Items Completed
- Caching for commonly used selectors
- Github Actions for CI
- #37 - Zoomed out map view
- #118 - Create basic screen layouts
Caching Queries
I spent a lot of time investigating some of the performance opportunities in Terminus. The code design I’ve settled on is highly modular, but that can lead to some inefficiencies as there is more communication or duplicate data retrieval.
Roguelikes seem to need most of their optimization in how the process a turn more than how should each frame behave. General animations and things like that are usually not that demanding, and simplifying graphics load is usually an obvious optimization. (Don’t draw what won’t be seen)
Selectors and Actions
State in Moonpie Apps are managed through actions/reducers + selectors. This is similar to the Redux implementation or any other segmentation of Pub-Sub/State Management. This allows a clear entry point into when data is accessed and when data is changed.
This can be leveraged to cache certain responses instead of searching the state tree every time a request is made for some data. This cache can be flushed and refreshed in response to changes to the state.
Implementation
The Cache implementation is as follows:
- Register the
Cachewith an ID, Query that populates the cache, Events that flush the cache - On first request the Cache will populate the results in the
Cache - From then on, any request to the Cache will return the data in the
Cache - If an event that the
Cacheis monitoring triggers then previously stored results are cleared. - The next query will behave as in Step 2.
-- Excerpt from game/cache.lua
local flushCallbacks = {}
local results = {}
function Cache.lookup(cacheDef)
local name = cacheDef.name
-- Configure when cache should clear
if flushCallbacks[name] == nil then
Cache.addFlushCallbacks(cacheDef)
end
-- Check for cached results
if results[name] == nil then
results[name] = cacheDef.source()
end
return results[name]
end
Outcome
The implementation of the cache has improved some of the turn processing. When processing a turn there might be multiple duplicate lookups and this simplifies the queries down. Missing optimized queries based on position still limits the performance. I made a decision to hold off on that a bit longer until I’m convinced of the performance gains as well as feeling that the position implementation is not going to change.
Optimizations
Some potential optimizations:
- The cache instead of flushing could monitor what was changed. This would require an update to the store to broadcast the state that had been updated.
- More advanced caching that handle particular query values: Right now, it is difficult to cache with a certain query. For example, requesting entities in a specific position is difficult to cache because it requires knowing what position is being cached.
Github Actions
Travis-CI over the past 6 months or so, switched to a pay model for all repositories that build on their platform. I have no complaints with a service that costs money, charging money to stay supported. The problem for me was that the price point was so much greater than the return for having a couple of repositories run automated tests. If there had been some sort of offering that was more inline with my use case, I would have stuck around.
There is a simple alternative though and that was to switch to Github Actions. Seems to be in response to some of the offerings that Gitlab has been putting out. Anyway, I’ve set up automated build steps that will run the unit tests for Terminus.
Included in this, I’ve updated Moonpie and the Moonpie Template projects. Using the template project should mean that any future Moonpie project or game I create will automatically get configured with continuous integration including code coverage reporting. This will simplify the process greatly going forward.
Here is the configuration file I created if it helps anyone else to build Love2D/Lua projects with Coveralls reporting.
# Build configuration for Terminus
name: build
on: [push]
jobs:
build:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
env:
COVERALLS_REPO_TOKEN: $
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
with:
submodules: true
- uses: leafo/gh-actions-lua@v8.0.0
with:
luaVersion: "luajit-2.1.0-beta3"
- uses: leafo/gh-actions-luarocks@v4.0.0
- name: build
run: |
luarocks install luacheck
luarocks install busted
luarocks install luacov
luarocks install luacov-coveralls
luarocks install luafilesystem
- name: test
run: |
luacheck main.lua ./game
busted --run=travis
luacov-coveralls --exclude ext --exclude /home
Zoomed out Map View
This was not a challenging change, but one that provides a lot of value. Rogue games are all about maps. That sense of exploration is possible because the map changes each time. And, keeping track of everything requires the ability to zoom out and see things from a zoomed out perspective.
This implementation just loops through all the tiles and renders out the tiles for the map.
-- Excerpt from game/ui/widgets/world_map_detail.lua
-- Demonstrates custom drawing within Moonpie Components
drawComponent = function(self)
local state = store.getState()
local tileWidth = math.floor(self.box.width / self.mapSize.width)
local tileHeight = math.floor(self.box.height / self.mapSize.height)
for x = 1, self.mapSize.width do
for y = 1, self.mapSize.height do
local p = Position(x, y, self.currentLevel)
local t = Map.selectors.getTile(state, p)
if FogOfWar.selectors.get(state, self.player, p) and t then
if t.terrain.key == "wall" then
love.graphics.setColor(Colors(Colors.gray))
love.graphics.rectangle("fill", (x - 1) * tileWidth, (y - 1) * tileHeight, tileWidth, tileHeight)
elseif t.terrain.key == "room" then
love.graphics.setColor(Colors(Colors.light_accent))
love.graphics.rectangle("fill", (x - 1) * tileWidth, (y - 1) * tileHeight, tileWidth, tileHeight)
elseif t.terrain.key == "corridor" then
love.graphics.setColor(Colors(Colors.light_shade))
love.graphics.rectangle("fill", (x - 1) * tileWidth, (y - 1) * tileHeight, tileWidth, tileHeight)
end
end
end
end
if self.player.position.z == self.currentLevel then
local x, y = self.player.position.x -1, self.player.position.y - 1
love.graphics.setColor(Colors(Colors.playerBlip))
love.graphics.rectangle("fill", x * tileWidth, y * tileHeight, tileWidth, tileHeight)
end
end,
User Interface
The other key step I worked on was mapping out what screens I thought would be most important for the game. Some of these will change and some will be broken down in more detail. For example, the character creation screen will need some more sub-screens to help guide the process. There will also likely be some sort of encyclopedia or other information collection system that collates data together.
I’ve created the basic structure for all the non-dialog based screens to make it easier to add new functionality going forward.
Statistic Report
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Tag: devlog-15 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Files Update: 83 LOC Added: 1038 LOC Deleted: 270 Code Coverage: 97% ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code Complexity ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Lua 662 27588 3746 3009 20833 1343 Markdown 21 1163 313 0 850 0 ReStructuredText 13 464 142 0 322 0 Plain Text 5 658 108 0 550 0 CSV 4 1175 0 0 1175 0 JSON 4 153 0 0 153 0 License 2 42 8 0 34 0 YAML 2 66 14 0 52 0 Batch 1 35 8 1 26 5 Makefile 1 20 4 7 9 0 Python 1 56 15 29 12 0 gitignore 1 51 10 9 32 0 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Total 717 31471 4368 3055 24048 1348 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
