Performance and Shapes

The functionality is really starting to come together on Sgine, but the performance has been a bit lower than I had hoped for large scenes. For simple games and business applications Sgine is performing quite well, but it's definitely not yet ready to write a first-person shooter on yet.

I've spent a bit of time doing performance tweaking and optimizations with YourKit and the performance is getting better, but still not where I'd like to see it. Right now I've got 400 cubes (which is made up of four independent Images for greater complexity) rotating and animating back and forth across the screen via easing effect at 38fps:



Not terrible, but over the next few weeks I'm hopeful I can get 4,000 cubes rendering at over 60fps.

Another quick note is that I've created a little Shape system in Sgine that will hopefully eventually be the core of all rendering as it auto-detects and uses additional capabilities of the video card for better performance. Additionally, I've added support for java.awt.Shape to ShapeData to draw nifty things like vector-text directly from a java.awt.Font to the screen. This is not the Shape-to-Texture cheating that most of the other engines do, this is direct to screen via tesselation. I've turned off any anti-aliasing so you can see it for yourself:



I've still got more work before I'm finished with the new Shape system, but once it is done I think this should help me get to the framerates I'm looking for.

AngelCode Fonts - Kerning

I already did most of the legwork earlier this week, but hadn't gotten around to turning on support for kerning, but that's all changed now:



Pretty easy to see the benefits of kerning here. However, this example also shows I seem to have a little problem with my low-hanging characters like 'g' and 'p'. Hopefully that will be fixed in the next update.

For now, here's the source:

package org.sgine.render

import org.sgine.math.mutable.Matrix4

import javax.imageio.ImageIO

import org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11._

import scala.io.Source

object TestFonts {
 def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
  val r = Renderer.createFrame(1024, 768, "Test Fonts")
  
  val m1 = Matrix4().translate(x = -200.0, z = -1000.0)
  val m2 = Matrix4().translate(x = -200.0, y = -25.0, z = -1000.0)
  val fps = FPS(1.0)
  
  val font = AngelCodeFont(Source.fromURL(getClass.getClassLoader.getResource("resource/Arial.fnt")), getClass.getClassLoader.getResource("resource/Arial.png"))
  
  val a = new Array[() => Unit](5)
  a(0) = MatrixState(m1)
  a(1) = () => font.drawString("VAST Kerning Example Enabled", true)
  a(2) = MatrixState(m2)
  a(3) = () => font.drawString("VAST Kerning Example Disabled", false)
  a(4) = fps
  r.renderable := RenderList(a)
 }
}

A couple more days of effort and we can hopefully dig into some much more interesting features. :)