Visualizing the Future

The last month hasn’t been idle time. I’ve been working towards TransientVisualizers (think animation sequences for certain splashy actions) being associated with certain server-side model activities and being transmitted to the client where they can rendered. I’ve added support for “literal” brush keys, in which the key name represents a solid color or a linear gradient (horizontal or vertical) so that I can encode fail-safe animation colors without having to have mapped brushes defined (in Ikosa packages) for the models.

I’ve also added a storage area in the map for holding transient visualizations for the current tick. When the map time changes the transient visualizations are cleared (hence: transient). This storage area is accessed by an operation contract in the visualization service contract. Well enough to have a place to store and retrieve visualizations, but I also added bits to the power definitions and (by extension) the spell definitions for supporting animation types based on targets and animation style. Turns out that not too many spells (in the 0th to 2nd level range) require flashy animations, as some of them are buffs, divinations, “invisible” effects, or create persistent (not transient) objects such as dancing lights.

I did add one new type of animation over my previous set: namely a flying orb that moves a sphere from point to point. I already had a flying “bolt” (ray bolt), but there are some low level orb-spells that are necessary. I bound animations to the spells that needed it, and fixed a few power and spell issues I noticed along the way.

Finally, the past week or so has been fixing some client-side items (and server-issues that led to them) related to icon imagery, which I never implemented in the client (despite being the reason for doing all my flat XAML icons), but now have.

My next bits of effort are in surfacing wand and spell action selection and targeting in the client (they are defined and should be “working” server-side) so that I can test and fix the animations that should be bound to them.

One MeshGeometry3D to Rule them All

I finished off the PanelCellSpace a few weeks ago, and got it pushed through to the service host, proxy client and client UI. One thing I noticed (since I was testing in a large outdoor space) was that the performance was absolutely crappy (client-side…the workshop rendering was mostly OK). I wanted to fix this right away; but knew it would take profiling, though spending $500 around tax time wasn’t a viable alternative. Thus I had to improvise.

Enter good old Debug.WriteLine() statements with timings. I soon narrowed down a major performance problem to calling the full map rendering method 3 times. Basically when anything changed I was redrawing the entire map, locators (game tokens) and overlay graphics (aiming cells and lines). By separating those functions and only calling them when needed, I reduced re-draw time from 4.5 seconds (after making a single 5 foot move) to 1.5 seconds. Pretty good, but I was certain it could go faster.

I toyed with several ideas including caching full frozen Geometry3D models (per thread), and having other mesh collapsing optimizations. I finally settled on an approach of rather than drawing each cell face into a cell Model3DGroup with copious amounts of (frozen) transforms, I’d build aggregate meshes for cell faces using the same material rather than separate models. I had to replace a parameter in my call chains (and retain the old group for those cells I didn’t want to “upgrade” to the new style just yet), and futz around with collecting cell Model3DGroups and the shared MeshGeometry3D, but the end result is about 0.3 seconds from action start on client, through to server processing and updating, back to notification, collection of new map display data (based on senses) and rendering.

Yay!