[OLPC-Games] KuKu refactor for decreased playtime lag

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2007 at 05:45:03PM -0400, Julius B. Lucks wrote:
> Hey Chris,
> 
> Actually I just realized that those get_xxx() methods are probably  
> relics of the old code.  The main differences you will encounter in  
> the main loop is that all these get_xxx() methods are now just  
> object.number, that the object.draw(screen) -> object.draw(), and  
> that lives_object.draw_lives() -> lives.draw().

Yep, that's exactly it. I got to the point of cargo culting, but not to
the point of actually porting over to the newer style code :) 

> I just did those fixes to your patch and ran it on an XO and except  
> for the initial 10 questions that draw the fruit images in the tiles,  
> it is MUCH faster.  Thanks for this, and I can't wait to get your  
> final patch committed.

If you've got something that works, feel free to run with it. Changing
the accessor methods to just access the values seems fine to me: I had
gotten far enough to see that it looked like that was neccesary, but not
far enough to actually doing it -- it looked like that was a large chunk
of the remaining work, so far as I could tell.

Once you've got that in, I'll start taking a look at the image drawing
part -- I think it's likely that the code is reloading all the images
from disk every time the chicken moves, which has obvious negative
affects. (Before it was actually reloading them all every time the event
loop ran, so far as I could tell - a 15 second game would call
load_image 9000 times.)   

Let me know if you want me to dive back in and fix anything, but I think
at the moment the next step is just to get your working version of the
patch in, and then I'll start hacking again here.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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