P-167: Paranoia: Update 21: VR Debugging: Part 3

I had almost completely solved this issue using my script-based solution, but I was still getting very slight, but noticeable “jitter” every second, when the optimisation function was being run. I was also getting some “popup” of objects in the same room as the player as they moved around.

I had considered spreading out the creation of the objects by a few hundred milliseconds or so, to reduce the sudden load on the system, but I eventually discovered a much better way to solve this.

The script-based way that I had been doing this was not the preferred way,but I thought that implementing it first would be a faster way to solve the problem, since it wouldn’t involve working with complex code. As it turns out, the “correct” was was faster to implement than my simple script “hack” was.

I was able to add the culling of items and static shapes to the scenecullingstate::cullobjects() function, which essentially does the same thing that I was doing in script, but this was was much faster. This solved many of the problems, but performance was still a concern.

The other major change that I was was that I tried running the engine in a release build. I should have tried this sooner, but I am so used to running in debug mode that I didn’t think of it. The performance boost from a release build easily solved the jitter issues, and VR on the rift works great now.

I also learned that pressing “n” in T3D activates the network profiles, I didn’t know T3D had one of these!

The performance issues that I was having make sense, when you consider that to draw a scene in VR, you essentially need twice the performance than you need with a conventional screen, because you are rendering the scene twice, once for each eye. That means twice the frames per second. This is likely why the game worked fine on the screen, but had performance issues on the rift’s display.

The next goal with P-167 is to finish the debugging, and finish the rest of the art, and then the gui’s and probably some other minor things.