Stutter when showing Monarch screen containing a Distance Field font with a shadow

Questions
1

I can’t seem to get rid of a stutter that happens when I show a Monarch screen for the first time. Subsequent monarch.show()'s are fine.

The “Preload” flag has been ticked, but this only seems to move the stutter a few frames earlier.

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The curious thing about this is that it happens for all screens, even if they’re virtually empty (one text node and one box node) and minimal code in the .gui_script.

Aside from the above, is there anything else I could do to avoid this stutter?

Edit: Removing things in sequence until there was no stutter revealed the culprit: Shadow Alpha and Shadow Blur. When both set to 0, the stutter disappears. Is it possible to pre-cache the fonts?!

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Edit 2: Changing the font to Bitmap also removes the issue, but then the shadow doesn’t work (it becomes square blocks).

2

Does this happen when testing on desktop or on mobile?

There’s a transition or something that stutters?

I have no idea why this happens… @jhonny.goransson or @JCash any idea?

3

iPhone 11 Pro, mostly. :flushed:

First the phone freezes for 2 frames, then the FPS gets shaky for a few seconds, then comes back to normal. If no shadows are used, there is no freezing or FPS drop at all.

4

Not sure why it would be that much heavier. SUre, each glyph has 3 layers instead of one.

As for caching, for each uncached glyph, we, upload the glyph texture to the larger cache texture.
Before that, we unpack the glyph texture as well.

I guess if there are a lot of new glyphs to be uncompressed and uploaded the first frame, it will stutter.

We don’t have a handy preworming function currently yet.

You should be able to prewarm it by incrementally adding a few glyphs to an (invisible/hidden) text node each frame.

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5

Since it’s a distance field, would it be enough to pre warm the glyphs at one point size, or would all used point sizes have to be cached separately?

6

At that stage, there is no point size, only the rasterized size that you chose for the font.
So, for each fontfile you’ll have to prewarm.

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7

That’s great. Then my plan to cache all glyphs during loading might work. Will try it out tomorrow.

Edit: Ok, I’ve managed to get it to work! There is a caveat, though: The collection with the cached fonts needs to always be visible/in memory. If it’s unloaded, the stutter starts happening again.

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