[Ohrrpgce] SVN: james/6397 Remove docs for Scrunch slice because I am having second thoughts

Fri Feb 14 07:12:42 PST 2014

On 14 February 2014 20:05, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14 February 2014 07:55, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 7:26 AM, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I haven't done profiling, but I strongly suspect that the slowdown is
>>> simply when there are large numbers of slices on the screen that have to do
>>> collision testing with each other.
>
> But do the invisible slices affect the collision checking?
>
> Once script commands can return lists we can implement much more
> efficient collision checking commands. The current commands are very
> bad.

Oh, looking at the profiling information I see that the slice
collision commands are not the problem. checkpointcollision is the
most expensive script, with 29% of time... but I'm not really sure
why. It doesn't seem to call any expensive commands or do much
looping.

>>> If you are interested in profiling it, the game is at
>>> svn://gilgamesh.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/games/vorpalflorist
>
> But what is the problem enemy?

That was a very easy question to answer by actually trying out the
game! (Actually it runs at less than 18fps even on my desktop unless I
compile with gengcc=1)

I really like the animations for jumping and attacking, but I still
think the walking animation looks a bit odd.

The AI for the enemy in the first room seem to misbehave a bit if you
run past it and stand either behind it out of range, or somewhere in
the middle of its range.

>> Actually, I just tried compiling with scriptprofiling, and when I ran, all
>> the output I got was
>>
>> OHRRPGCE wip 20140212.6396 gfx_sdl+fb/music_sdl FreeBASIC 0.90.1
>> (07-17-2013) -g -exx script_profiling Linux 32-bit
>> Runtime info: gfx_sdl "SDL 1.2.14 (0 joysticks) Driver:x11"  music_sdl,
>> SDL_Mixer 1.2.11 (22050Hz)
>> Playing game
>> /home/james/src/ohr/wip/../games/vorpalflorist/vorpalflorist.rpgdir (Vorpal
>> Florist) 02-13-2014 10:52:14
>> Could not open /home/james/.ohrrpgce/vorpalflorist/gameconfig.ini
>> Partial game data upgrade...
>> script profiling information:
>> #switches is the number of times that the interpreter switched to that
>> script
>> (switching time is relatively neglible and included to help determine
>> calls to other scripts, which are more expensive)
>> Total time recorded in interpreter: 0.000sec   (timer overhead = 1.96us)
>>  %time        time    time/call      #calls   #switches  script name
>> cleaningup
>> /home/james/src/ohr/wip/../games/vorpalflorist/vorpalflorist.rpgdir and
>> /home/james/.ohrrpgce/ohrrpgce20140213105213.795.tmp/
>> Could not rmdir(/home/james/.ohrrpgce/ohrrpgce20140213105213.795.tmp/):
>> Directory not empty
>>
>> Is scriptprofiling broken right now?
>
> I completely forgot about this problem (and it took me a while to
> realise what was going on). The script profiling information is only
> printed when you quit the game normally; it doesn't get printed when
> you quit with alt+F4/etc.
>
> Also, don't forget that you should compile with scriptprofile=1
> debug=0, because -exx greatly slows things down, but release builds
> are built with debug=0. Actually if you're investigating performance
> on Ouya you should compile with gengcc=1. (And we should probably
> compile release builds with gengcc=1 on all platforms to speed things
> up if it's stable enough.)
>
>> ---
>> James
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 4:54 AM, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 13 February 2014 18:02, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:
>>>> > To be more specific about those second thoughts
>>>> >
>>>> > 1) Although the scrunch was working nicely, I had not considered the
>>>> > fact
>>>> > that it means that the position and size of the child slices are
>>>> > effectively
>>>> > in different units. I had expected to deal with this manually in my
>>>> > script,
>>>> > until I noticed that it makes the "slice edge x" and "slice edge y"
>>>> > commands
>>>> > useless. I am reluctant to add special-case handling for scrunch slices
>>>> > to
>>>> > those commands. That would mean i would have to script my own versions
>>>> > of
>>>> > them for my game, and that will probably have performance impacts.
>>>> > Those
>>>> > commands do get use a whole lot in collision detection.
>>>> >
>>>> > 2) After further testing, I doubt I can get my scripts to work reliably
>>>> > at
>>>> > 36 FPS on the OUYA. Some existing enemies drag fps down to 17 fps,
>>>> > which is
>>>> > not a big deal when 18.3 is my target, but is game-killing when 36.6 is
>>>> > my
>>>> > target. Considering that the game looks nice and controls nice and
>>>> > feels
>>>> > pleasant at 18.3, I have flip-flopped back to not wanting to change the
>>>> > frame rate for this game.
>>>> >
>>>> > So that leaves me doubting whether I should leave ScrunchSlice in at
>>>> > all. I
>>>> > am leaning towards removing it, and I can always add it back later if
>>>> > somebody is working on a project that would benefit from it.
>>>> >
>>>> > ---
>>>> > James
>>>>
>>>> That's too bad.
>>>>
>>>> I would consider sliceedgex/y returning the wrong results a bug
>>>> though. When scaling is implemented they will have to return positions
>>>> in the slice's coordinate system.
>>>>
>>>> Have you tried running the game with the script profiler or a regular
>>>> profiler to see where all the time is spent? I would be quite
>>>> interested to know. (Assuming that it's whole due to scripts.) I
>>>> believe that the slice commands are quite inefficient, which is a
>>>> problem because a script interpreter won't change that (unless direct
>>>> access to slice data as object members is added).
>>>>
>>>> > On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 3:55 PM, <subversion at hamsterrepublic.com>
>>>> > wrote:
>>>> >>
>>>> >> james
>>>> >> 2014-02-12 15:55:07 -0800 (Wed, 12 Feb 2014)
>>>> >> 66
>>>> >> Remove docs for Scrunch slice because I am having second thoughts
>>>> >> ---
>>>> >> U   wip/docs/plotdict.xml
>>>> >> U   wip/docs/plotdictionary.html
>>>> >> U   wip/whatsnew.txt
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>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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