[Lindsayts]

Genma Saotome, on 15 October 2013 - 10:15 AM, said:

Simply described, a portion of Open Rails handles getting the files from disk and forwarding them over to the rest of the program. That's the Loader. A different portion handles the railroad simulation -- how stuff moves, where things are presently located, what is the current time of day, the position of each switch, etc. That's presently called the Updater. A third portion is getting everything ready for telling the GPU (graphics card) what subset of the whole route it should display and giving it the data it needs to do that, frame by frame -- that's Render, and then, outside of the OR program, is what the GPU/Graphics card has to do to convert all that 3d data in to a 2d picture for display, stuff like not showing pixels for things in the background when something else is in the foreground blocking your view. A fair bit of work actually. We cannot monitor it's performance and so it's not listed on the f5 text displays.

The concern is the words Loader, Updater, Render are not obviously understood by the layman, whereas possible alternatives of File Process, Simulation Process, Video Prep Process might be.

By and large that 3rd portion -- Render... or Video Prep... or whatever we wind up calling it, it is the one that seems to be doing most of the work and as such is often the bottleneck that determines actual fps performance.

The first paragraph here is one of the clearest pictures I have seen describing the process. A possibilty is to format it clearer, somemthing like

Loader is..........

Updater is...........

Render is..........

and pin it some where where it can easily be seen, putting such definitions in the Docs would likely be a help.

An important point here is the education on what and how the process works is better than renaming anything, such renaming at this stage in the development will almost certainly only increase the confusion.

Lindsay

[R H Steele]

I gotta agree with Lindsay, better to expect people to want to educate themselves, then to lower the terminology to meet them, myself included very definitely. Obviously this layman would prefer to learn what the present terms mean and their function rather than rename them. I was being facetious when I said "makes the sim go" and "makes the sim go better" --- but if that is the understanding a user wants then why complicate it trying to change the process terminology? It's more important that OR provides a smooth, easy and almost transparent entry into the sim, which it does now. That what's important to me.I also agree that the paragraph cited by Lindsay is very clear, add that to James more technically nuanced descriptions and you have an excellent explanation. Cheers, rhs (aka gerry) :sweatingbullets: {we need a bigger clown)