In the course of satisfying my blog-reading addiction, I came across this nifty litle rock-paper-scissors game. It is done in WPF/E, basically Microsoft's version of Flash[1]. So there are animations all over...
Which brings me to realize why we need more processing power. My poor Pentium-M 1.6GHz processor pretty much died while the application was running. That's right, my processor was maxed out by a rock-paper-scissors game. The past few year's worth of advances in the fine art of computer programming sure are great. I can envision a time when I'll need a core to animate the start button, another to animate the background (already implemented in Dream Scene), one to make all my desktop icons slowly revolve around in a complex spiral so that the ones I'm most likely to use at a certain time of day will be in the center at that certain time of day (you KNOW that would be super-sexy), another to index everything constantly (I think I need a separate HDD for the indexer actually, 'cause it's always keeping mine busy), and another to actually respond to what I want it to do.
Anyways, back to the game. I imagine if I had a real graphics card instead of an integrated POS the game wouldn't have run so slow, but it is still rather pathetic. All of those fancy scaling vector graphics don't run so well without a real GPU. Just the background gradient which slid up and down repeatedly would max out my processor.
Such is progress I guess. I look forward to the future of sliding vector-based menus and animated backgrounds overlayed with 3 layers of transparent objects. As long as I can "Flip3D" through everything I'll be happy. :)
And yes, I did win the match.
- As an aside, one nice thing about the WPF/E plugin for IE7 on Vista (possibly this is also true on other browsers/platforms) is that it didn't require me to restart my browser.
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