I'm writing my own clone of Minecraft (also written in Java). It works great right now. With a viewing distance of 40 meters I can easily hit 60 FPS on my MacBook Pro 8,1. (Intel i5 + Intel HD Graphics 3000). But if I put the viewing distance on 70 meters, I only reach 15-25 FPS. In the real Minecraft, I can put the viewing disntance on far (= 256m) without a problem. So my question is what should I do to make my game better?
The optimisations I implemented:
- Only keep local chunks in memory (depending on the player's viewing distance)
- Frustum culling (First on the chunks, then on the blocks)
- Only drawing really visible faces of the blocks
- Using lists per chunk that contain the visible blocks. Chunks that become visible will add itself to this list. If they become invisible, they are automatically removed from this list. Blocks become (in)visible by building or destroying a neighbour block.
- Using lists per chunk that contain the updating blocks. Same mechanism as the visible block lists.
- Use nearly no
new
statements inside the game loop. (My game runs about 20 seconds until the Garbage Collector is invoked) - I'm using OpenGL call lists at the moment. (
glNewList()
,glEndList()
,glCallList()
) for each side of a kind of block.
Currently I'm even not using any sort of lighting system. I heard already about VBO's. But I don't know exactly what it is. However, I'll do some research about them. Will they improve performance? Before implementing VBO's, I want to try to use glCallLists()
and pass a list of call lists. Instead using thousand times glCallList()
. (I want to try this, because I think that the real MineCraft doesn't use VBO's. Correct?)
Are there other tricks to improve performance?
VisualVM profiling showed me this (profiling for only 33 frames, with a viewing distance of 70 meters):
Profiling with 40 meters (246 frames):
Note: I'm synchronising a lot of methods and code blocks, because I'm generating chunks in another thread. I think that acquiring a lock for an object is a performance issue when doing this much in a game loop (of course, I'm talking about the time when there is only the game loop and no new chunks are generated). Is this right?
Edit: After removing some synchronised
blocks and some other little improvements. The performance is already much better. Here are my new profiling results with 70 meters:
I think it is pretty clear that selectVisibleBlocks
is the issue here.
Thanks in advance!
Martijn
Update: After some extra improvements (like using for loops in stead of for each, buffering variables outside loops, etc...), I now can run viewing distance 60 pretty good.
I think I'm going to implement VBO's as soon as possible.
PS: All source code is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/mcourteaux/CraftMania