Category Archives: random

I’ve been working on rewriting Sheeple these past couple of days. The new version will be a major bottom-up redesign, mainly to the lowlevel stuff. The early results without too-crazy optimization are already showing up, and it’s quite nice.

These numbers are on Clozure CL x86  Linux:

SHEEPLE> (time (loop repeat 100000 do (allocate-std-sheep)))
(LOOP REPEAT 100000 DO (ALLOCATE-STD-SHEEP)) took 119 milliseconds (0.119 seconds) to run
                    with 2 available CPU cores.
During that period, 106 milliseconds (0.106 seconds) were spent in user mode
                    3 milliseconds (0.003 seconds) were spent in system mode
50 milliseconds (0.050 seconds) was spent in GC.
 4,000,000 bytes of memory allocated.
 19 minor page faults, 0 major page faults, 0 swaps.

And a single sheep object:

SHEEPLE> (time (allocate-std-sheep))
(ALLOCATE-STD-SHEEP) took 0 milliseconds (0.000 seconds) to run
                    with 2 available CPU cores.
During that period, 0 milliseconds (0.000 seconds) were spent in user mode
                    0 milliseconds (0.000 seconds) were spent in system mode
 40 bytes of memory allocated.

Now, that’s still a bit heavy compared to CLOS (which only allocates 24 bytes for a raw instance), and to be honest, I’m not aiming at beating CLOS. It’s like a class-based system trying to beat out structs. On the other hand, it’s actually pretty nice to shrink everything down to more usable levels.
The current Sheeple release, for example, the one built on top of CLOS, is quite a monster:

SHEEPLE> (time (loop repeat 100000 do (allocate-sheep)))
(LOOP REPEAT 100000 DO (ALLOCATE-SHEEP)) took 11,273 milliseconds (11.273 seconds) to run
                    with 2 available CPU cores.
During that period, 10,716 milliseconds (10.716 seconds) were spent in user mode
                    204 milliseconds (0.204 seconds) were spent in system mode
3,249 milliseconds (3.249 seconds) was spent in GC.
 244,000,000 bytes of memory allocated.
 9,419 minor page faults, 0 major page faults, 0 swaps.

So yeah, this is a huge improvement.

Keep in mind that all of these numbers don’t yet take into account what the full cost of a raw (clone) will be, although it won’t be much higher than what it is right now (I believe it will only be two extra words, because an item will be added to the parents list).

It’s a bit fun to mess around with stuff so carefully at a lower level…

So i went missing for a few days.  One reason is that I got distracted from code by a recently-purchased copy of the World of Darkness Storytelling system rulebook.

I really love  White Wolf’s approach to these games. I’ve played MMOs for many years now, and tabletop roleplaying games for a little less, and I found that I almost universally went with roleplaying/story-heavy sides of whatever I played, so the Storytelling system’s strong emphasis on telling a story, rather than leveling up a character by grinding through rats, really resonated with me.

It also helped me think a lot more about what kind of system Sykosomatic should employ — what can be done in an online world that encourages cooperative storytelling between players, while still having systems for fairly resolving conflicts?

Anyway, I should have an actual full post about what Sykosomatic is and what I’m aiming for with it before I go too far into more specific aspects of its design.

As far as the WoD goes — I’m really liking this system, and I’m going to try and run a couple of short games over the coming months to get familiar with it. Right now, I have a feeling a modified version of the system is what Sykosomatic will end up using in the background…