My presets too slow?

[unchained]

High mesh size, Rova? My presets will KILL anything using a high mesh, but they run great and you're really not losing a lot of quality if you're in hi-rez.

Try 'em out, the effects are worth it, even if you decide not to keep it that way.

:)

I get about 21FPS on that one with a 400mhzK6 chip

If a lot of people like what I'm doing, I'm thinking I might take a crack at making my own vis software. I'd like it a lot to be able to steer from left/right panning, and split out harmonic bass from drum bass, stuff like that.

[Illusion]

I leave the mesh size at 24 x 18, and run it by 800 x 600, and can usually pull around 25 - 30 fps on most presets, but most of yours are less than half of the usual framerate, spindizzy barely manages 9.

Do you reckon you could try for some presets that are similar to the framerate of the standard presets? Your presets are much better than mine (mine are very simple thus far), but it sucks going down to less than half the speed from a "standard preset". Not having a go at you at all, I know my math is nowhere near as good as yours, but perhaps for us poor Celeron owners ;), it'd be good to have some more presets that can blend in with the rest without having the framerate killed.

Cheers, keep up the good work...

[StudioMusic]

dark illusion, I use the same settings as you and I get 21 to 22 fps, are you running win98 and what is your processor? Win2000 is much faster. I have a pentuim 800 with a ati 32 meg vid card and 256 megs of ram. I really love this preset and it seems very fast to me. This could be one of my favorites now. SM

[unchained]

Most of the slowdown is in the beat detection, not the math for the effects (most of which is pretty bland, and you've seen already)

The problem is in simple compares. I'm passing a variable to the per_pixel code that tells it what effect to use, but for EACH PIXEL it has to check every line "is this effect on? how about this one?"
and even if a given effect isn't "turned on" for that pixel, MD still has to do the math as if it were. :(

The math library Ryan's using is a pretty good one in terms of speed and correctness, but there's just not much I can do with it in terms of optimizing out effects that aren't being used that frame.

I'll try to make a few "normal" presets for y'all, but I'm kind of tapped for ideas for new effects.

[Illusion]

I'm only running a Celeron 667, 128MB RAM, and a very dodgy video card (onboard Intel i710, 8MB), so that's probably why it runs a little slower.

I think it looks cool too, if only I could run it at a decent speed :(

Maybe I'll have to try it under a different OS to get a decent framerate, unless someone decides to give me a Pentium 4 and a decent video card ;)

Out of interest, as anyone tried it on Win XP yet? Does that help performance much?

And yeah, I can see why your presets are so computationally intensive, mine are very simple, usually less than 10 lines, and no fancy if statements, but that's why mine are probably not as good....
after my exams are done, I might try and do some more complicated ones, I just need more time to practice...

[StudioMusic]

Dark Illusion I do not have XP but I do not think it would be any faster than 2000 because they have the same kind of system files sort of like 98 to ME, and I would think on a slower machine like yours it would be slower than 2000 because XP uses more system resourses than 2000. My friend had a celeron similar to yours with windows ME and after we installed 2000 there was a big difference in Milkdrop fps. She only had a 500 with and a 8 meg vid card like yours. but don't do anything you are not comfortable with. But the difference from my machine to hers, well actually no comparison. So when and if you get a P4 I am sure you will be extremly pleasantly surprised with MD. I wish I had one myself. SM

[Rovastar]

Sorry it has taken me so long to reply unchained but have had PC problems.

I do run a highest useable res, high mesh size and as high a texture as I can.

but the main probloem is my poor graphics card (omg sorry illusion I didn't realize how bad your card it makes mine look pretty respectable - geforce2 (32mb)) but I like the presets to run less than 30 fps.

I actually use XP now and no real difference in my eyes.

Rovastar

[Illusion]

Yeah, like I said, I need a decent video card :)

I'm pretty happy with MD considering my specs, most presets on 800 x 600 pull a decent framerate, so I'm not really complaining, it's really only unchained's 35-line per_frame & per_pixel code that slows it down ;)

I have Win98 too, so you were saying that Windows 2000 is faster, but ME and XP are really no different?

[Rovastar]

Sorry Illusion I meant that there is no difference from 2000 to XP.

