GO and performance (Bug or not?)(SOLVED)

[AGulev]

I just tried to create empty project.
It consist:

• one factory
• one empty object
• one script file with the next code:

function init(self)
    for i=1,10000 do
        factory.create(self.factory)
 end
end

This is absolutely empty project even without sprites.

And I receive next result on iPad4:

@Ragnar_Svensson said that GO is really easy entity, but it looks different

Overflow! Each collection allocates memory by numbers from the game.project (SOVLED)

An empty game object instance in Defold is equivalent to a scene graph node in another engine, e.g. a specific skeleton bone, or something as small. They are not equivalent to an instance in e.g. Unity. In Defold, it’s an entry in a few arrays as opposed to a dynamically allocated heavy-duty object. In terms of cost, they are much closer to particles in a particle system, than an NPC for example. The typical use case for a collection proxy is to do dynamic level loading, or possibly to run two …

I just want to be sure that this is not a bug of Defold. It looks really strange.

[britzl]

An empty game object is not ignored by the engine. A game object still has a transform and that transform needs to be updated every frame. This still costs CPU cycles. I can’t give you a detailed answer but I know @Mathias_Westerdahl mentioned some optimisations that could be made to improve the numbers.

I will talk to the team about this and try to give this a higher priority since there’s been a lot of recent discussions around Defold’s performance.

[Ragnar_Svensson]

For the record, I do call something that takes 8 ms / 10000 = 0.8 microseconds to process a “really easy entity”. But as @britzl says, the transform processing can be improved so it takes less time.

[AGulev]

he transform processing can be improved so it takes less time.

Cool! Looking forward for this optimizations.

For now game create something about 3000 object. Most of them just GO with one sprite component which stay in one place all the time.
In theory 1600 GOs could be replaced with one tilemap, but tilemap doesn’t support isometric tiles and engine doesn’t support skew for GO.

[AGulev]

Now, with 1.2.119 it looks much better: 3-4 times faster!

I think I can mark this issue as resolved.