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General Performance on Mac OS X

by Seth Willits · in Torque Game Builder · 03/05/2005 (8:29 pm) · 5 replies

I've noticed T2D is really sensitive to background processes using the CPU. If T2D is running (and not doing anything other than scrolling the background slowly) the slightest mouse movement over the Dock or receiving an IM or message in IRC causes a big jerk in gameplay. This definitely seems like it could be smoothed out as I can run full 3d games and do the same thing and not have a problem.

Thoughts?
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Torque Owner Josh Williams
Default Studio Name
#1
03/05/2005 (11:56 pm)
Yeah, when it is not the in-focus application, Torque attempts to harshly minimize its processing requirements, slowing the game simulation way down. T2D follows Torque's footsteps here.

I believe this is probably what you're experiencing. But I actually haven't noticed this on my own Mac. I'll check it out and see if there's any easy way to bypass it, maybe set-up an option to remain active in the background. My brain is frazzled atm, and I don't remember where exactly this code lives and if it's easy to change. Definitely won't be able to get to this until after GDC though, and maybe by that time Melv will have ponied up and bought an OS X dev machine. ;)

Torque Owner Seth Willits
#2
03/06/2005 (2:04 am)
It's not that it jerks while Torque is in the background, it jerks when even the slightest background event takes place. Not sure if you understood that based on your reply.

Associate Melv May
#3
03/06/2005 (2:07 am)
In windows, this is in "winWindow.cc" (line 711) where it waits upto 100ms for an incoming message.

In OSX, there's a notion of ticks, 1 foreground, 2 background but I'm not that familiar with the code.

Linux?

- Melv.

Torque Owner Josh Williams
Default Studio Name
#4
03/06/2005 (3:39 am)
Seth, yeah, maybe I should've been more clear w/ the terms. It happens any time the Torque window is out of focus. In OS X, in the example you gave, this can happen when the dock becomes active / gets the focus. Again, this is something we'll be looking into, when time allows. :)

If you are interested, you seem to know your way around OS X pretty well, I could really use some assistance on the OS X side of things! Do you have much C++ experience? Think you'd be up to help out a bit? It's cool if not, but I just need some help to keep up w/ OS X dev in general, so any assistance is appreciated.

Torque Owner Seth Willits
#5
03/06/2005 (11:26 am)
Ahhhh... ok. I took your "focus" to mean the window was active/inactive.

I was fiddling with Activity Monitor and Torque's cpu usage is high (always above 80%, closer to 90%), but when any other process needs to use another 1% to display something... JERK.

I don't use C++ as my main language on Mac OS X (Obj-C and Cocoa are soooo much nicer) but I do know the language and a good chunk of the APIs. What kind of help do you need?