I think that Unchained actually works for all the chip manufactures out there and it is a cunning plan for us to spend loads of money of highly expensive super fast systems. ;)

Rovastar

[unchained]

Dude, I've told you the crappy stats of my computer. 600mhz AMD K6 chip. I don't even think the bus is more than 100mhz (been a while since I've messed with the mobo). I've got the first geforce DDR ever made, which sucks by current standards.

TWEAK

Today's chips, every graphics card made since voodoo technology came out, ALL have tweakable perameters that you have to fine-tune, and nobody selling or installing computers knows JACK about how to optimize them.

Think about it...CPU chips long ago exceeded MILLIONS of instructions per second. Ever get an old (or cheap) calculator where it takes a second to come up with 5+5? The machine you're running does MILLIONS of computations per second...not single-digit decimal addition, but 128-bit (or higher) floating-point operations.

It's all in the software. Selling high-hz chips is just a way to get people to spend money.

Get a generic bios that let's you tweak EVERY setting, you can find 'em with socket-7 boards in any size/shape. Get a cyrix chip or an AMD, one of the dirt cheap ones that everybody was afraid to buy, like the K6. Slap in TONS of dirt cheap PC-100 memory, the stuff's almost free these days. Memory is EVERYTHING under windows, get like a gig of it, or steal it from walmart or something...like I said, it's cheap.

There's a zillion sites out there telling you step-by-step how to tweak this and that. Once you do it enough, you get the hang of it and can do your own tweaks...just like making presets. :)

Once you fools whining about how XP is faster/slower who don't know just how good you have it get your acts together, and configure your machines to be WORTHY of my "ultra-slow" presets, MAYBE just maybe I'll teach you how to do math.

:P

(Thanks once again to Krash for teaching me polar geometry, every text I could find was utter shite, but you gave the topic the exact algebraic treatment to make it jive for me. You should write math books for a living, or teach, seriously.)

[StudioMusic]

Unchained what did Krash teach you? Krash I think you should write the MD help or math book like Unchained said, only if you want to and you have the time. :cool: SM

[Ultima]

Originally posted by unchained
TWEAKI agree. If you do the research, you can get a bit more out of your hardware than you expect. I tend to shy away from overclocking and other similar tweaks to run outside of spec, but my BIOS and drivers are tuned pretty well. I get more overall performance (not scientific, just based on "feel") out of my AMD Duron 800 than most people do with their P4 1200 or whatever.

However, if a known manufacturer like Dell built your system, there isn't that much to tweak. Just make sure you have lots of RAM and a good graphics card.

600mhz AMD K6 chipHey, you said 400 MHz earlier. Did you overclock it?
Ultima

[unchained]

Truth is I'm not quite sure which it is. I have bong resin where my memory should be, see?

--
unchained

[Illusion]

unchained, what framerates do you tend to get on your own presets? Many of yours tend to be about 60% of the fps for most of the standard presets on my machine. Is RAM a big issue for MD? I'm thinking of getting a fair bit more in the holidays (+256MB to make it 384MB).

And if I tell you all your presets are running at insanely high framerates, does that mean you'll write us novice preset writers a help file? ;)

I wasn't having a go at you regarding your lines of code either, just saying that regardless of whether people's machines can handle it, your presets tend to have a relative loss of speed, unless you have an awesome computer. I still think yours are some of the best, but would just like them to look the same as the other presets without having a noticeable slowdown so they would merge into them.

Also, out of interest, what sites give advice regarding tweaking all your settings? I don't have the cash to get anything new for at least another couple of years (apart from RAM) being a poor uni student, so anything I can do with the old Celeron would be great.

Oh, and I think unchained has disproved your theory that he secretly works for nVidia, rovastar :)


Finally... I read on another board that people keep nearly all of the presets... I tend to have fairly high standards when it comes to presets, I'd only keep about half of what gets posted here.... and I haven't kept hardly any of mine in my "good" presets folder.. because they really aren't that good. I reckon it's quality over quantity, and I'd rather have one good preset from Krash, rovastar or unchained than 8 lousy ones from me...

[Krash]

The stuff I taught Unchained:

<a href="http://64.12.38.241/showthread.php?threadid=58629">Crash course in polar geometry</a>

It requires a fairly rudimentary understanding of geometry and trigonometry, but nothing that fancy.

