[Idea] Multi-threading for multi-core processors

[MechWarrior001]

Hey, new here. I got this idea for Warzone. What if we/someone-else-who's-willing-until-I-improve-my-C-skills re-thread Warzone to run on multiple cores. For example:

CORE 0 - Critical Game code and Player.
CORE 1 - AI player 1
CORE 2 - AI player 2
CORE 3 - AI player 3

and etc. If I'm understanding the concept correctly, each core will be dedicated on a specific component of game, allowing main game/critical game code to have more processor time on CORE 0, while each AI player will have also have it's own dedicated CPU core, possibly sharing if less cores than CPU players. Example:

CORE 0 - Main/Critical code, Player
CORE 1 - AI Player 1 & 2
CORE 2 - AI Player 3 & 4
CORE 3 - AI Player 5 & 6

What do you think?

P.S. did I post in the right forum?

[Per]

It is something I am thinking of doing one day, but it is not so simple, since you need to be very careful in the design to avoid race conditions in the code.

Note that the game can already utilize two cores, if you have that, since we have a separate thread doing path-finding calculations.

[MechWarrior001]

What do you mean by race conditions? I'm still new to C so I'm not sure if that's a function or not.

[Safety0ff]

What do you mean by race conditions? I'm still new to C so I'm not sure if that's a function or not.

Here.

[Tenoh]

And is there any other way we could use the cores? sadly i only got 2 T_T.

[MechWarrior001]

Well assigning AI to each core doesn't necessarily limit the total AI per match based on the amount of cores you have, we could simply just assign all AI players to CPU 1 and player+main thread to CPU 0, anything above CPU 1 will have a dedicated AI player.

For example:

Dual Core Config
Game - CPU 0
AI - CPU 1

MultiCore Config
Game - CPU 0
AI 1 - CPU 1
AI 2 - CPU 2
AI 3 - CPU 3

and etc.

[MaNGusT]

CORE 0 - Main/Critical code, Player
CORE 1 - path-finding calculations
CORE 2 - AI Players, scripts, events, triggers
CORE 3 - something else (mb net code)

I think it should work like - at launch the game detects how much cores system has, then applies/loads prepared "preset" for 2 or more cores.

[MechWarrior001]

It might be worth adding the ability to manually assign threads & calculations to certain cores.

What about CUDA and OpenCL? Could Warzone 2100 benefit from either of those?

[Zarel]

It might be worth adding the ability to manually assign threads & calculations to certain cores.

What about CUDA and OpenCL? Could Warzone 2100 benefit from either of those?

CUDA is proprietary Nvidia technology. It's not designed for a game designed to run on a variety of platforms.

[Tenoh]

Hmm.. my second core is always used by win7 and always at 27 or 30% and first core is for program use.