Re: interactive game demo for gnuplot

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

On Monday, August 26, 2013 11:52:47 am Juhász Péter wrote:
> On Sun, 2013-08-25 at 16:51 -0700, sfeam (Ethan Merritt) wrote:
> > On Sunday, 25 August 2013, Juhász Péter wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > The only thing I find surprising or unexpected here is that
> > qt is faster than both wxt and x11. 
> > X11 with no pause is slightly faster than in earlier versions, 
> > but I think that is likely due to Dima Kogan's speed optimizations.
> 
> About those, see the next attachment.
> 
> ./metaball1.sh > foo; gnuplot foo
> 
> With earlier versions the animation is quite smooth. With the current
> cvs it's glacial. So those optimizations may backfire in some cases.

It's glacial because your demo puts it in a poll/wait loop
where each poll has the 1 msec timeout that I mentioned earlier.
If I reset that timeout to zero, then the timing for current cvs
is comparable to earlier versions:

$ time gnuplot_4.4.4 foo
  3.156u 0.506s 0:04.37 83.5% 
$ time gnuplot_4.6.3 foo
  4.525u 0.517s 0:05.16 97.4% 
$ time ~/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/src/gnuplot foo
  3.440u 0.721s 0:04.39 94.7%   

It seems the 1 msec delay was a bad idea.
I'll make it a defined constant in term_api.h, set it to 0 by default,
and update CVS so you can test it.
 
> Interestingly, the more obvious ./metaball1.sh | gnuplot - is uselessly
> slow in all cases, because gnuplot echoes all commands to the terminal,
> but even with redirecting the output to /dev/null it is slower than in
> the file-reading case.

Perhaps we should add a command line option  -noprompt
or something like that to suppress the echo if it is not wanted.

> (about this demo: it's adapted from a demo a colleague of mine wrote for
> his project called animator, http://repo.hu/projects/animator/ )

  nice!

> 
> Peter


	Ethan