- Krash

[unchained]

I tend to get around 35fps on normal presets with simple effects, 25 or so as an average. Those 5 million line presets I was cranking out for a while dog it down to literally 9fps or so on my machine, but I was so concerned with getting the effects and beat detection right that I didn't really even notice (after you stare at MD for 2 hours or so with the FPS slowly dropping as you add more and more crap, you don't notice the slowdown)

These days I won't post anything unless I can get it to do at least 20fps on my machine, and I try to aim for 25.

I'm also using the "enhancer" DSP plugin for winamp, and if I turn that off I get another 5fps at least on average, but I just can't live without it...I love the way it splits out the harmonic bass from the drum bass. Of course, if you're using MD at a party or something I highly reccomend you do your DSP, pre-amping, and whatnot on another machine (of course in that case you probably have professional equipment to do that stuff anyway) as DSP really tends to make winamp tank.

---

I'd LOVE to write some sort of authoring guide, but I just don't have the ability. For one thing, I have very little of what mathematicians call "geometric intuition"...I just can't do like what Krash did when he says "picture the cartesian coordinate plane..." I have no visual memory, and my mathematical instinct works completely algebraicly (set-theoreticly would probably be a more accurate description). I do most of my milkdrop coding by "feel", and if you look closely at my presets, you can tell I'm doing a lot more set logic than I am geometric coding, at least as I think of it.

What I'm trying to say is that if I wrote a help file of some sort, I doubt anybody would actually be able to read it or make any sense out of it, as my understanding of mathematical concepts seems to be scewed from the mainstream perception, at least as far as geometry/trig is concerned. Also, I've been coding for YEARS, and I'm sure I take lots of things as obvious that other people would need spelled out.

My suggestion is that one of you who's just now "getting the hang" of it tries to write a guide, and let the rest of us comment, edit, and build on it. I could probably fill VOLUMES with my theories on beat detection at this point.

[StudioMusic]

Krash, I have had alegebra geometry and physics in college, but no trigonometry all over 10 years ago, and from reading what you posted I guess my math is not mature enough to comprehend what you posted at this time (although I wish it was) but thanks for posting it for me. Maybe if I study it some more things will start to come to me. Illusion you mentioned something about getting more ram than what you have, personally I do not think it will make one bit of difference, but if you got windows 2000 it would probably make the biggest difference for you. For example I get 22 fps in windows me on this time with feeling for my settings, but 30 in windows 2000 with the exact same settings and that goes the same for most of unchained's large coded presets. Also in Me, which I think you have 98 which is basically the same as ME when it comes to MD I can never get 60 fps but in 2000 I can get 60 fps on many of the presets, I would estimate about a third, but I am saying this with almost all the presets out there and from what you say you only keep about half so that could be different for you. Since you can not upgrade your vid card win 2000 is your best bet because you have plenty of ram for MD, but even 2000 that will probably not make to much of a diffence for you on a celeron, but more than the ram will. If you do that though make sure all your hardware drivers will work for 2000. Also I think you will really like 2000 for everything else too because it is faster and much more stable especially if you keep your services that are running and your start up folder to a minimum, but for you I would not get XP because it needs more stytem resourse than 2000 and would probably run MD a little slower, but still faster than 98. One more thing Illusion, I do not have an awesome computer just a P3 800 with 256 ram and 32 meg vid card but MD flies for me and I just love it and unchained's preset fly too no difference from the others, but I do love my little machine, I just wish they made a 2gigaherst with a 128meg vid card and I would try to get it and it would probably be fine for me with 256megs of ram. Whops almost forgot Illusion, if you do anykind of heavy 3D rendering or something like that then the more ram might be useful for you, but your machine even then might not make to much difference. SM

[Ultima]

Hey StudioMusic, do you have the latest version of the ATI drivers on both your WinME and Win2K?

[StudioMusic]

Ultima, I have the latest drivers for everything in my pc, I am very thorough and picky when it comes to my pc that I have to have everything perfect. I always check at least weekly for new drivers and new versions of software, not that new versions of software are always better for me, but if they are I alway's upgrade immediately and I have everything that I can set in my pc without tweaking to get the max out of it. I have worked with win95 98 ME 2000 and a little with XP. I also have the newest version of bios for my machine. What else would you like to know that maybe I can answer for you? SM

[unchained]

If your celeron has an AGP bus (if it's 2x or greater), and your vid card has AGP, more ram (up to the limits imposed by your cache) is the SINGLE most effective upgrade you can make to the overall performance of your PC, as it will work across the board, providing you more texture memory with faster access to that memory, in addition to the other manifold advantages of having more memory for the general use of your PC. Optimizing and tweaking the AGP pipeline and its effective use, as is possible with modern day nvidia drivers/cards, can yield performace results beyond your wildest dreams. I actually have my memory and CPU *underclocked* on my nvidia card, my tests having revealed that I suffered no loss in performance.

