Bugsmashers: Episode 14

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   hey everyone welcome back to an exciting new episode of bug Smashers uh before we begin I heard some exciting news we're getting a new Star Trek and it's going to be on CBS on demand but it's a new Star Trek um hopefully you know the reboots all coming out and about you know Star Wars and all that fun stuff probably never going to get a firefly but we might get another sequest oh yeah that's gonna be good don't judge me Randy sequest out no come on a box [Music] bashes hey everyone we are here in our fancy Dancy Mark test level yay so I'm

2. 00:00:52

   in a Retaliator and I am looking at a optimization that we could do with the um the HUD R Trace well pretty much all the r traces we're doing with our ships so let's step into our fancy Dancy visor code um depending upon where the player is looking it will send out a trace to kind of see where to try to Converge All Your Weapons all onto that point um that's if they they have gimbals and this is our beautiful Ray World intersection or uh Ray Trace test and we basically shoot it out every frame like I said to try to hit this little point with all your big ass guns um now unfortunately when I do this Trace so let's hop back into the

3. 00:01:42

   game um we have to send in something called a skip list so uh what this skip list is is basically we want to ignore certain physical things so if this is my beautiful ship and I'm a little sticky note of a player when I'm shooting out my Ray I might be intersecting the ship a little bit and now all my guns are going to try to point at the ship we don't want that so instead we have to send in that little skip list to say hey Skip my vehicle and continue on so that's what this beautiful little thing does right here is we send in a bunch of physical entities to say hey skip this when you're performing the trace and find other things and unfortunately our skip list has

4. 00:02:31

   121 things inside of it which is not pretty good to do every frame since we have to rebuild this skip list so let's go uh here we are so every frame we are adding the ship's physics every actor and every children and these children are is basically inside our Retaliator we have like dozens of entities that control control the doors opening up um some brushes bunch of things to make it look beautiful and interactable inside and unfortunately we're adding all those plus all the players and as you saw we are at 121 unfortunately our limit is 128 and we don't want to be sending all

5. 00:03:23

   this stuff every frame where there's dozens of other places that do the same test it's very very expensive so what I have done and what I'm going to do now is we basically don't need to skip these things uh goodbye and the player is another one so we get rid of that on the vehicle and the player is actually going through all of his item ports and adding his weapons and gear on into the skip list thing is those items don't have physics or if they do have physics they're part of the player physics so they're basically adding the player physics multiple times so we don't really need this part and this is the only exception that

6. 00:04:12

   we'll need to have oh excuse me um this is for if the player picks up something uh we don't want you know that thing to be in the test so we'll skip whatever he's picking up so the player should just skip his physics so an actor it will skip his physics and his ragd doll physics that's what both of these guys are and ideally the vehicle we just skip itself so let's go back to our lovely visor code and lucky for us we already have this global grid setting on here what this means is um we're going to do the global grid so here's my ship and out here is the global grid so we're going to ignore or basically the innards

7. 00:05:01

   of the ship and we don't care about its um you know its door inside because we said this is the global grid we're going to trace against the outside in that case we only need to trace against or I'm sorry um send in the skip list of the vehicle and the actor himself and nothing really else and then now we still get the same result so if I hit recode oh no recode has failed us so we have to do a regular code compile yay all right so that magical recode button worked so now I'm going to put my breakpoint on and as you can see we only have three things to skip uh we have the

8. 00:05:51

   the vehicle physics and mic physics and the ragd doll physics so we have basically optimized a fun little R Trace awesome uh there were some other things that I have done as well which I can show you real quick so that's all and good but there may be sometimes where we have to trace for certain things uh or want to skip certain things while we're still in the um the grid so we have that global grid setting which means we'll we'll just ignore everything but the um we'll ignore the insides but we'll get the outside and what I have done too is in the interiors and on the vehicles I have added um basically actually where is I

9. 00:06:42

   think I put it let's look for that bad boy there you are so in some instances um we still want to do the trace but we want to do it locally to the grid and but we may want to still ignore the inner Collision but we want to get you know things like I don't know maybe another ship in a ship so we could say hey we the vehicle performance Trace but I want to ignore the insides and all the players or you could just say I want to ignore the on the vehicle I want ignore all the players or maybe you want to keep all of them the next thing you could do is you could actually put in which grid you want to specify so if I'm inside of here

10. 00:07:33

    we don't need to necessarily test everything out here if I have say a weapon I just want to test the inside so I could tell the ray World hey just test for this grid so we've done a lot of optimizations to our traces so it's not all General it's more what do you want to do how do you want to do it work for that problem if we make it too General you're going to have a problem like we're adding everything into this big skip list when we don't need to do that and you know performance intense when we're performing some of these Rays per frame so hope you guys enjoyed uh my fun little spaceship and cool so as you can see in this episode of bug Smashers uh we're doing some optimization what R traces um finally got around to doing some of that

11. 00:08:21

    stuff uh this was pretty much a we call a code cleanup Fridays where all right we have some fun little code that's not as good as it should be so on Fridays we're tasked to go and clean up those little bits and it comes into a little fun thing cuz it's like hey I got this thing running for production it's not as best as I want but on a code clean up Friday I'm going to make it better because they I get to have that time to do what I need to do hope you guys enjoyed and I'll see you guys next time this video made possible by the ICC Stellar surveyors and subscribers like you [Applause]