SVN for dummies: purpose of multiple builds (-j3)?

[Finchj]

I finally managed to piece together the bare minimum knowledge necessary to get the SVN version to work on OS X yesterday.

The game runs and I can play. One thing I didn't do, however, was use the -j3 command:

Quote

• -j3 gives the number of parallel builds to run, and should typically be one plus the number of CPU cores available.

Because I didn't tell the computer to make three "parallel builds," is my computer not using both cores? (Yes, my computer is that old)

When I play the SVN version, the game takes longer to load models/textures. You can actually see the game loading each individual thing and putting the textures on, which is at its worst right at the start of the game.

Does this have something to do with not running parallel builds? Would anyone explain what this command does performance wise?

Thanks!

[sanderd17]

The -j flag just specifies the number of parallel build processes you can run. So it just makes the build process faster. But the resulting binary will be exactly the same. In other words, it doesn't say anything about the number of processes the game will use.

And yes, we currently don't really support multiple cores. We only use separate thread for small tasks like IO, that would otherwise stall the game for a bit.

[Stan`]

About the texture loading issue you are facing it's because textures are not cached in the dev version so the first time you load them its gonna take some time

[fcxSanya]

Regarding the second question (textres loading): release versions of the game come with pre-cached textures, so they are displayed instantly.

SVN version on the contrary caches each texture as soon as it's needed, so when all textures are cached SVN version works the same way as release one.

[Finchj]

Thanks for the replies everyone

Good to know the textures are working properly too.

(PS: Love the changes so far)