| |
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| |
What's News in the PlayBasic world ? - Find out here.
|
Multi Core Support Coming To PlayBasic V1.64L
|
|
By: Kevin Picone Added: March 13th, 2010
|
|
Category: All
|
With the upcoming PlayBasic V1.64L release, our goal is better embrace the Multi-Core CPU hardware out there in 2D gamer land. A lot has changed since we started work on PlayBasic all those years ago, and a landscape of game programming languages has exploded since then, which in turn, so has the uptake of game programming as a hobby, or even a business for some people. While there's more products available, more often than not, they use the same approach underneath. This is particularly evident when we look at the types of graphics interfaces many products are using, Ie Direct3D, OpenGL. However, while the uptake of Multi Core Cpu's in recent years has been steadily increasing, there's very little support for it in high level languages. In particular that are beginner friendly.
So the main objective for the PlayBasic V1.64L upgrade is to implement threading (Multi Core) support in such a way that its either transparent to the you the game programmer or as close to transparent as possible. So the programmer can simply activate it, or disable it depending upon their preference/availability. Secondly we wanted to implement this support in a scalable fashion. So the PlayBasic engine can take better advantage of the how ever many Cpu cores the players cpu has Therefore allowing your game/application to transparently scale it's work load on systems that have 2, 3, 4 or more CPU core's installed. It fact, it can handle up to 32 cores in the current Work In Progress editions of PlayBasic V1.64L.
Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet, as the current beta editions of PlayBasicV1.64L have limited threading support to only a hand full of the rendering functions. Most notable the big image processing functions in BlitImage library. These functions are often used for doing full screen effect passes, so distributing the work load better across CPU cores can be very beneficial. While this will certainly help many programs, the bigger changes and more universal benefits, we're looking into the viability of adding threading to camera/scene rendering. This would allow you to render your scene as normal and fully realizing the potential of Multi-Core rendering. While an objective, we're not currently there yet.
You can follow the development of PlayBasicV1.64l on our forums
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
