if (Environment.ProcessorCount > 1)
{
for (int i = 0; i < Environment.ProcessorCount; i++)
{
Space.threadManager.add();
}
Space.useMultithreadedUpdate = true;
}
What this does is run through all the processors available on your machine and add it to the thread-manager to spread load across all available CPUs. Thanks to BEPU the integration is VERY easy. A pdf + sample is available on their site.
Multi-threading on the Xbox is slightly different, however it shouldn't be a problem considering the available documentation and sample by BEPU.
I still had some time left to test the performance gains using a small demo scene I made yesterday. It's basically a dominos scene with 350+ domino bricks in 3 lines getting knocked over by three boxes slinging through the air. With the debugger still attached the performance drops to 2 FPS at its lowest. Activating Multi-threading on two cores (my laptop has a Core2Duo (T9400) CPU, without Hyper-Threading) the lowest FPS recorded is 31. That is an amazing difference in performance. Another test without the debugger attached didn't get the demo-scene below 60.
Another thing I worked on today are trigger-volumes. These can be used for a number of tasks (audio triggers, portals, level events etc.) BEPU has a very nice EventManager attached to every Entity. With this manager you can easily add events to your game objects. There is not much to see so far, but I hope to have some cool demo scene ready very soon...I'd like to get rid of the boring cubes and show some actual cool stuff :)
Entity.eventManager.addEventHook(new EventHandlerInitialCollisionDetected(initialCollision));
This will fire the attached method only once when the Entity is colliding with another Entity...The fired method could be something like this:
public void initialCollision(Entity sender, Entity other, CollisionPair pair)
{
other.moveTo(new Vector3(0, 10, 0));
}
This will move the colliding Entity to the Vector3 position...More on this in a later video ;)
Image of the current demo scene:
