I decided to tackle some of the performance issues today. First, I fixed the A* implementation to match the fixed pathfinding implementation. This didn’t resolve my performance issues, and I wasn’t expecting it to, but I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t my issue.
What I thought was my issue was the code that checked network connectivity. I timed that segment of code, and to my surprise, it was running in under 1ms, so that certainly isn’t why the game is crawling along when lots of energy network segments are being checked as powered or not.
That leaves the actual drawing function. With one network segment, it takes ~1ms again do draw, but by the time even ~15 are on the screen, it’s taking ~10ms, and when 85 are on the screen, ~75ms. Still not the smoking gun I expected, but maybe the issue was elsewhere in drawing above the layer where I am technically setting the sprites up to draw.
And then I noticed that I’d missed clearing the children of the network layer. I’m not sure why I need to do this, but I’d already figured out that it seriously impacted performance elsewhere and had to do it. What I’d missed doing for the network and safe layers, leads to huge amounts of sprites that are being drawn, just not visibly (I think, cocos2d/pyglet can be a little opaque at times). Each time a batch is added, it stays there unless it is explicitly gotten rid of, even things that are updated many times. I still don’t know the proper way to do this, but making the change made the game run about 5-10x faster.
Creative Misconfiguration 