Drawing speed

[Jim Hurley]

Jim Hurley wrote:

>  > > There appears to be no remedy in the offing to the speed problem.

Scott Rainey wrote:

>Actually the current release is pretty close to HC in performance,
>the primary remaining difference being due to running in color vs
>black and white (anywhere from 8 to 32 times as much data to move
>around, you know).

I concede the difficulties in speedily running color vs. black and 
white, and the improvement in the current release is much 
appreciated. However there remains a considerable gap between MC/RR 
and HC. For example, the following script draws concentric boxes of 
ever decreasing size.

on mouseUp
   clean
   put 100 into a
   put  300 into b
   put 2 into da
   choose the line tool
   put the ticks into startTime
   repeat 50 --draw boxes of ever decreasing size
     drag from a,a to b,a
     drag from b,a to b,b
     drag from b,b to a,b
     drag from a,b to a,a
     add da to a
     subtract da from b
   end repeat
   put the ticks - startTime into field 1
   choose the browse tool
end mouseUp

on clean
   repeat until the number of images = 0
     delete image 1
   end repeat
end clean

This script takes 265 ticks on average in RR and  30 ticks in HC on 
cards of identical size. (I realize that this can be done more 
efficiently with the rectangle tool and that a graphic would be 
faster than an image. My  purpose was to measure the drag speed. ) 
The discrepancy would be less in Windows.

There is no limit to the greedy demands which we, the  users, put on 
Scott and the development team. In my case, to properly implement 
Turtle Graphics, I hunger for a speedy monochromatic drawing  mode.

Jim Hurley