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From Odwiki

Credit: Mark Alexander

What is it?

Timing slicing is meant for realtime channel processing. It reduces the amount of data to cook substantially by only cooking a 'slice' of the channel. The slice is defined by the number of frames between the last cook time and the current cook time. So, instead of cooking 300 frames each cook, it tends to cook around 1-3 frames, which is much faster.

The 'Timeslice' toggle in the Common tab of CHOPs enables time slicing. Not all CHOPs require the toggle, only those CHOPs that need to be aware of previous samples (for example, a Lag CHOP would be very underwhelming if it only did 1-2 sample lags independent of the previous samples). Other CHOPs, like the Math CHOP, don't depend on previous samples, and so the Timeslice toggle will be greyed out as it has no effect on that CHOP.

Example

To see it in action, put down a Mouse CHOP (set the Active parm to 'While Playing') and wire it into a Lag CHOP. On the Lag, turn on 'Timeslice' and display it. Now play forwards, and watch your current mouse position lag. Export it to a geometry object's tx/ty for a more visual example. If you turn off Timeslice, you'll notice that the lag effect disappears, as it's computing normal cooks on a 1-2 sample channel.

If you're doing a realtime project, and always want Timeslice on, enable the 'Enable Time Slice Flag when Creating CHOPs' option in Settings->MainPrefs->MotionAndAudio.

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