Speed

This diary is hosted on TopoFusion, but it’s not a TopoFusion blog. It’s almost always about riding bikes. But I also enjoy working on TopoFusion and especially some of the interactions I have with TF related people.

I’ve always had an obsession with speed in TopoFusion. It’s an unhealthy one, for sure. Unhealthy for the good of ‘the company’ (said in a snickering tone). The fact is that TF is already pretty fast, and indeed fast enough for the majority of users. Put another way, very few will even notice many of the optimizations. But there are still a few things that bug me. It’s never quite performed the way I want it to.

This week I finally got the display/tiling/caching engine to work the way I’ve wanted it to for years. One word: compression. Instead of storing maps locally as .jpg and .gif, we’re going to store them in .DDS format. Graphics cards are very fast at decompressing them. So, finally, the burps and slow downs when loading tiles from the HD are largely gone. I can crank up the ’tileset zooming’ and still get really good performance.

There are some details to work out (most likely a conversion program for older Maps.dat files), but I’m pretty excited about it. The speed is pretty sickening, and far better than anything else out there.

Of course, riding bikes is going on in the background, though I got an extremely painful (deep tissue) massage this week that kind of put a damper on things. I think I really needed it though.

A few pics from Tucson Mountain Park. Nothing spectacular about this ride, but I feel so lucky every time I ride out there. We’re fortunate to have such an under-reported, under-loved Gem that is so close. I love just hopping on my bike from home, meeting a friend, cruising through campus and then enjoying an hour or so out among the saguaros and rocks.

Jon. Golden Gate in the background.

Jon descends new trail. On the left is the ‘Africa chair’ made by the crews and so named since the back of the chair is shaped like Africa.