🚀 go-pugleaf

Benoit JAUVIN-GIRARD <jh...@marge.cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
>The big difference would be for heavy-duty strategy/tactics games, such as
>wargames, historically accurate or not, galactic conmquest games...   Also 
>any other game with a fancy computer opponent (air combat simulators).  These
>games all need a pretty good computer opponent if the games are to be 
>replayable.  In a single-threaded OS, the computer only starts playing when
>-you- are done, and you get to stare at the screen.  The better AI's, of
>course, take the most time.
>
>In a multitasking OS, the computer opponent can busy himself thinking his 
>next move while the human player is still staring at information screens
>and clicking left and right.  So, when the human is done, the AI is almost 
>done, too...   Resulting in faster, less frustrating play and potentially
>'better' AI's (they have more time to 'think').

The hard part about a multithreaded system is dealing with multiple threads
that have to interact with things other than the CPU and memory (e.g., that
have to deal with the file system).  For what you are talking about, the
computer opponent thread should only need to interact with game data
structures in memory.  Adding sufficient thread support for that to a DOS
program is trivial.  It takes about 20 lines of assembly code, and another
page or two of C code.  You can easily do it in an hour or less, including
debugging.

--Tim Smith