I've never had one to play with, but I believe that modern voodoo and other chipset cards have many of the same tunable features, but I've never seriously read into it. There was a bit of a philosophical holy-war in the design of graphics card chipsets about 2.5 years ago...nvidia spearheaded the method that appears to be winning out, and their use of simple logic and engineering principals in the designs of their chips are amazing, and easy-to-follow.

If you somehow don't have AGP, or don't have an AGP card, spend the money on a new mobo and/or card instead. It doesn't have to be cutting-edge, use what was cutting-edge exactly two years ago as a good rule-of-thumb. Then just "fiddle" with the AGP options in the bios and card drivers until things work. (Some motherboards require AGP drivers, but win98se and later usually have you covered.)

[StudioMusic]

One thing I disegree with unchained on (sorry unchained) but my friend has a celeron with an integrated vid card and we upgraded her memory 128 to 256 megs their was not one bit of difference with her MD fps rate, but when she installed win 2000 much difference. Sure more ram is great and makes a big difference in alot of areas, but you already have a decent amount for MD, unless you are doing alot of heavy shit at the time you are running MD than more ram is not necessary, but if you just run milkdrop and say are using your modem, you will not notice a difference with MD by getting more ram. I myself started with 128 and went to 256 on boths ops, and for just running MD and say a browser, no diffence that I noticed at all, also win 2000 utilizes memory much better than 98 and ME anyway, so just by changing ops you will seem like you have a major memory improvment. Krash if you think I am wrong here please tell me, but this is by major experience. Unchained remember I am not knocking you, and this is without any major tweaking or overclocking which I do not do and do not have much experence in that area anyway. But then again memory is much cheaper than buying 2000 but if you don't have to but it then? Well Illusion buy the ram and you will see, then upgrade your op and you will see again. SM

[StudioMusic]

Illusion one more thing. If you had say 32 or 64 megs or ram then I would get the ram for sure, but you have 256 plenty for MD. SM

[StudioMusic]

One more thing Illusion, if you are worry about losing win 98 you don't have to if your hard drive is big enough, you partition your drive and install 2000 and have a dual boot and that way you will have both ops to test yourself. win2000 is pretty good at doing all this for you, but if you want you can use something like partition magic before you install 2000 if you do. Also Unchained knows what he is talking about I am sure, more ram is one of the best things you can do to a pc, but for you running MD win 2000 will show you much more improvment without a doubt in my mind, and if you are short on cash here is a place you can get some wonderful retail software for free http://nt.cdicon.sk/fosi/set.html besides using Morpheus, limewire, gnotella or some other. SM

[StudioMusic]

Sorry about that Illusion thought you had 256 ram (my mistake), but still I would say the windows 2000 will be more improvment than more ram, but I would do both. SM

[Ultima]

Originally posted by StudioMusic
Ultima, I have the latest drivers for everything in my pc, I am very thorough and picky when it comes to my pc that I have to have everything perfect.
...
What else would you like to know that maybe I can answer for you? SM Okay StudioMusic, sounds like you have it under control. The average user doesn't upgrade their drivers and bios, and I didn't mean to imply that you didn't know this. I merely asked that question to see if that could explain the difference in performance.

WinNT has been known for slower graphics, so it's interesting (and pleasing) that Win2K outperforms WinME. Any ideas why this might be? Do games perform better on Win2K as well? I've read that the kernel in WinXP is slightly more optimized than in Win2K, although a number of those changes were also included in Win2K SP2. Also, I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that ATI's latest driver for Win2K is more optimized for certain 3D graphic operations used by MilkDrop than their latest version for WinME. The case just might not apply to another graphics board.

BTW, I'm generally quite impressed with my ATI Radeon board.

Ultima

[Ultima]

Regarding RAM, once WinAmp and MilkDrop are loaded and running, they should not be swapped to disk. Watching the memory usage, I see WinAmp + MilkDrop using approx 15MB (9MB RAM + 6MB swapped because it hasn't been used). That seems fairly constant, even with Unchained's 90-line presets. If this is all your machine is doing, the process would not be swapped to disk while running. Therefore I wouldn't expect any improvement by upgrading RAM.

