246
votes
Accepted
Why is it so bad to optimize too early?
Preamble:
A few objections have been raised in the comments, and I think they largely stem from a misunderstanding of what we mean when we say "premature optimization" - so I wanted to add a little ...
- 132k
155
votes
How can I clean up excessive player-created rubble?
Figure out your bottleneck
A few hundred moving objects should not be a problem. However, a few hundred colliding objects might be. It will take some testing, yet I believe the bottleneck you have ...
- 25.2k
89
votes
Accepted
When is the best time to consider performance?
Engineering for Performance
Follow vendor recommendations.
Use the correct data structures.
Implement the correct usage patterns.
Don't do anything stupid.
Optimization
When already written code is ...
- 20k
80
votes
Accepted
How do bullets work in video games?
I can certainly see why you would think that it would be hard to simulate those, but there are enough constraints on bullets (all projectiles, really) to make them easier.
They are generally ...
- 1,319
72
votes
Accepted
How can I clean up excessive player-created rubble?
First of all, that game mechanic looks like it could be super fun, so congrats on thinking of it! Here are two simple solutions that could be used independently or together to solve this particular ...
- 848
58
votes
Intentionally using "worse machines" to develop a game?
Intentionally doing everything on a weak PC when a stronger one is available to you is just masochism. Developers run lots of tools in parallel to the game which require resources, and also do various ...
- 118k
54
votes
Accepted
Optimization of rendering of cube world
No high-performance voxel renderer draws individual cubes or cube faces.
To get good performance, groups of voxels are assembled together into a single mesh, called a "Chunk".
A chunk is typically ...
- 132k
49
votes
Accepted
How to handle a large number of pickups in a MMO game
By simply only loading those parts of the world into memory which are close to the player. Anything else is suspended to hard drive. When there is a tiny object laying around two kilometers away, then ...
- 118k
45
votes
How do bullets work in video games?
Probably one of the most efficient ways to implement bullets is using what is known as hitscan. It is rather simple in its implementation - when you fire, you check to see what the gun is aiming at (...
- 1,398
45
votes
How can I reduce the performance impact of rendering trees?
There are couple of things you can do to increase drawing performance.
You said they were pretty far away. You could use LOD to decrease the vertex count of those trees, and thus decreasing time ...
- 3,241
44
votes
Why is it so bad to optimize too early?
Note: this answer began as a comment on DMGregory's answer, and so doesn't duplicate the very good points he makes.
"Would it not be incredibly difficult to change some of the core structures of ...
- 814
44
votes
Is the Microsoft recommendation to use C# properties applicable to game development?
But my impression is that in game development, unless you have a reason to do otherwise, everything should be nearly as fast as possible.
Not necessarily. Just like in application software, there is ...
- 118k
42
votes
Accepted
Is it normal for a game to use 100% CPU?
Yes, this is normal for a real-time game to try to use 100% CPU to perform as fast and good as it can. So that player sees as much frames per second or as good physics simulation or anything else as ...
- 10.6k
40
votes
Accepted
Game loop isn't performing well enough, so my frame rate is too low (Windows Form + GDI+)
TLDR:
Get DirectBitmap from https://stackoverflow.com/a/34801225 and add
...
- 516
34
votes
Accepted
Improving an O(N^2) function (all entities iterating over all other entities)
I know you do not conceptualize this as collisions, however what you are doing is colliding a circle centered at the creature, with all food.
You really do not want to check food that you know is ...
- 25.2k
32
votes
Accepted
How can I efficiently load huge volumes of star systems?
The trick Elite likely uses is that they don't pre-generate the whole galaxy and store it in a database. They likely generate most of the galaxy at runtime when it is needed.
I would do this using a ...
- 118k
28
votes
How can I shorten the length of time spent on finding a path using my A* pathfinding code?
Let's start with some general C# optimization advice:
Avoid heap allocations in your hot path. That means anywhere you have new Foo(...) where ...
- 132k
25
votes
Why is it so bad to optimize too early?
"Do not optimise early" doesn't mean "pick the worst possible way to do things". You still need to consider performance implications (unless you're just prototyping). The point is not to cripple other,...
- 845
23
votes
Accepted
Why does Unity use reflection to get the update method?
It doesn't
How Update is called
No, Unity doesn’t use System.Reflection to find a magic method every time it needs to call one.
Instead, the first time a MonoBehaviour of a given type is accessed the ...
22
votes
When is the best time to consider performance?
If you want to do optimization at the right times, have slow machines and use them. For a small shop, a good option is to use a slow laptop on the commute and a fast desktop in the office. As an ...
- 9,955
22
votes
How to handle a large number of pickups in a MMO game
You have two very different things to manage:
The server must manage the entire world, in an authorative manner. For that, communication with N clients (where N is "massive") is necessary.
The client ...
- 1,374
18
votes
Accepted
Is * calling *= (or *= calling *) slower than writing seperate functions (for math library)?
In practice, no additional overhead will be incurred. In C++, small functions are usually inlined by the compiler as an optimization, so the resulting assembly will have all the operations at the ...
17
votes
Accepted
Most efficient way to convert Vector3 to Vector2
Vector3 v3 = Vector3.one;
Vector2 v2 = v3;
Vector3s can be implicitly converted to Vector2 (z is discarded).
http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Vector2-...
- 750
17
votes
Accepted
3D models budget. What matters more number of triangles or vertices
Let's imagine a big grid mesh, like one we might use for terrain. We'll render n triangles worth of it, covering say half our 1080p screen, in a single draw call.
...
- 132k
17
votes
Game loop isn't performing well enough, so my frame rate is too low (Windows Form + GDI+)
When things bog down, check your inner loop. That's the code being run the most often, so even a small inefficiency there stacks up. Here we see:
...
- 132k
16
votes
Improving an O(N^2) function (all entities iterating over all other entities)
You should adopt a space partitioning algorithm like BVH to reduce complexity. To be specific to your case, you need to make a tree that consists of axis-aligned bounding boxes that contain food ...
- 1,423
14
votes
Accepted
Why is the for loop more efficient than the for each loop in Unity?
A foreach loop ostensibly creates an IEnumerator object out of the collection you pass it, and then walks over that. So a loop like this:
...
- 132k
13
votes
Accepted
How can I reduce the performance impact of rendering trees?
Ok, so the problem was simply that I wasn't using pre-computed realtime GI. I check that on a little while ago but it didn't have an immediate effect so I left it and forgot about it, and the lighting ...
- 2,759
12
votes
Performance degrading when resolution increases for a 4k screen
One way to limit the resolution of your game is to have your camera render to a RenderTexture.
You can create a RenderTexture in script to match the current aspect ratio of your window/screen, or even ...
- 132k
12
votes
Can I just convert everything in godot to C#
The Godot C# documentation provides an incomplete list of the API differences between C# and GDScript. There are some difference in the methods & properties names. Additionally, some things in C# ...
- 11.6k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible