Some demos I found online (nehe, cone3d) and all of my programs tend to be jumpy and somewhat slower when there are other programs running in the background, especially an internet connection. But I don't see that happening with commercial games like warcraft. What kind of magical snippet(s) do these companies use to combat this problem? Is there anything I can do to help this? I'm using SDL/Opengl under windows 98 (but it happens with non-SDL programs too) peace -DA [edited by - deadalive on February 7, 2003 5:41:01 PM]

Most commercial games use threads and this can greatly improve performance. For instance, a few games that have seen the source code for put their event reading code in one thread, graphics code, in another and so forth. This way, the cpu doesnt waste time waiting in a loop in your program that isn''t doing anything.

SDL has support for threads. Read the docs and experiment.

just to point out something, all processes contain a thread of execution
some programs use more than one, which can boost performance if done correctly (and slow it if done poorly)

MS Visual C++ 6.0 comes with a process viewer, which you can delete any uneeeded processes.

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SIMON SAY''S GET THE F-UP AND CODE SOME MORE.
YOUR NOTHING BUT A SILLY LITTLE WHORE.

ahh ok so this must be why I''ve seen so many people wanting to know about multi-threading. I saw the threading commands in SDL docs but didn''t know why I''d ever want to use them.. thanks guys!
-DA