Laser Cutter, processor at 100% even when paused.

[zanco]

Hi,

First thing to say is that I am not used to use Algodoo myself but my son (11 years old) does use it (Algodoo Physics V 2.0.1) and loves playing around with it.

Today he decided that it would be nice to have one gear rotating, then adding a laser in the "cutter" mode and having a nice circle as result.

The laser only did one cut, the rotation of the gear slowed down a lot and the computer halted with an error. Algodoo does not longer respond, do you want to wait or shutdown ?

5 minutes later he came down from his room complaining I did give him a bad computer (Dual core 2.2 GHz with 2 GB ram and Nvidia videocard) because of his laser running very slow and making the computer crash.

I did some reading on the forum and noticed that indeed the laser only does one cut, so it has to be interrupted to make multiple cuts.

I tried myself, creating a new scene on my home computer (I7 3.3 GHz with 16 G ram) with one laser source, one rotating rectangle (indestructible) in front of the laser and one rotating gear.

I was surprised to notice that the rotating rectangle used to interrupt the laser was getting slower and slower and the gear rotating speed went down to almost zero. Then Algodoo no longer responded and showed a white screen.

I did a retry on the same scene, ( I am used to save first and then try) with the taskmanager on screen. After starting the scene the processor core went up to about 40 %, then, when the rotating slowed down, the processor raised to 100% on that core. (I know Algodoo uses just 1 core). Then I paused the scene and again to my surprise the processor core keeps running on 100% unil I undo steps to get me back to the start.

[Kilinich]

I did a retry on the same scene, ( I am used to save first and then try) with the taskmanager on screen. After starting the scene the processor core went up to about 40 %, then, when the rotating slowed down, the processor raised to 100% on that core. (I know Algodoo uses just 1 core). Then I paused the scene and again to my surprise the processor core keeps running on 100% unil I undo steps to get me back to the start.

It's not that simple. Cutting edges like this gives hudreds of polygons and cause high cpu usage.
Small modification and everything will be fine

[electronicboy]

I did a retry on the same scene, ( I am used to save first and then try) with the taskmanager on screen. After starting the scene the processor core went up to about 40 %, then, when the rotating slowed down, the processor raised to 100% on that core. (I know Algodoo uses just 1 core). Then I paused the scene and again to my surprise the processor core keeps running on 100% unil I undo steps to get me back to the start.

It's not that simple. Cutting edges like this gives hudreds of polygons and cause high cpu usage.
Small modification and everything will be fine

I was half way through writing before Kilinich posted this, so I'm rewriting.

This is essentially the problem, you are cutting lots of small geometries, all colliding with each other.
As they are small, they do tend to penetrate each other a little, which Algodoo has to spend a tiny little extra time processing how they should react.

The following changes are made in the scene Kilinich has posted;

No self-collision:- All the objects won't collide with each other, removing the need to calculate how they will collide together.

Killer Ground:- This will remove the need to calculate the collisions of the objects on the ground. The collisions still has to be processed, otherwise it will fall through the floor.

/electronicboy