Optimizations

[Helikin]

Here is a collection of possible optimizations.

• Sky: The dynamic sky renders the sky in every frame. If the sky properties (e.g. sun light direction) do not change, the sky can be cached in a cube map.
• Terrain: When the terrain is flat, we can optimize the terrain mesh/base clipmap. The material layers, detail texture resolutions, clipmap resolutions must also be adjusted. Mipmap generation is also very expensive and perhaps it should be turned off by default.
• Profiling: General profiling using a profiler (e.g. VS diagnostics or dotTrace) needs to be done.
• Particles: The number of particles per effect should be reduced.

I will add more optimization notes when I see an obvious optimization opportunity in the code.

[Helikin]

I started the game in a profiler and the LocationManager.MapResolution property takes most of the time. I checked the code and found this:

public double MapResolution
        {
            get
            {
                double temp=0;
               Application.Current.Dispatcher.Invoke(
                    DispatcherPriority.Background,
                    (Action)delegate ()
            { 

                double latitudeRadians = MathHelper.ToRadians(_map.Center.Latitude);
                temp= 156543.04 * Math.Cos(latitudeRadians) / Math.Pow(2, _map.ZoomLevel);
            });
                return temp;
            }
        }

If I remove the Invoke() everything works fine and a lot faster. (Changes not checked in.) This code is terrible. It blocks the current thread until the Dispatcher thread executes the delegate with low "Background" priority. If there are cross thread call problems, then I suggest that the LocationManager listens to Bing Map view change events and caches any values it needs.

[Helikin]

I have commented out the Dispatcher.Invoke code and added an assert to check for cross-thread problems. Besides causing performance problem, the Invoke() also changed the initialization order and some asserts failed when a game was started with Continue.