threads - use them as much as you can

[Ulf Wiger]

There was a military troop simulator written in Erlang as a student
project. The project was a success, and I have forgotten why it didn't
go further. Anyway, it simulated movements of up to 100 troops in
varying terrain.

"Process-based Simulation of Interactive Agents in a Dynamic Terrain"
Samuel Tronje
UU/CSD, 1995

I think it does seem like an interesting approach for a certain type
of video games.

/Uffe

On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, James Hague wrote:

>How has Erlang worked for applications in which processes are used to model
>static objects, rather than parallel processes?  Erlang is one of the
>nicest languages I have ever used, but I'm not using the language in it's
>intended domain.  I use it as a general purpose alternative to Python and
>such, where processes provided an elaborate way of catching errors (for
>example, spawning off a compiler task and putting the error reporting in
>the controlling process).  I can see interesting some applications of
>Erlang that use processes heavily, but not in a truly concurrent way (e.g.
>a video game with a process per onscreen object).  The potential overhead
>of message passing in such situations has put me off.  I should run some
>experiments.
>
>James
>
>

-- 
Ulf Wiger                                    tfn: +46  8 719 81 95
Senior System Architect                      mob: +46 70 519 81 95
Strategic Product & System Management    ATM Multiservice Networks
Data Backbone & Optical Services Division      Ericsson Telecom AB