[Freeciv-Dev] GTK client draws more slowly than it needs to (PR#898)

[Kevin Brown <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 01:04:39PM -0400, Ross W. Wetmore wrote:
> > The total run times for an exactly identical game show an overall
> > 25% cost (9 min vs 12 min) for functions over macros for a small
> > set of the common ones. One could probably refine this by playing
> > with the set to see which were the key ones.
> > 
> > My thoughts at the moment are that this would be really useful for 
> > client code that seems to have a performance bottleneck in processing
> > server packets that can cause it to die from buffer exhaustion. A
> > small speedup in the client might be enough to keep it ahead of the 
> > wave.
> 
> The server is faster in sending out packets than the client can
> display the changes. I would suspect the improvements in the common
> code base would also benefit the server. The server justs wins this
> race. Maybe some of the gui (drawing) code needs to be examined.

Ahh...and here you are indeed correct: the drawing code can be sped up
a bit.

Attached is my GTK+ client speedup patch as it stands right now.  It
creates and uses a tile cache.  Activate it with --use-tile-cache.
You'll need to apply my client-specific argument handling patch from
PR#892 before you apply this patch.

It provides the options "--tile-cache-size", which allows you to
control the number of entries in the cache (default 1024) and
"--min-cached-tile-depth", which allows you to control the minimum
number of sprites that have to form a tile before it'll be cached
(default is 2).

Note that this does NOT affect isometric view.  I'm still working on
that one, as it will require me to combine masks (but once I've got
that done it'll be a lot more general-purpose).  So to test this,
you'll have to use "--tiles trident" or something similar.

Because of how it works, this won't help that much unless you have fog
of war turned on.  But it should help significantly in that case.


I'm submitting this to bugs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx as well, in the hope
that it'll create a PR# for this...



I'll be very interested in knowing how much it helps the problem of
the client keeping up with the server, if any...





-- 
Kevin Brown                                           kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

    It's really hard to define what "unexpected behavior" means when you're
                       talking about Windows.

freeciv-1.12.0-tilecache.patch
Description: Text document