cpu consumption

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by hawk66

Hi,

don't know if that was discussed before or if I have over-read this in the doc (wouldn't be the first time ):

Even if Winspmbt(CD-version) is idle, it consumes ~25% of the cpu(quad-core)...any reason for this...perhaps the used libraries to bridge that DOS-coding to Windows?

Might be a slight problem if you try to play that game on a netbook since it consumes more power than necessary...

That is because it is a game and not some office application.

Games are in a tight continuously running game loop, using idle time to do things like the palette cycling that does "moving" smoke, and redrawing the map several times a second to allow for animations. They are usually not very cooperative with other applications (ours allows a short amount of sleep time to allow office apps some CPU).

Office applications are in a wait state for the user to actually do something most of the time (type a key, press the mouse).

Games therefore assume they own the machine - you have started the thing in order to play the game, not do work !. If you actually are not doing something in a WP package, it is effectively doing nothing other than occupying RAM. Most games are always doing something that uses CPU, even if the end user is not focussed on the game window at the time.

Cheers
Andy

[dmnt]

I work as a programmer in the software industry and often write multi-threaded applications and I have noticed the same that the other gamers above.

I wonder if there is no "sleep" or "wait" periods within the game? I'm running winspmbt on a single core machine and it then naturally takes 100% of the computing time available for it. Not that it's a big problem, but while drawing maps for the game the responsiveness of other windows could be better if it didn't.

Is there any wait loop where the software could sleep() for couple of milliseconds or possibility of yielding by sleeping 0 milliseconds whenever there's "nothing to do". Of course I understand that the base program was written at the ages when CPUs were never idling but working in a busy loop and there was no multitasking. All computers wait at the same speed - maybe there's a place somewhere for this little sleep routine?