Re: pfSync() and faster dynamics
Lew Hitchner (hitchner++at++netcom.com)
Sat, 30 Oct 93 07:29:14 -0700
At the recent IEEE VR Symposium in San Jose this past week it appeared
to me that the consensus in the VR research community was that
synchronizing object action simulations to the rendering simulation
rate was considered pretty much out of date. Even a fixed integer
ratio between object simulation rate and rendering frame rate was not
considered a great solution (though, certainly an improvement over 1-1
ratio). In Andy Van Dam's keynote talk, "VR As A Forcing Function:
Software Implications of New Paradigns", he spoke in favor of every
object in a VR simulation having its own independent simulation, what
he referred to as fine grained concurrency. How to actually implement
such concurrency is difficult to determine, and probably should be done
differently for different applications. But, the point was that
synchronizing application updates with rendering updates is a loser.
Jim Helman's suggestion (and I believe also John Rohlfe in some earlier
msgs.) of separate forked processes is one solution, though it adds a
bit of run-time overhead and a lot of app. programmer overhead and
debugging complexity (esp. if you're a klutz with programming multiple
processes and shared memory like I am).
Lew Hitchner
Xtensory Inc.
Scotts Valley, CA
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on Mon Aug 10 1998 - 17:50:04 PDT