#godotdash — Public Fediverse posts

new release: https://codeberg.org/godot-dash/godot-dash/releases/tag/v1.0.0-alpha.4

Enhancements
- Optimized trails, with an important optimization specifically for the wave trail
- Tweaked the default MSAA level since MSAA_8x isn't a reasonable default (diminishing returns)
- Disabled search bars on popups on Android (since it made the on-screen keyboard automatically pop up)

Fixes
- The swing could crash into ceilings

#godot #gamedev #godotdash

Making a public alpha release (after ~4 years) | Godot Dash

https://makertube.net/w/viC7crEhsukKNqd5pjGd5p

i just did a small but satisfying refactor!
we used to duplicate objects in our level editor by packing them into a PackedScene then instantiating it, every object one by one in a map operation.
but it turns out that level serialization and deserialization code is modular enough to have a function to do it at the object level, and that's what the refactor uses.
in a worst-case scenario, it avoids the allocation of n unique PackedScenes, which will save memory!

func _clone_object(object: Node2D) -> Node2D:
    if object is Player:
        return object
-   NodeUtils.change_owner_recursive(object, object)
-   var packer := PackedScene.new()
-   packer.pack(object)
-   var clone := packer.instantiate()
-   NodeUtils.change_owner_recursive(object, level)
-   NodeUtils.change_owner_recursive(clone, level)
-   clone.scene_file_path = object.scene_file_path
-   return clone
+   var object_data: Dictionary = Level.serialize_object(object, Serialize.Reason.SAVE)
+   var cloned_object: Node2D = Level.instantiate_object_from_data(object_data)
+   Level.deserialize_data_to_object(object_data, cloned_object, level, true)
+   cloned_object.set_meta(Constants.LAYER_META, object.get_parent())
+   return cloned_object

over the last few days, i optimized level loading times when restarting a level from ~600ms to ~50ms on a benchmark level with 2000 objects.
it's still not enough, since we're expecting levels to be a lot heavier than 2k objects, but it's already a good start.

the first optimization was to make the game set the deserialized data on all the objects when restarting, instead of re-instantiating the level from scratch.

the second optimization was to remove as many get_node calls as possible, and replace them with storing a reference once in metadata, and getting that reference back using get_meta (which is essentially a hashmap lookup, i checked). get_node is slow because it has to traverse the tree and do a bunch of string matching and stuff.

#godotengine #gamedev #godotdash