Jay McGavren's Journal

I’m having a very productive day today. Panic will do that to you.

Here we go… ruby-prof said wxRuby was spending a lot of time initializing memory device contexts (canvases to draw on)…

 %self     total     self     wait    child    calls  name
 45.42      5.63     5.63     0.00     0.00      120  Kernel#sleep
  8.85      2.05     1.10     0.00     0.95    28440  WxRubyStyleAccessors#method_missing
  5.16      0.64     0.64     0.00     0.00     9520  Wxruby2::MemoryDC#initialize
  4.42      5.14     0.55     0.00     4.59     9520  Wxruby2::Bitmap#draw

That would be because I was doing so before each line I drew.

	def draw_line(options = {})
		buffer.draw do |surface|
			surface.pen = Wx::Pen.new(
...
		end
	end

So as a quick fix, I’m queueing my shapes and drawing everything at once. This brought me about in line with Ruby-Gnome2, speed-wise:

	def draw_line(options = {})
		@line_queue << options
	end

	def render_lines
		buffer.draw do |surface|
			while options = @line_queue.shift do
				surface.pen = Wx::Pen.new(
...
			end
		end
	end

 %self     total     self     wait    child    calls  name
 69.41     11.27    11.27     0.00     0.00      240  Kernel#sleep
  4.24      1.83     0.69     0.00     1.14    30600  WxRubyStyleAccessors#method_missing
  2.96      4.17     0.48     0.00     3.69      480  Wxruby2::Bitmap#draw
  2.41      0.39     0.39     0.00     0.00    40640  Regexp#===

Though I made a pretty big memory structure to do it. I’ll have to slim that down at some point.

Now it says it’s spending a lot of time initializing colors (Colours?) and pens. Will I have to cache those? Hope not.

The Tivo gets a lot of tech podcasts, and I told Lenny I wanted to pick the next show after his cartoon was done.

Lenny (sincerely): “You mean that show where they talk about a lot of cell phones? Like nerds?” Me (laughing): “Yes, that show.”

Mario Steele from the wxRuby list solved my problem - I was creating an extra device context and then not even using it. draw_bitmap works a lot better, too.

It’s working within Zyps as well, but it’s about 50% slower than Ruby-Gnome2. :( Now to find out if that’s my fault or the library’s.

wxRuby animation demo not quite working...

Posted this to the wxruby-users mailing list. Let’s see if anyone else has attempted anything like this.

OK, I have a basic blit demo working (thanks to Alex Fenton for his reply, which I finally saw). However, there's a great deal of "tearing" on the screen - flickering grey lines in the black background. It looks like the blit isn't always complete when the screen refreshes. Can anyone look at this and tell me what I might be doing wrong? Any help would be most appreciated! -Jay McGavren http://jay.mcgavren.com/zyps