Can you make this code more efficient?

While I haven't timed any brightscript for my own applications, just a scan of your code would lead me to target a few things.

• Does udp.receive take a long time? How about receiving a large block (20*20=400) and looping over it so you only have to read from the network once


• Does object construction take a long time? Move 'params = {}' out of your loop and reuse it.


• Do you have to walk the player array for every update that comes in? Perhaps players should be an associative array where the key is 'id'. Then most likely you'll have C code in the brightscript interpreter finding the matching player for the update rather than having to walk an array and test the id for every entry.

Thanks!

There are a couple of solid ideas here.

Creating an roAssociativeArray object every loop through is just stupid and I'm sure it's eating a few milliseconds. I didn't even realize I was doing it, it is not necessary.

The last suggestion is probably the best one, instead of having an array of associative arrays, I could have an associative array of associative arrays. Then I'm guessing I could just do a check like...

    id = params.id   'or something like this
    If this.players.id <> invalid
        'then do all of the movements for the player
    else
       'add the player to the array
    end if

It would be a lot faster than looping through the array of players I'm sure, thanks a bunch! It does mean some changes to my code, but that's why I asked this question now before I got too far along 😄

Veeta you are my hero! I am now getting a maximum of 5ms for 50 active players!!! So much better, I used to crash the game if I got up to 30+ players, now my 8 core gaming computer is the bottleneck :shock: . (50 virtual game clients at once is about all it can do). Here is my new code if anyone is curious.

       
        While this.udp.isReadable()
            received = this.udp.receive(this.buffer, 0, 20)
            if received > 0
                params = {}
                params.id = resolve_two_byte_integer(this.buffer[12],this.buffer[13])
                id_string = params.id.tostr()
                params.x = resolve_two_byte_integer(this.buffer[14],this.buffer[15])
                params.y = resolve_two_byte_integer(this.buffer[16],this.buffer[17])
                params.color = this.buffer[18]
                params.destroy = this.buffer[19] 
                id_exists = false
                player = this.players.Lookup(id_string)
                if player <> invalid
                    this.players[id_string].x = params.x
                    this.players[id_string].y = params.y
                    id_exists = true
                    if params.destroy = 1
                        print "Removed player - id : " ; this.players[a].id
                        this.players[id_string].sprite.Remove()
                        this.players.Delete(id_string)
                    end if
                end if
                if not id_exists and params.destroy = 0
                    params.sprite = this.compositor.NewSprite(270, 500, this.region_ring[params.color])
                    params.sprite.SetData(params.id)
                    this.players.AddReplace(id_string, params)
                end if 
            end if
        End While

I didn't remove the params = {} object creation, but it really doesn't seem to have much of an effect.

Thanks again! 😛