Last night I took my character down to Moorcroft Manor, with two other people.
The dungeon was almost all clockwork passages. I consistently noticed that by the time I had a screen up, the entire first area (around the elevator; varied from level to level) had already been cleared out.
I've got long loading times. Up til now, I hadn't given it any thought. I know I've got a "barely capable" graphics card, but this is more than just that.
Recently, I had a developer for UfoAI VNC into my system to try to diagnose a graphic problem. His response to seeing how long it took to load a level in that game cannot be aired without a bleep. Apparently, on intel systems it loads a level almost instantly, and on two different G4 systems (1.42), with two different graphic cards, it is very slow. (And my graphic cards are not underpowered for that game on it's low setting.)
So, I wanted to find out how long the game levels are supposed to take to load, and see if intel/motorolla endian is a problem.
Starting in Moorcroft, and using the "stubby" dungeon (only goes half way to emberlight), just going back and forth from the arcade to the party lobby and back, I took some timings. I made sure I was using "create party", "solo"; Time machine was disabled. No browsers or other large programs running. MDS had its cache flushed. System always had free memory (never went into swapping).
The first run into the lobby and back was discarded. I noticed that there was a pause at either 98% or 99%, so I tracked that.
Here are some timings, from pressing the button, until the "loading" screen appears, the time to reach 98/99 percent loaded, and the time to display the graphics on screen. I'm going on the assumption that the time from 0 to 98/99 is dominated by endian conversions; in any event, this seems really high.
Runs into the lobby:
1 10 41 4
2 9 38 5
3 6 39 5
4 5 36 4
5 6 40 6
Returns back to the arcade
1 4 32 6
2 6 25 5
3 5 37 6
4 5 28 6
5 6 31 6
This is with a 1.5Mb internet connection; I don't think the 30-40 seconds of loading is just data transmission. About 5-6 seconds to display the first frame I can understand being my card. I'm confused by the 5-6 seconds to fade out before saying "loading", and surprised that the first two "down"'s had so much more than the others.
(even with < code > blocks, this forum still collapses multiple spaces. Sheesh. )
So, I wanted to find out how long the game levels are supposed to take to load, and see if intel/motorolla endian is a problem.
I'm going to go with "no." Java uses "network byte order" (big endian) when serializing numbers: in other words, the same ordering that Motorola uses internally. If anything, Intel architectures would be slower, since they have to convert to little endian. Realistically, though, the performance impact of that conversion is negligible. The reason loading is faster on Intel than on Motorola is the same reason everything is faster: the Intel machines are newer and faster, have newer operating system code and graphics drivers, etc., etc.
This is with a 1.5Mb internet connection; I don't think the 30-40 seconds of loading is just data transmission.
Indeed, almost none of it is. The loading process consists almost entirely of loading textures, models, animations, sound effects, etc., assembling the scene, and creating the dynamic actors.