Jacob Repp

RubyCube progress

March 26th, 2007 by proj

I got some more time to hack on RubyCube so from my original almost ready post I got the following done:

Finished the stress test
Finished first pass of documentation (rubydoc)
More test cases for basic functionality
Perspective transform is working

Working on the above items exposed some underlying issues that need to be addressed.

Object destruction had to be optimized a bit. This is a bit tricky due to multithreading issues. Basically once the ruby script calls the registered free callback the object is marked for cleanup. The graphics/update thread handles reclaiming the actual memory in the main loop.
I couldn’t find an effecient way to do game timers in ruby. This code looks nice but creates too many Time objects:

stopTime = Time.now() + 60
while(Time.now() < stopTime) do
  puts "thinking"
end

So a custom solution has been cooked up. This ties into the existing low level events system used in rubycube (uglier but fast):

timerId = RubyCube.settimer(10, -1) # interval 10 seconds, repeats forever
loop do
  event = []
  while(RubyCube.readevent(event)) do
    if(event[0] == RubyCube::TIMER && event[1] == timerId) then
      puts “hit timer”
    end
  end
end