Long time without posting. I’ve spent a lot of time working on the game, contracting art, buying sound effect and music assets, designing the levels… New screenshots/video should come very soon.
Anyway, back on topic: when developing from C++ to C#, I found out very strange that you can allocate memory but you cannot free it and have to let the garbage collector do it. But I finally got quickly used to it and found it quite handy… Until I found out that garbage collection is not free and usually causes framerate drops, especially on X360.
Using the CLR Profiler (screenshot above), you can easily see where you are wasting memory (well, it can be scary the first time you see it but in fact, it’s easy). I nearly removed all my runtime allocations with this tool, here are the few tips that can be useful:
1. Be careful with the class string
String is allocating memory every time it returns a new string. StringBuilder is the key to the problem. I didn’t even know what StringBuilder was before working on memory and now I use it everywhere I need to take care about memory. There are some awesome tips (and source code) about StringBuilder on Gavin Pugh’ blog. Especially this and this. You have everything you need now 🙂
2. Reuse your lists
I had multiple sections of code creating a temporary List<> in order to add elements to need a special treatment. This was in an update function in my case. It is handy and fast to write code like that, but it allocates memory. To fix this, I know have the List<> as a member of the class. I clear it and reuse it when needed. When creating a list, you should use the constructor with an int used to define the default capacity of the list. (List<Vector2> l = new List<Vector2>(64) for instance).
3. foreach loops
I converted my foreach loops in C++ like for loops and it saved me some allocations. Memory allocated due to foreach loops on lists is showing up in the CLR Profiler as System.Collections.Generic.List<T>.
Conclusion
I hope you’ll find this useful. In Spring Up Harmony, I still have some run-time allocations, mostly in the particle engine, when a new fx is launched (I use Mercury for now). However, it seems that the garbage collector is not causing hick-ups therefore I’m ok with it.