I notice that the
color cursor in HOMM3 on Linux is ever so slightly draggy, and
that Loki's latest update has an option to use only X cursor
instead, so I suspect those guys had to work at getting reasonable
speed too.

Stan