Week 23: Slimming-down file sizes and giving-back to Godot!

The platform-graph inspector has always been able to display jump trajectories as well as all jump/land position pairs that were considered for possible jumps between a pair of surfaces.

These trajectories and these jump/land positions don't need to be saved, and are now re-calculated as-needed when using the inspector.

tl;dr: I reduced platform-graph file sizes to improve performance, and I made some contributions to Godot.

What happened last week?

Highlights

• I reduced platform graph file sizes.
• These files were pretty massive before, and were making the HTML builds run very poorly.
• They are much smaller now, and things are zipping along!
• I made some contributions to Godot.
• Identified some problems with how binary serialization works.
• Created some pull requests to make documentation better.
• My two submissions to the Godot Asset Library were reviewed.
• Nearly done!
• I participated in the GMTK 2021 game jam!
• Stay tuned! I'll write a separate post on this.
• But here's a link to my game.

Laundry list

• Refactor platform-graph storage in various ways, in order to reduce file sizes:
• Implement an alternative, more-efficient approach to path-finding, which doesn’t save trajectory state, and instead re-calculates trajectory state on-the-fly.
• Add support for omitting various debug-only state from platform-graph save files (info on failed-edge calculations and a complete list of all jump-land-position-velocity pairs considered).
• Remove trailing zeros after decimals in JSON encodings.
• Move JSON-parsing logic into a separate file.
• Go back and leave a trailing . when removing trailing zeros after the decimal.
• For some reason, removing the trailing . breaks something when I try to parse the graph afterward.
• I have no ideas why this breakage is happening, and I should probably look into it.
• But, leaving the trailing . doesn’t increase the file size by too much, and I don’t want to spend the extra time looking into this for now.
• File-size metrics:
• Before: 4838 KB
• After removing trajectory state: 2220 KB
• After removing debug-only state: 624 KB
• After removing trailing zeros: 584 KB
• After adding back in a trailing ".": 591 KB
• Refactored some inspector logic, which relates closely to the data I'm trying to remove from save files.
• Add logic to dynamically populate edge-trajectory state as-needed within the inspector.
• Fix a bug in the inspector that was somehow causing the first item in the tree to get squashed into the root.
• Refactor some platform-graph edges-from-surface logic to make it easier to dynamically re-calculate later from the inspector.
• Update inspector to dynamically re-calculate all possible jump-land-positions and failed-edge state from a given origin.
• This lets me discard all this extra state from my platform graphs and save files.
• This lets me still debug these things as needed.
• Update the graph to never hold onto debug-only state.
• Experiment with `File.store_var` and `File.get_var`.
• This API should be both _much_ more convenient and _much_ more space-efficient for storing my platform-graph data than my current approach of using JSON.
• But this API seems to be completely broken?
• I filed a bug:
• https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/49430
• Received some feedback on how Godot’s object serialization should work.
• Learned about Godot's contribution model, and opened a few pull-requests.
• Looked into how to contribute to the Godot engine and documentation codebases.
• Created a series of pull requests to make changes to various Godot docs to better describe object serialization.
• https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/49470
• https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/pull/4976
• https://github.com/godotengine/godot-docs/pull/4977
• Responded to comments on my various Godot pull-requests, and made corrections to my documentation.
• Created a secret README for my GitHub profile.
• https://towardsdatascience.com/build-a-stunning-readme-for-your-github-profile-9b80434fe5d7
• Clean up MovementParams flag names and doc comments.
• Increase preselection-update throttle periods and move them to SurfacerConfig.
• My Godot Asset Library submissions were approved:
• Scaffolder:
• https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/969
• Surfacer:
• https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/968
• Send an Analytics event when platform-graph load ends, and include how long the load took.
• Adjust new-nav-pulse-duration to be longer and less dependent on the length of the path.
• Add a dynamic surface-exclusion-list to platform graphs.
• This can be used to simulate adding/removing surfaces at runtime.
• Fix some issues with overly strict trajectory re-calculation checks.
• Create a new godot-bootstrap project that only includes the bare minimum for a fully-working usage of Scaffolder+Surfacer.
• This served as a general-purpose starting-off point for my GMTK project.

What's next?

• I have a small list of fixes I'd like to make to my game jam game.
• These changes won't count for the game jam judging, but they will be nice for anyone who finds my game in the future.
• These are mostly fixes that are needed in the underlying Scaffolder and Surfacer frameworks anyway.
• Rate other GMTK games.
• Finish updating and merging my Godot documentation pull requests.
• A few more small fixes to my Surfacer framework.
• Then I think it'll finally be time to start making a handful of small games with Surfacer!
• I suspect I won't actually get this far until next week.

🎉 Cheers!