I’ve made a very large 3D game with Processing, and for the past few months, I’ve dealt with pretty shotty performance, considering only 2,000 or so quads are being drawn at any given time. With enough workarounds, I’ve been able to maintain 60 FPS on my GTX 1070, but the game is getting so large that I keep having to sacrifice more and more to maintain a smooth framerate.
The bulk of the game’s drawing is done by a drawWall() function that looks something like this: (I’ve shortened it to get to the point)
void drawWall(float x, float y, float z, float thickness, float width, float height, PImage texture) {
beginShape();
vertex(x,y,z,0,0);
vertex(x+width,y,z,1,0);
vertex(x+width,y+height,z,1,1);
vertex(x,y+height,z,0,1);
endShape();
beginShape();
vertex(x+width,y,z,0,0);
vertex(x+width,y,z+thickness,1,0);
vertex(x+width,y+height,z+thickness,1,1);
vertex(x+width,y+height,z,0,1);
endShape();
beginShape();
vertex(x,y,z+thickness,0,0);
vertex(x+width,y,z+thickness,1,0);
vertex(x+width,y+height,z+thickness,1,1);
vertex(x,y+height,z+thickness,0,1);
endShape();
beginShape();
vertex(x,y,z,0,0);
vertex(x,y,z+thickness,1,0);
vertex(x,y+height,z+thickness,1,1);
vertex(x,y+height,z,0,1);
endShape();
}
This basic example is a 3D wall being drawn with width, thickness, and height. There aren’t any quads drawn on the top or bottom to make it a full cuboid because those parts are invisible when the walls go from the floor to the ceiling.
So is there any way to do that more efficiently? I read this article about P3D alternatives, and while I was able to get raw OpenGL 2 to work (and it definitely had much better performance), I don’t know how to incorporate Processing’s operations such as pushMatrix(), popMatrix(), translate(), rotate(), and scale().
What I’m really looking for are alternative methods of drawing shapes that save on performance but don’t force me to remove all of Processing’s 3D operations listed before. Any ideas?
No wonder I got bad FPS, as I drew the whole cube multiple times from the inner loop lol. (plus my previous not-optimal brainfart method…).
)