Re: DblBuffer2d updates (Swarm)

[Manor Askenazi]

Hey Catherine!

   Swarm (13May) is running happily here under RedHat Linux. 

Excellent!!! That's one huge hurdle out of the way...

   Unfortunately, my heatbugs are frying themselves in accumulating heat.

Ohhhhh noooooo <<as heard when playing Lemmings, if you recall the game>>

   I'd expected DblBuffer to mean that all reads take place from the 
   old lattice, all writes are written to the new lattice, until 
   updateLattice swaps new into old.

That's the plan... As far as I know :-)  

   I've found the magic schedule corner in HeatbugModelSwarm
   and have tried adding any/all of the following in logical
   combinations both before and after the Heatbug Step message:

   [modelActions createActionTo:    heat  message: M(updateLattice)];
   [modelActions createActionTo:    heat  message: M(getNewLattice)];
   [modelActions createActionTo:    heat  message: M(blankLattice)];

Q1: Why are you calling getNewLattice? 

All getNewLattice does is:

  -(id *) getNewLattice {
    return newLattice;
  }

It does not (as far as I know) serve any operational purpose in the 
normal course of events...

Q2: The heatbugs are still reading the values they left previously off
    of the oldLattice so blankLattice won't delete any heat as far as 
    the bugs are concerned -> it will clear up the area to which they 
    will dump new heat but if the bugs cover the surface with heat on
    every turn this will make no difference... 

By the way, about blankLattice, you're right that it is a useful thing 
to be able to do, I had independently added the following four additional 
calls to Discrete2d and intend to ship them on the next release (rumored 
to occur by the end of this coming weekend :-)

  -fastFillWithValue: (int) aValue ;
  -fastFillWithObject: anObj ;

  -fillWithValue: (int) aValue ;
  -fillWithObject: anObj ;

Hope this helps,

Manor.

PS>