Subject:
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Mac Brick CAD and the Imerial Star Destroyer
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev.mac
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Date:
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Mon, 17 May 2004 01:48:22 GMT
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Viewed:
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2329 times
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Following the comments by James with Orion Pobursky's version of 10030 (Imperial
Star Destroyer), I took a look at the file.
In it's original form there was 3 problems:
1. MBC is case sensitive when referencing sub-models (don't know if this is good
or bad?)
2. MBC requires the "NOFILE" meta command after each sub-model (this is an
unexpected bug that needs fixing)
3. Even with the above two items fixed, Orion's file is still too complex for
MBC to fully render
For .mpd files, MBC is limited to a depth of 3 sub-models, Orion's file goes to
4 and 5 levels of depth.
Therefore, I took Orion's file and modified it so it's now friendly to MBC (i.e.
I eliminated some of levels of sub-models by integrating them into upper
sub-model levels).
This modified version of the Imperial Star Destroyer can be got from here:
http://homepage.mac.com/aallan/LdGLite.html
Returning to the original comments by James, I did a crude speed test with the
file and got some rather strange results. I have 2 Macs at home:
1. Powermac G4/400 (Yikes), 192Mb with 16Mb ATI Rage128 PCI graphic card running
MacOS 10.2
2. Powermac MDD Dual 1GHz, 512Mb with 64Mb ATI 9000Pro graphic card running
MacOS 10.2.8
My test was as follows: firstly, I started MBC. Then, for the first test, I
double clicked on the M10030.mpd file and measured the time from the second
click of the mouse until the image was visible on the screen. For the second
test, I pressed the '0' key (orthographic view) on the keypad and measured the
time for the view to refresh. (All measurements were with a stopwatch - as the
times are so long, no more accuracy is needed)
The result were quite startling...
G4/400 Yikes: Double Click to view - 44 seconds, redraw - 10 seconds
MDD Dual 1GHz: Double Click to view - 44 seconds, redraw - 7 seconds
By rights, I would have expected a mac with dual 1GHz G4 processors to have been
much faster than on with a single 400MHz processor.
The redraw times do fit the pattern of the bottle-neck being the bus speed
(100MHz vs 167MHz), but that said the 9000Pro card is OpenGL hardware
accelerated where as the Rage128 isn't.
However, the load times have got me baffled. While the loading an parsing are
very disk intensive (and therefore speed limiting), I'd still expect the newer
machine to outperform the older.
On the plus side, users of older Macs aren't necessarily to disadvantaged.
Therefore if anybody else wants to try my crude experiment, please send me the
results.
Andrew...
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Mac Brick CAD and the Imerial Star Destroyer
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| (...) Thanks for the MBC update! PowerBook G4, 400MHz, 512MB RAM, IBM TravelStar 40GN 40GB HD (4200 RPM), OS X 10.3.3 (build 7F44), 8MB Rage128. I don't have the .mpd extension mapped to MBC, so I dropped the Star Destroyer MPD on the MBC app. Timed (...) (21 years ago, 17-May-04, to lugnet.cad.dev.mac)
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