Re: [GD-General] worker threads, level loading and progress bars

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

I took a stab at this (loading in a background thread) in Soul Ride.
In Win32, it's pretty easy to set up a new OpenGL render context, and
use wglShareLists() so that textures defined in one thread are usable
in the other thread.

In captivity it worked, pretty well in fact.  But at the time
(early/mid 2000, IIRC) it was highly vulnerable to bugs in driver
thread support, so I gave up and fell back on the DoWork() pattern.

Under X, there seems to be a way to share textures across threads, but
I never got around to trying it.  Nowadays I try to use SDL for all
video setup & config, and it does not have a facility like
wglShareLists :(

The worker queue thing works as well; my Chunked LOD demo uses this
pattern -- I load the image data in the loader thread, and bind it in
the foreground thread.  But it still means some extra, unnecessary
work for the foreground thread; plus the coding work.

-Thatcher

On Aug 07, 2002 at 04:44 +0200, Ignacio Casta?o wrote:
> Hmm... it seems to my now, that the problem with the multiple threads could
> be easily solved.
> 
> The only OpenGL operation performed by the worker thread is to upload
> textures, so my texture manager could have a list of textures waiting to be
> uploaded, and I could process them on each game loop.
> 
> Anyway, I still would like to hear how others have solve this problem.
> 
> 
> Ignacio Casta?o
> cas...@ya...
> 
> 
> Ignacio Casta?o wrote:
> > Hi,
> > to display a progress bar during the level loads, I've always used
> somekind
> > of callback mechanism, or a simple 'DoWork' function that performs a
> little
> > part of the work in each call and returns a special value when the work
> has
> > been finished. Those approaches worked ok, but the progress of the bar
> > wasn't smooth and the resulting code was not very clean:
> > ...
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________________________
> Copa del Mundo de la FIFA 2002
> El ?nico lugar de Internet con v?deos de los 64 partidos. 
> ?Ap?ntante ya! en http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/fc/es/
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek
> Welcome to geek heaven.
> http://thinkgeek.com/sf
> _______________________________________________
> Gamedevlists-general mailing list
> Gam...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gamedevlists-general
> Archives:
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=557

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com