Generally, under Win95/98/ME you should have 96-128MB. Under WinNT/2K/XP you should have 128MB-512MB. I say this because Win95/98/ME don't really know what to do with large amounts of RAM, whereas WinNT/2K/XP are designed for it.

Ultima

[StudioMusic]

Ultima, I am not sure why MD runs faster in win2k. I have several hypothesis, but will not mention them till I am sure. I am not really a gamer but I have kchess elite and Kyodai manojogg and they seem about the same in both ops, but neither one is that resourse hungry for a good comparision on games, Me is suppose to be more multimedia friendly than 2000, but with ser pack 2, I must say it is almost equal now, and in certain instances better. The thing I like about 2000 is that you can access your ME files in the other drive even if 2k is formatted to NTFS but you can not even see the win2k drive from ME and you can even run most of the software from ME's drive. I should also mention that the vid drivers for both ops came out the same day with the same improvments, but they are both different drivers in other words my ME vid drivers will not work for 2K and vise versa. I also must say I am very impressed with my ATI mobility M4 with both ops. SM

[unchained]

You're completely missing my point. The 15mb (or whatever) being swapped out isn't a problem, it's the graphics card being able to access whatever memory's left over AFTER the bloated windows kernel, milkdrop, explorer, the little clock, the pretty icon next to the word "start", your desktop wallpaper, the volume-adjustment program, the netbios drivers you aren't even using and so on are put into whatever rediculous cached/swapped state windows decides to leave them in (which is highly subject to change at any given time). If you're not seeing a difference with more AGP memory usable by the vid card, it's not working for one reason or another (probably a driver/configuration issue, which is my guess in SM's case of better performance under 2K...you never know what wacky drivers windows will plug-and-pray for the wee-yet-important parts of the IO/bus system).

Sure, one version of windows might be more aggressive or in some other way better at memory management than the other, but such things are HIGHLY dependant on the applications running, and usually you only see wins when you're crunching database stuff, serving web pages, anything where you have a lot of threads going at once. Just loading up a desktop machine and running winamp, you're not going to see ANY difference dependant on whether the OS uses a slab-allocation system, journalized memory management, recursive B-trees or any other wacky system. With milkdrop, you're pretty much talking about a DirectX pipe directly from the CPU to the graphics memory. NT's known as being a slug graphicly because they over-tooled the memory management they couldn't detangle it enough to implement the more advanced DX features, they just flat gave up.

--
unchained

[Krash]

In winNT, that's true.

In win2K and XP, the problem is nonexistant, primarily due to directX 8 and the detonatorXP series of drivers (for nvidia cards, anyway). The improvements in directX 8 were about 5% win95/98/ME optimisations, about 10% was support for the fancy per pixel things that the GeForce3 can do (and all cards will do in the future), and the remaining 85% or so was optimisations for 2K and XP (NT got left behind). The result is that the 2K/XP environment is at least as fast for 3d apps (such as MD) as win95/98/ME on the same system. In some cases, it's even faster. Personally, I get about 200 more 3dmarks (2k1) in win2k than I did in win98.

- Krash

[Ultima]

Wow, there really is a big difference! (At least according to these benchmarks.) Check this link...
TR's Windows performance comparison (http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2001q4/os/)

Ultima

[Illusion]

This thread is getting pretty long already :)

Anyhow, I found out y'day I only have a 4MB video card (not 8MB), and it's onboard. It's lousy, I know, plus it doesn't have any AGP support.. which is what you get for not being able to afford a top of the range machine - it was only about A$1100 (US$550) about this time last year, and it was a lot cheaper than getting a P3 or an Athlon, so that's what I ended up with. When you see that a GeForce 3 at the moment costs about 2/3 as much as your machine, you know you haven't really spent much, so I reckon you guys with 32MB cards should consider yourself lucky ;) Despite all this, I still have a relatively decent framerate on MD, so I'm not really especially worried about it at this stage/

As for a new OS, from what I've heard and read (including the link Ultima posted last message), 2000 & XP are both very similar performance-wise, and that they are far better than ME or 98. So it might be worth getting that, although not sure at this stage, and from what unchained says it sound like it won't really make a huge difference.

