Skip to main content

Godot (GDScript) Memory Management

I've been working with the cocos2d-x engine for a while and have gotten used to one of the important features in the engine.. the autorelease().

It's basically a reference counting implementation which automatically deletes any object that is removed from a scene. Unless ofcourse you called a retain on it. So when i was working on DotDot a simple 2D game, i created a crosshair animation everytime the user got a perfect alignment and removed the object once the animation was done. It worked great and for a while i assumed that everything was fine.

I was showing off the game to people on my android device when i started noticing slowdowns once in a while.. and as the score got higher it got worse.. surely the engines' fault i assumed.. but then i thought ill' give Godot the benefit of doubt and checked the documentation about freeing the memory. That is when i discovered that the objects removed from the scene are not actually removed from memory. Basically every time i did a perfect align in the game i was leaking memory. I used the inbuilt profiler to try and figure out which object was getting left out in the memory and it was the cross hair object.

So how do we get around this problem?.. Ideally we should be maintaining a pool of the objects and changing position / re animating the object.. but for the game it wasn't that important. I chose the method of creating / destroying the object instead and for this to work i had to use "queue_free()" call in the "_exit_tree()" which is called when the node is removed from tree.

Hope this helps anyone trying to do something similar, this was definitely a big miss and could become a problem if you miss it :)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Vehicle Physics (Godot 2D)

I've always been fascinated with the vehicle physics used in games. I played so many racing games / the hill climb games and every single time i would wonder wow that must be really hard to do. Thanks to the new generation of game development tools, developing physics based games has become almost a second nature to most people. I didn't want to be left out so i gave it a shot.. I tried setting up vehicle physics in GoDot Engine for a 2D vehicle. Here is what the vehicle scene looks like.. 2D vehicle setup in GoDot As you can see the body collision shape is not right but the rest of the stuff just works. The idea is simple think of what parts move along with the body vs what doesn't. I was kinda stuck setting up the pinJoint2D in GoDot, it actually clearly takes two nodes under the properties. This makes sure that the wheels are hinged to the DampingSpring2D. The Damping Spring2D takes two physics bodies(Body and the PinJoint2D) and makes it work like shock ab

Epic Games Store on Steam Deck

EGS ( Epic Games Store ) like it or hate it, has been giving away free games and if you like free games you would have picked up atleast a couple of them. So given that some of those games are Deck Verified / Playable, its fair to assume you would like to install the EGS on the Deck.  Installing EGS on Steam Deck Switch to Desktop Mode on your Steam Deck Download the EGS installer for windows from the Epic Store website: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/download (using your web browser of choice)      Open Steam in the desktop mode and add the installer as a non-steam game                                In the browse window, switch from .desktop files to All files. Select EpicInstaller-xxx.msi and add it to steam library. Find EpicInstaller in your steam library and open its' properties by hitting the "Gear" icon on the right side of game details page. Set the proton compatibility to latest one. Now hit the play button and go through the install screens of EGS.  Once t

Flash animations in GoDot Engine

If you have not heard about GoDot game engine,.. you should check it out right away.. godotengine.org Last time, i wrote a blog post about my experience making a simple physics game to GoDot Engine. Though there are a bunch of free options announced during the GDC this year, i thought ill' contribute to the engine. The one piece that is most important for game dev is the pipeline for the engine. One of the most common tools used for 2D animations is Flash. I have been using a library called Super Animation for almost all the games we've made for android at TMG. It's  a  free tool which lets you convert swf files to .sam files. This file can then be loaded in Cocos2Dx using the Open source loader library  https://github.com/raymondlu/super-animation-samples I thought it would be a good idea to port this cpp library to GoDot so that i understand how to write custom modules for the engine. This is the video of the module in action. I have exposed