Funny Populator Behavior

[sjefen]

Populating trees may take some time, but I just noticed the populater works faster if I just move the mouse around.
Not much, but still, it's faster

Anyway..... why is this? It doesen't make any sense.

- Terje

[Mohawk20]

No, it doesn't...

Just as water boils faster if you don't look at it.
By moving your cursor you distract yourself so your perception of time shifts.
Sorry, but it's all in your head 

[sjefen]

I'm serious. It does.
Tell me how to record what I'm doing on my monitor and I'll show you.

- Terje

[dandelO]

This happens, and a lot faster too, when generating a heightfield. I noticed it a while back... http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3219.0

[sjefen]

Yeah... I noticed that as well. Hehe.
What's up with this anyway?

- Terje

[JimB]

Happens for me during Population generate as well.

-"Got any hints and tips for working with Terragen?"
-"Well, you know those wrist supports you can buy...."

[Seth]

hehehe
we all gonna have tennis elbow soon !

[Oshyan]

I have no idea why this happens and it has bugged me for a while. I'll see if I can find anything out.

- Oshyan

[jaf]

A possible clue (though a very vague) may be found by watching the Task Manager CPU usage.  Roll the mouse around and the CPU usage naturally goes up.  Stop, and it settles down. 

Of course if something like an all core render is in progress, it's difficult to see.  But it doesn't make sense that increased CPU usage to support the mouse would result in an increased application performance.

Does the amount of time slice the application under focus (active window) gets from the operating system increases? 

Quite interesting and hopefully someone can add a plausible explanation.

[jo]

Hi,

I thought these problems had been resolved. I'll look at it again. Basically, while the progress dialog is shown user events are kind of manually processed. I think there may be something up with this on Windows. Perhaps the event loop is waiting without timing out or something and wiggling the mouse is waking up the event loop, pushing the event processing through and letting the application get back to populating or generating the heightfield or whatever so that it ends up going faster. Anyway, I'll check it out.

Regards,

Jo

[PG]

So we can decrease our render times by using our mice as a frisbee?

[jo]

Hi,

Rendering isn't effected by this. It will only be things which put up a progress dialog.

Anyway, it's fixed now. A task I tried went from taking almost a minute to 16 seconds, no wiggling required :-).

Regards,

Jo

[sjefen]

That's awesome.
Thanks jo.

- Terje

[Seth]

good job

[rcallicotte]

Nice job, Jo.