Some thoughts on the engine...

[letsrock]

Hello out there...

First of all: Mike i love you! No really! 
Without your tutorials i would be lost with XNA.

BUT  ...

I played around with your code a while now and i have a couple of points to talk about.

First of all: Performance...
I'm aware of, that the engine isn't near of completition but i think if the changes won't made yet, it could be hard to change later eh?

• it's easy to change the foreach loops to normal for loops
• more use of ref keyword for arguments
• some of the collections could be simple arrays (like the Octnode child-nodes which are fixed number of

I've made those and some more changes and my framerate raised up alot (about 20 frames per second).
The performance on the xbox is still very low but even there i got a boost of 5-8 frames.

Second: Cameras, (Camera-Viewports)...
-If you change the Viewport, like when changing the resolution, the viewport don't get published to the current GraphicsDevice.
-I think a Interface for the cameras would be easier to implement new cameras.
-The projection matrix don't need to be created each update/frame, just after a viewport change. Again a performance thing, sorry i'm a performance freak

Third and last: Shaders, Effects...
These are my week point,... oke, one of a lot of other but i think the weakest point of all.
But one thing, lol again a performance thingy, is: why to search each use/frame the effect/shader for an object out of the manager and don't reference it in the shader?

oh and fourth: Please, please, please give use the next tutorial...

greathings from austria...
Markus

[h4rdc0m]

could you share your changes a we could all benefit from it. I'm also looking into optimizing the performance.

[mikeschuld]

As has been mentioned elsewhere on the forums, I will be doing an optimization tutorial on the engine at some point in the future, but for ease of understanding everything as people go along (and since this engine is a tutorial and not technically meant for real world use as is) I have chosen readability and ease of understanding of the ideas and algorithms involved in developing the engine so far.

That said, there are very many optimizations that could be done right now, and do feel free to post them more specifically so others may benefit from them as well. There will be an 'official' optimization tutorial coming up where I will probably ask in the forums for people with the know how and obsession - - where they think the best optimizations would be and then out them altogether in one big change set. Thanks for taking such an interest in speeding things up btw I don't claim to be the best programmer out there nor the best designer of game engines, just giving back to the community that gave so much to me in the past 6 years.