Blaze 2.0

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Mason Green <mason.green at gmail.com> wrote:
> Brian wrote:
>>
>> I don't know how different Blaze 2.0 is from the version i had, but I'll
>> take a look when I get a chance and see if I can be of any help.  I'm using
>> Box2D for the time being because there were still GC issues, but I'm very
>> excited about "smoothed partial hydrodynamics" and non-convex
>> models/partitioning.
>
> Blaze 2.0 is 90% Box2D, using all the same algorithms for the CPU intensive
> tasks.  All I did was add smoothed particle dynamics, and force generators
> from the Motor2 engine. The new version is much, much different from Blaze
> 1.0.
>
> Motor2 has a few other features that I may eventually incorporate, but as I
> mentioned, for all practical purposes Blaze 2.0 is pretty much a straight
> port of Box2D.
>
> Performance should be on par with the Java and Action Script variants of
> Box2D, aside from their more efficient garbage collectors. If there are D
> specific tricks I can use to speed up the engine, I would definitely
> appreciate the help and/or contribution.

Using value types where possible would probably help.  Porting the SOA
from the C++ version of Box2D would probably also give a tremendous
speedup (and fewer GC pauses), though I don't know what effects that
would have on the API.  The way it is now is really noticeably
GC-bound.  On some of the more complex testbed scenes (like the
compound bodies test), there's a noticeable pause every two seconds or
so.