v0.117.0-rc12 Whole Worlds

Everything in rc11, plus physics that costs a fraction of what it did for big craft and vehicles on the ground, shader materials that draw together, and a way to load a level's shaders and pictures before its first frame.

Physics costs less, and moves the same

Every body ends where it did before, to the last bit; only the work is less.

• Each part of a craft is tested only against what it can actually reach this step, not everything around the whole craft. A distance question stops at the radius it needs, and a part in open air skips the ground entirely.
• Ground queries near terrain are several times cheaper.
• When a craft splits, only the parts near the other half are compared.
• In our tests: a 15-part plane rolling on terrain went from about 21 ms of physics a frame to about 4; a 1,000-part craft released onto the ground from 53 ms to about 3, and asleep at 0.2 ms.
• Sphere, capsule and box casts skip parts far from their path, so 20 casts past a 1,000-part craft went from 2.1 ms to 0.2 ms. perf.counts() now reports sweeps and sweepMs.

Drawing many of the same thing

• Parts that use the same shader material with the same settings now share it, so they draw together: 3,000 parts with one shader material draw once instead of 3,000 times. A part whose settings change gets its own copy and the others keep theirs. What is drawn is the same, pixel for pixel.
• Material changes are applied only to the nodes that changed, so a quiet frame does no material work.
• perf.counts().unbatched and unbatchedBy say how many draws could not be shared, and why: a unique mesh, a texture, a shader, shader settings, or skinning.

No first-use freeze

• assets.warm(list, cb) prepares pictures, shaders, materials, models and sounds in the background, and calls cb when all are ready. Warm a level's assets behind its loading screen and its first frame does no first-use work.
• A shader's skinned version is built only when something skinned draws with it.
• Built shader pipelines are kept on disk between runs (Vulkan), so a shader is faster to prepare the second time.
• perf.hitches() names the assets a slow frame was waiting on, with their times: decoding, uploading, compiling a shader, or building its pipeline.

Upgrading

Nothing to do. A shader nobody warmed is still prepared the first time it draws; call assets.warm on your loading screen to move that work off play.