Tore Eriksson Wrote:
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> The bottom line is, I still need a good
> replacement for L3Lab, absolutely max 50% slower
> when it comes to loading models.
Tore,
I know you're not using a Mac, but I figure you might appreciate some generally applicable background information.
Part of your frustration is that you conflate loading time and drawing time. They really are very different operations, it's just that you apparently don't notice it because of your workflow. In any modern 3D graphics API (having vastly more power than non-hardware-accelerated systems), the structure in which you submit the geometry data is critical to fast drawing. LDraw files are not naturally favorable to that structure and must be massaged quite a bit to produce something which draws reasonably fast. This process elongates loading time, but results in drawing performance improvements of over an order of magnitude. In any graphical editor, the model is redrawn over and over; drawing time is vastly more important than a few seconds of parsing and reformatting. Likewise, any viewer that wants to support drawing the same model more than once must optimize for drawing over loading.
Loading impact can be reduced by amortization and caching. In Bricksmith, the first load of Orion's 10030 takes 5.8 seconds on my three-year-old Mac. The second load (provided you don't quit the program in between) takes 0.06 seconds, simply because I only throw away the 10030 itself, not the individual parts inside it. Even better, using a hardware-accelerated graphical editor to build your model would incur no loading time whatsoever while adding and moving parts, and would only be bound by the drawing fps. In which case, faster drawing wins the day.
Allen
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> The bottom line is, I still need a good
> replacement for L3Lab, absolutely max 50% slower
> when it comes to loading models.
Tore,
I know you're not using a Mac, but I figure you might appreciate some generally applicable background information.
Part of your frustration is that you conflate loading time and drawing time. They really are very different operations, it's just that you apparently don't notice it because of your workflow. In any modern 3D graphics API (having vastly more power than non-hardware-accelerated systems), the structure in which you submit the geometry data is critical to fast drawing. LDraw files are not naturally favorable to that structure and must be massaged quite a bit to produce something which draws reasonably fast. This process elongates loading time, but results in drawing performance improvements of over an order of magnitude. In any graphical editor, the model is redrawn over and over; drawing time is vastly more important than a few seconds of parsing and reformatting. Likewise, any viewer that wants to support drawing the same model more than once must optimize for drawing over loading.
Loading impact can be reduced by amortization and caching. In Bricksmith, the first load of Orion's 10030 takes 5.8 seconds on my three-year-old Mac. The second load (provided you don't quit the program in between) takes 0.06 seconds, simply because I only throw away the 10030 itself, not the individual parts inside it. Even better, using a hardware-accelerated graphical editor to build your model would incur no loading time whatsoever while adding and moving parts, and would only be bound by the drawing fps. In which case, faster drawing wins the day.
Allen