Re:An Architecture for Millions of Things
by yetihehe on Thursday July 14, 2016 @02:33AM
(#12092028)
If you need to do something which was never done because of efficiency problems, you need to think about how to do it before you start. It's called planning, not premature optimization. Just optimizing existing approaches won't do anything good here as author said in beginning.
Re:An Architecture for Millions of Things
by ggambetta on Thursday July 14, 2016 @07:00AM
(#12092811)
It is a bit premature in a way; paraphrasing here, but "a million is not cool. You know what's cool? A billion" No matter how much you optimise CPU caches and memory allocators, at some point your application won't fit in a single machine, and you'll have to go distributed. Datacenters, not mainframes :)
Re:An Architecture for Millions of Things
by anselm_eickhoff on Thursday July 14, 2016 @08:22AM
(#12093122)
But if you're already using message passing, this transition will be much more natural!
> which was never done
Highly doubt that.
Oh, and when I see a phrase "millions of things interacting" and don't see a word "GPU" anywhere I feel strange. Just saying.
Re:An Architecture for Millions of Things
by majewsky on Thursday July 14, 2016 @07:43AM
(#12092967)
Assuming that he is talking about a city sim as a game, I can understand that he doesn't want to use the GPU for the simulation, since it will be occupied with the (even more expensive) rendering of the city.
Re:An Architecture for Millions of Things
by anselm_eickhoff on Thursday July 14, 2016 @08:12AM
(#12093078)
That and that I really want to avoid having to debug GPGPU code for the main simulation. But I'm not saying it won't become GPGPU at some point!
Re:An Architecture for Millions of Things
by anoother on Thursday July 14, 2016 @07:35AM
(#12092939)
On that note, you might find Introversion's (cancelled) 'Subversion' project interesting.
Dev blog: http://www.introversion.co.uk/subversion/
Post 12 is especially relevant to the 'convincing city' discussion: http://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=41634
Edit to add: Amazing to think that this was happening 8 years ago. I wonder what it would turn out like if they took another crack at it today.
The youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/theanzelm) seems to have plenty of images.
Not seeing anything there that looks like a street from street level. Mostly talking-head video.
Re:An Architecture for Millions of Things
by anselm_eickhoff on Thursday July 14, 2016 @08:11AM
(#12093073)
(author here) others already addressed the point of premature optimization. It's about getting it kinda right from the start.
Procedural building generation is indeed one of the other huge topics of the project and believable, unique street-level looks a main goal.
Their big problem is making a procedural city generator that produces a convincing city at street level. There are lots of floorplan generators and things which produce vaguely reasonable buildings, but nothing good enough to make a video game grade driveable or walkable city down at street level. Unless they crack that problem, their game is going to suck.