Bunnymark improvements

stetso

Hi Gideroseans,

I am still learning a lot about Gideros and wondered about best practices on performance. One thing that came to my mind is how to efficiently draw an (ridiculous) amount of stuff to the screen to I tried to port the infamous Bunnymark from Pixi.js.

However, I was not very successful because framerate drops quickly after approximately 3000 bunnies so I would like to ask you experts what could be improved in the code to make it more efficient. Hopefully, this will help me understand more about how Gideros works (for example I am not sure how draw batching works in Gideros, is it automatic? or can it be enabled somehow? Maybe there are better alternatives to Pixel? Maybe my Lua is just plain bad? Lots of things come to mind...) So I would be grateful for some tips!

And as a related question: how do you usually profile your code in Gideros? Any Tips or libraries in this direction?

Thanks a lot for your time! [-O<

EDIT: This is probably overkill and also completely unnecessary for real-world usage, but I wonder if we can go near there: http://www.themozokteam.com/playground/frameworkstest/
O:-)
...just for comparison. Also I am on a MacBook, so these things are far away anyway, but I am curious...

keszegh

it is surprisingly slow, but otherwise usually i find gideros to be quite fast.
so i think this specific test where other frameworks do tilemapping (or batching) can beat gideros.
or can we do similar tilemapping in gideros somehow?
i'd also be interested in how fast we can make this test, but i don't see any clear way to improve (changing from bitmap to pixel did not change the speed much)

keszegh

openfl is also a similar sdk with similar overhead so we should be able to get a comparable result.

keszegh

maybe with particles?

hgy29

What about using particles ?

hgy29

Ah, @keszegh got the same idea, but I actually tried

stetso

Whoohoo, now it goes up to 25000 for me before slowing down to ~30fps. Actually, I thought about particles as well but somehow missed the :setParticlePosition() method in the reference 8-|
Thanks a buch, this is very cool.
Just out of curiosity: what is so specific about the rendering of the particles that makes it so much faster (maybe reusing the same texture efficeintly somehow?) and can that be somehow be applied to the other types as well? Since I just started out, I am sometimes confused about different Types existing for similar purposes (Bitmap and Pixel, Shape and Path). The subtleties are not always clear to me...

But the particles version is pretty cool! Thanks ^:)^

keszegh

seems to be much faster indeed with particles. see attachment.

keszegh

heh, you beat me.

SinisterSoft

It would be useful to somehow automatically cache sprites into batches if it's detected that they are from the same texture, etc - I don't know how complex this would be though ( @hgy29 would be best to answer this ), plus I think the main thrust forward right now is with fixing things before adding more features.

hgy29

I think it would be very complex to do this automatically given how Gideros draws things now. But we could provide helpers in lua for batch of Bitmaps, based on Mesh primitive.

keszegh

meshes was also my other idea that could be fast.
one can draw one mesh with plenty of squares (pairs of triangles) where on each square the texturecoordinates are set to the corners of the base texture. actually i use exactly this same method to have textured vector brushes in my animation app and it's quite fast (although i don't change the vertexcoordinates during time, which would be needed for bunnymark).