Another performance pass (same look, same play)
Found by timing every per-frame function inside the benchmark, then checked against renders of the old build: the spiders and the Sanctuary towers come out pixel-identical.
- Swing trails were rebuilt from every frame's sample. At high frame rates that meant hundreds of points per frame, the single most expensive thing in a fight. They now keep a point at most every 1/240 s (the newest point still sits exactly on the blade), only add in-between points where the gaps are wide (low frame rates, as before), and share one material.
- Rig transforms: the actor rig's position and facing, and a skinned body's joints, were written every tick even when nothing changed. Each write pushes the whole skinned body and weapon to the renderer again. Now they're written only on change.
- Spiders: six eyes and the Widow's hourglass were eight draws per spider. They're now one shared mesh each, with the eye glow on the spider's own material (it still flares on an attack).
- Sanctuary towers: about forty meshes are folded into a few by the same static merge the depths use.
- Spells: a cast no longer makes four new meshes and materials; each look is built once and shared.
- Bow: the draw animation is only re-applied when the draw actually changes.
- Skills HUD: a full-screen banner layer was redrawn every frame even with no banner showing, and the tracker kept updating after it had faded. Both stop when idle.
- Small things:
- Rods on a fishing-shack rack stop trembling when you're more than 20 m away, where the tremble is too small to see.
- Health text only re-formats when the whole numbers change (fire-side healing emits every tick).
- Settings reads no longer allocate (they happen per frame and per mouse move).
- The damage-number pool is built at startup, not on the first hit.
- Party name plates only change when someone starts or stops talking.
- A cheaper check runs first in the enemy's target re-think.
VAEL is a co-op dark fantasy extraction dungeon crawler for PC, in active development. Get playtest news by email, or read the wiki.