nojustice

Exactly. Physics calculations are highly interrelated. On a single vessel, each part can potentially affect any other part. This has two consequences: first, you're limited by the fact that you can only calculate one time step at a time, as the state next time step of any variable on any part can potentially be affected by a calculation being performed this timestep. So the only way to introduce any kind of parallelism into a single vessel system is by splitting that vessel up into a number of parts equal to the number of cores you have available, and dividing the labor that way. The reason I say "won't help as much as people think", is because since the parts all affect each other, you still need to be able to exchange state information between all the parts on the vessel. Multitheading this kind of interconnected computation increases the amount of memory access needed, which can actually case a net slowdown if it's not implemented very carefully.

Granted, if you had two ships that were both loaded but not interacting, then you could effectively utilize multiple cores. But that's not the case where people are having trouble with frame rates. It's while launching big vessels. And while it may be possible to squeeze a little extra performance out of that situation with multithreading (after doing a whole lot of work to get it right), it's just never going to be the magic bullet that people seem to think it will be.

It's possible now. It was a hell of a lot less likely in the mid-90's

/5. How much have you grown as a programmer since beginning this process? Any anecdotes about either eureka moments, or having implemented something by hand only to learn later that there was a built-in that offered the same function?

Also, multi-threading wouldn't help nearly as much as many people seem to think it would.

Isn't it easy enough to verify if a given hit is the right decoding or not? Say you get a hit that says "wait bus bomb". Can't you just take whatever encoding produced that hit and decode the entire message with it? A brief look at the result will tell you whether its garbage with a few real words here and there or a clear, well-formed message.