Michael Bayne
45ec296ba0
flattens messages into a buffer and then passes that bucket to a SocketChannel.write() method which is part of the NIO business. If said buffer is a "direct" buffer, the write() method will in theory do high-performance shit like DMA the data right to the network card. If it's not a direct buffer, Sun apparently makes a temporary direct buffer, copies the data into it and passes that on to the underlying socket send() call. We weren't using direct buffers which means that we were copying everything one more time than needed (not a huge deal) and that we were allocating a direct buffer for every message (a much bigger deal). This should take a serious load off of the I/O thread and fortunately we can test it on Ice to make sure it doesn't do anything super crazy. All this said, this whole business is going to change when I rearchitect Presents to avoid the potential race conditions it suffers from now and we won't be able to use a single direct buffer to write all of our outgoing messages, but I believe we will be able to use a pool of direct buffers with one used by every message in the queue waiting to be written (hopefully that won't be too many at any given time) which we can keep around to avoid the expense of allocating and freeing direct buffers. git-svn-id: svn+ssh://src.earth.threerings.net/narya/trunk@3336 542714f4-19e9-0310-aa3c-eee0fc999fb1
The Narya library
-----------------
The Narya library provides various facilities for making networked
multiplayer games. It's various packages include:
* geom, util, io - basic tools for doing networked I/O, data structure
manipulation and some geometry math
* resource - tools for bundling, deploying and managing media (images,
sounds, etc.) with a game
* media - a framework for doing "active" rendering in Java
* media.image - tools for loading, caching, manipulating and displaying images
* media.sound - tools for loading, caching, and playing audio
* media.animation, media.sprite - works in concert with the active
rendering system and provides tools for defining and manipulating
sprites (graphical entities that follow paths) and animations
(graphical entities that affect the display in other ways)
* miso - a framework for defining and displaying isometrically rendered scenes
* presents - a framework for distributing information among a server and
networked clients
* crowd - builds on the presents framework to create the notion of
bodies and rooms and provides chat infrastructure
* whirled - builds on the crowd framework and defines a scene graph with
portals to move between scenes and provides hooks for distributing and
updating scene data (for example isometric rendering information) over
the network
* cast - a framework for defining and using recolorable, composited
characters with different poses and actions
* parlor - builds upon the crowd framework to create the notion of a
game with players and provides tools for making turn based games
* puzzle - builds on the parlor and media frameworks to provide tools
for implementing puzzle games in a networked environment
* micasa - builds on the parlor framework to provide lobbies and
matchmaking for multiplayer games
Documentation is somewhat sparse at the moment, but inspection of the code
in the tests/ directory shows examples of use of many features of the
library.
Building
--------
Building the library is very simple. First ensure that the necessary third
party jar files are available either in the lib/ directory or in the
system wide jar file location specified in build.xml. See lib/README for a
list of the necessary third party jar files and how to get them.
The library is built using ant, a modern build tool available from The
Jakarta Project. If you aren't already using ant for other projects, it
can be found here:
http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/
Invoke ant with any of the following targets:
all: builds the distribution files and javadoc documentation
compile: builds only the class files (dist/classes)
javadoc: builds only the javadoc documentation (dist/docs)
dist: builds the distribution jar files (dist/*.jar)
Distribution
------------
The Narya library is released under the LGPL. The most recent version of
the library is available here:
http://www.threerings.net/code/narya/
Contribution
------------
Contributions to Narya are welcome. Control of the CVS repository is
presently in the hands of mdb@threerings.net, who should be emailed about
submissions. Soon we will be migrating to Subversion and making the
repository publicly accessible. For now, source releases are available at
the above website.
Contact Information
-------------------
Narya is actively developed by the scurvy dogs at Three Rings Design,
Inc. Contact Michael Bayne <mdb@threerings.net> with questions, comments
and other wordly endeavors.
$Id: README,v 1.1 2004/08/27 17:44:44 mdb Exp $