Performance

Performance is an interesting problem to solve, and one I am none too experienced with. While playing our game I've noticed a considerable hiccup, mostly when many projectiles on the screen. As a good guess, I commented the logic pertaining to projectiles, ran, and to my surprise the performance glitch still existed.

Stumped, I turned to the internet for assistance. Turns out, there's a reasonably good piece of software called SlimTune that came to my rescue. It is technically a beta, but it is open source and easy to use once you decode some of the results on your own. Not all the visual data has come to being useful just yet.

So what was the problem you ask? Well, I navigated the labyrinth of function calls and to my surprise, the problem was not what I expected.

The method call to the enemy draw was causing the problem. Not because of the textures or any complex logic, but because I was drawing a primitive rectangle around the enemy health bar to give it some emphasis. This was the lazy route and would've been solved when we used an actual image for the health bar, but it just goes to show that as useful as primitives can be, they can cause quite the backup.