How to make the Game loop wait for an event?: Page 2

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How to make the Game loop wait for an event?

cybereality

So doing the main loop while thing is possible, but it doesn't seem like it's of any use for a game. I could see why you might want it for a headless server, or other type of business applications. For a game, it doesn't make sense. There would be very rare times, if ever, you have a game without animation, without music, without any code running, etc. It's just not a realistic use case. Even if the screen is static (for example, with some type of 2D GUI interface) the frame still needs to be updated at 60 fps. Perhaps you can stop the buffer from clearing and just leave the last frame, sure, but you still need something alive to respond to input and restore interactivity. If done correctly, it could improve CPU utilization, I believe this is how the Godot editor works. But, again, in a real game this use case is almost non-existent. But it depends what you are doing, maybe I misunderstood your project. But if I understand correctly, this seems like a premature optimization.

Megalomaniak

cybereality There would be very rare times, if ever, you have a game without animation, without music, without any code running, etc.

no physics processing... But if I understand the OP correctly they might be looking to develop something very similar to Heroes of Might and Magic III, that kinda worked like it.

@lee-willis it might also be worth considering that in godot you can just pause/disable processing per individual script attached/scripted node. As an optimization that might be more relevant. That applies to both process() and physics_process(), you do have to toggle them individually iirc.

lee-willis

Pixophir

or, if you wish to try, write your own framework, which is a very nice finger exercise

Been there, done that. :-) I'm new to Godot, but not to game programming in general. (I'm certainly no expert, but also not a novice) Which is why I'm reasonably sure that Godot can do this, b/c it's pretty basic.

I haven't tested this yet, but the way I think it works is: if any of the nodes in the scenetree have a _process() or _physics_process() callback, then Godot will call them every frame, so it has to wake-up every frame. But if no nodes in the tree have those callbacks, (or if the node disables processing), then Godot won't run process or physics tasks at all, and will sleep until the next event.

I think the sample code I downloaded was so CPU intensive was b/c it has a _process() function.

cybereality

So you are somewhat correct. Defining _process, even with nothing in it (just pass) does consume cycles. If you have a blank script attached, with nothing else, I am getting around 9,000 fps. With a script with:

func _process(_delta):
	pass

Then it is 8,000 fps. But this sounds like more than it is (because of the way fps is measured) so the difference is not much. And with vsync at 60 (or even 144) this is far above any sort of useful metric.

If you additionally do this:

func _ready():
	set_process(false)

Then performance is even greater, around 10,000 fps. This would seem like a better way to do it, rather than attempt to turn Godot into something it is not.

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