With regards to AGP cards unchained, what would you recommend? You're probably a lot more clued-up on the hardware side of things than I am. Would this be better value than going for more RAM, or would you recommend both? RAM is, as you said, incredibly cheap, so I reckon it might be worth throwing some in regardless... but I really can't afford a new motherboard/processor at the moment.

Also, unchained, SM, or anyone else, if you could recommend some good sites in reagrds to tweaking your BIOS, and to get new drivers etc. I would appreciate that, I tend to be fairly lazy in getting new drivers, although I do like getting new versions of anything I can... thanks.

[unchained]

A plain old geforce (not even a 2) would ROCK YOUR SOCKS compared to a 4mb card with no AGP bus. It all depends on how much of the stuff on your current board is integrated, and how much is swappable. If there's no AGP slots at all on the motherboard, but everything is generic, just swapping in a newer motherboard could be cost effective. If your current board's got proprietary RAM, built-in NIC card, and all the other goofy stuff vendors like to do maybe not so.
Either way I'd reccomend a low-end nvidia card, just something to get you into AGP-land.

Gah...I hate giving hardware advice. The fact is, you can drop $1200 or so and get a machine that's pretty much brand-spankin-new all around, but upgrading an older machine with nickel and dime you to death...you're screwed no matter what you do. Call those cow folks :P

[StudioMusic]

yep, I agree with unchained just get a new machine, for 1200.00 you can get a pretty killer machine these days, probably blow the stats of everybody else here. Unchained if you can just make one single ball the bounces up and down as if I were bouncing a basketball if you can. If it changes colors and bounces to the beat that will be fine. Thanks, SM

[Illusion]

Yeah, I reckon most of my stuff is probably all linked in, I already had to replace the onboard sound card cause it sounded lousy, it didn't work with my sub & speakers, made them sound terrible, the only thing that comes before MD on my machine is a decent sound setup .... a P4 with budget speakers is useless.. you need to have a good sound for the full MD experience :)

You need a decent sub, mine's Altec Lansing, worth a bit, but getting old, might be up for a new sound setup soon..

And call the cow folks? What the? :confused:

[StudioMusic]

I run my sound through my pc speakers which are really good and my stereo system with four speakers with a total of 540 watts. Jbl and yamaha speakers. SM

[unchained]

Y'all are crazy. I've got the $45 cheapo grande especial from best buy, 2 tiny speakers and a 3" sub. Fine tuning the dsp effects, I can make any soundwave perceivable to the human ear travel in any direction relative to a person sitting at any given point in the room.

Digital sound output just kicks ass. Unless you just want to impress people by making the floor shake (and hell, my 3" piece of crap can do a pretty mean job of that) I don't see the point of expensive speakers, and the technology in even the most cutting edge stereo systems can't produce the fidelity (to MY untrained ear, at least) that any dell/gateway/compaq/etc machine can throw down. ALL HAIL WINAMP AND MILKDROP!

[StudioMusic]

Well, that is just it I like to make the floor shake sometime, most the time though I just use my pc speakers, can't always do want I want. Neighbors you know. SM

[Krash]

Unchained if you can just make one single ball the bounces up and down as if I were bouncing a basketball if you can. If it changes colors and bounces to the beat that will be fine.

The bouncing ball preset doesn't work that way - not for bouncing to the beat, anyway. What it does do, is bounce the waveform across the screen - it will bounce off imaginary walls, floor and ceiling. The thing with the preset is that it's really easy to change where those imaginary walls are, how strong gravity is, the velocities that the ball starts with, and whether or not the ball experiences friction.

Making it bounce inn time to the music would require a bpm detection algorithm, which milkdrop doesn't have (and they almost never work anyway)

- Krash

[StudioMusic]

Ho well, I thought it would of been really neat if something like that could have been done. I tried to do it for hours and never even came close, but for some reason I thought it was possible, but then I am not to good with presets. SM

[unchained]

Well, of course ANYTHING is possible in theory. I played around myself with trying to get the ball to bounce in time with the music, and after several hours all I could manage was to get it to bouce to the beat a few times before buggering off to the corner and refusing to come out. :)

Rova's started taking a shot at the long-awaited authoring guide, and when we get to more advanced topics, I'm sure Krash's bouncing ball will come into play, and we'll all be able to contribute ideas.