The managed byte buffer is created on demand, meaning a newly allocated sheet will not waste memory holding onto the buffer until some changes are actually required to be written. This avoids a newly allocated sheet wasting memory on buffers that do not differ from their backing texture.
Sheets carry a managed buffer of data that allows updates to be made without having to constantly fetch and set data to the texture memory of the video card. This is useful for things like SheetBuilder which make small progressive changes to sheets.
However these buffers are often large and are kept alive because sheets are referenced by the sprites that use them. If this buffer is explicitly null'ed when it is no longer needed then the GC can reclaim it. Sometimes a buffer need not even be created because the object using the sheet only works on the texture directly anyway.
In practise, this reduced memory consumed by such buffers from ~165 MiB to ~112 MiB (at the start of a new RA skirmish mission).
- Made private methods static where possible (runtime can elide checking the object for null).
- Declared attribute classes as sealed (allows reflection on attributes to complete faster).
- Moved some static cctor's into field initializers (static cctor's are slower than static field initializers).
- Made classes static if they contained only static methods (can't create instances of useless objects).
- Use inferable Exts.Lazy and not new Lazy<T>().
- Added required STAThread attribute to CrashDialog.
- Removed unused parameters in private methods.
- Added Serializable attribute to exceptions.
- Added parameter name in calls to ArgumentNullException.
- Use of as operator instead of is + cast.
- Changed (x as Foo).Bar anti-pattern into ((Foo)x).Bar. Results in sensible cast exceptions on error rather than null dereferences.
- Removed unused method in NullShader.
