[plt-scheme] 2htdp/image questions

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 01:17:52PM -0400, engineer at alum.mit.edu wrote:
> Exactly.
> 
> And the only reason I went all the way to 3,000 rectangles was because I had
> no other computations running in that example.  My student's actual game
> gets choppy after about 50-100 shapes.
> 
> My student was able to compromise and create a very playable game.  But
> after realizing that the bottleneck in his game was not our collision
> detections but rather the actual rendering of the background, I decided to
> look for workarounds.  The program would be able to handle a larger, busier
> world if only I could flatten the constructed background programmatically.
> 
> That said, I agree that we've not been overly restricted by Universe's
> limitations.  We've done a lot with the World, and I hope to have time to do
> a networked project before the year ends.

My son has been doing game development for a while now, and what I've 
learned from watching him is that a really *big* part of it is getting 
the game to render in feasible time and space.  Sometime it just 
determines the structure of the code, more oftern it severely constrains 
the game design itself.  Managing to get around the rendering 
constraints is one of the main issues in game design and implementation.

That said, it's essential that when you think of ways to work around the 
problems (which you are evidently doing) you have a way of expressing 
it.

It's no coincidence that the next major update of the OpenGL API 
deprecates individual triangle operations, and instead operations on 
huge meshes of triangles instead -- it reduces the overhead that kills 
speed.  Can Scheme do the same?  Can it do it and remain nicely 
functional?  Does it?

-- hendrik