By maintaining a set of changed cells we can avoid repeating work for cells that change multiple times before being rendered. The shroud renderer and radar widget now delay their work until they must render, and thus process each changed cell only once. This avoids significant repetition that was causing major slowdown when many actors were in the world.
Introduced also a small Unit test project to prove it.
- Separated caching capabilities from PathFinder class to increase cohesion and maintainability.
Refactored the pathfinding algorithm by extracting methods based on responsibilities like
calculating costs and reordering functions. These changes should provide a in average a small increase in
pathfinding performance and maintainability.
- Optimized the pathfinder algorithm to reuse calculations like the
MovementCost and heuristics.
- Introduced base classes, IPathSearch and IPriorityQueue interfaces,
and restructured code to ease readability and testability
- Renamed the PathFinder related classes to more appropriate names. Made the
traits rely on the interface IPathfinder instead of concrete PathFinder
implementation.
- Massive performance improvements
- Solved error with harvesters' Heuristic
- Updated the heuristic to ease redability and adjustability. D can be
adjusted to offer best paths by decreasing and more performance by
increasing it
- Refactored the CellLayer<CellInfo> creation in its own Singleton class
- Extracted the graph abstraction onto an IGraph interface, making the
Pathfinder agnostic to the definition of world and terrain. This
abstraction can help in the future to be able to cache graphs for similar
classes and their costs, speeding up the pathfinder and being able to feed
the A* algorithm with different types of graphs like Hierarchical graphs
Reworked the visible cells calculation to ensure the visible region is actually minimal, which should reduce the amount of rendering to be done by a small amount. Previously, the region would tend to overdraw by 2-3 cells in either direction. For isometric maps, there was also a bug where it would draw far too much vertically above the top of the map.
When the map border shroud must be rendered, but no cells at the border are visible, then we know that no shroud will be visible at all. We can bail from rendering early in this case.
Changes in the shroud are now tracked. If a cell changes it will mark itself and its neighbors as dirty. During the render phase all dirty cells will have their vertices calculated and cached. If a cell is not dirty, the pre-calculated vertices are retrieved from cache. Then the sprite renderer is provided the sprite and the pre-calculated vertices to draw.
This prevents constant recalculation of vertices for the shroud in the render phase, requiring instead only dirty cells in the visible area. The update phase is reduced to a practical noop, instead incurring the cost only of changed cells each frame, rather than checking the visible area.
- Made Array.IndexOf available via extension method.
- Made ToHashSet extension method.
- Change collections queried often via Contains into sets.
- Avoid Count() extension if Count or Length property exist.
- Made Count() > 0 checks and variations calls to Any() instead.
- Don't call ToList/ToArray if there is no benefit to materializing the sequence.
- If the sequence does benefit from materialization, follow this general pattern:
- Collection queried often via Contains use ToHashSet to speed up lookups.
- Short lived variables use ToList. This is because ToArray requires an extra copy to output the final size.
- Collections persisted into fields or for a long time use ToArray to minimize memory overhead.
To resolve the ambiguity introduced when the introduction of isometric maps meant that cell and map coordinates were no longer equivalent, a new type has been introduced so they can each be represented separately.
Automatically formatted all files via VS. This generally corrects indentation, removes trailing whitespace and corrects misplaced tabs or spaces. Manually tweaked a few files where required.