Is object pooling convenient for construct 3?

Post reply
0 favourites
  • 8 posts
From the Asset Store
Mayan Temple - Platformer Tileset
$15 USD
Hand-painted tiles, objects, animated objects, and background to build a colorful Mayan civilization environment.
ludicarts's avatar
ludicarts

  • I am making a bullet hell game and i made an object pooling system and once the bullets get outside of the screen they get disabled and stop moving. To enable the bullets i use a bulletSpawn function which picks random disabled bullets and sets the position, speed, move angle, etc. unfortunately, i stumbled with a big problem, the game is unable to go above 60 fps with more than 400 bullets even if they are disabled, the game literally ran better by creating/destroying objects. So i wondered, is my object pooling system not well programed or do i even need to make one?

  • If there's no object, then there's nothing to keep track of, and nothing to render.

    The engine is well optimized to work with creating, and destroying objects as you need them as long as you remember to design around the fact that objects don't fully exist until the next tick, and that garbage collection is not a controlled process.

  • I see now, thanks for your response!

  • just curious why you'd ever want your game to go above 60fps

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads

  • 400 bullets seems to me like a pretty low object count to drop fps regardless if they are active or on screen or not. You probably have some other issue causing performance problems, such as an event running on all your bullet objects every tick. Destroying them would remove them from that overhead.

    In my performance test I only start to see slowdown after 5000 bullet objects or so, with stepping collisions on, even on my phone.

    dropbox.com/s/rzpb2wpivfbxnyb/waterparticles_perftest.c3p

    Jobel - many pc users, especially gamers, have high refresh rate monitors now. Even some phones are starting to go over 60 fps.

  • just curious why you'd ever want your game to go above 60fps

    I have a 240hz montior. Sadly not because my PC is strong enough to support it (unless the games are older) but simply because my old one died and this one was on sale :V My Laptop also has 144hz. Construct games run tied to the monitors refresh rate, so as long as the PC can handle it the game WILL go above 60fps naturally. I'd be quite sad if a game doesn't reach 144hz on my 144hz monitor, especially if it isn't 3D maxed-out eye-candy.

    To be fair, my own game also runs at around "only" ~150fps though considering the 2D nature it probably should be more. I just noticed... it does run at 240 in the preview but not in the export. Hmm...

    In any case, the faster the game runs the better. If it hits 240fps on your machine it might just hit 60 on an older one. But if it already is chugging along at 60 on yours, the older one might hit 10 fps and it's unplayable.

  • I don't see any reason not to use object pooling to be honest. I tested it many times in construct and it always works better. I believe pooling is THE way to do bullets in such games. If only 400 bullets are droping your performance then you should check if anyhthing is done to them while they're in the pool and not active. Just disable them altogether until you shot them

  • As ever, performance is a complex and often counter-intuitive area, and it's rare that specific advice always works in all cases. The golden rule is to measure performance and make changes based on measurable results. Don't pre-emptively do complicated things: you might actually be making things worse, unless you can measure an actual improvement.

    My advice would be: don't use object pooling, or in fact any kind of complicated optimisation technique, unless you have measurements that prove it's worth it for your specific game. It could vary from game to game as well, so don't assume that you should always or never do something. See also Answer your own performance questions with measurements.

Post reply
  • 8 posts
Return to board index
Jump to:
Active Users
There are 1 visitors browsing this topic (0 users and 1 guests)