Daggerfall Mod:DFRemake/DarkBasic Issues

This page lists various challenges related to DarkBasic.

Outstanding Issues

Slow Delete Object 

The DELETE OBJECT command is hideously slow. For example, deleting 670 dungeon objects takes 14 seconds in v5.8, which is actually much faster than in v5.7 but still slow compared to the 0.5 seconds it takes to load and create a dungeon. Note that EXCLUDE OBJECT ON suffers the same slowness but HIDE OBJECT does not (0.5 ms for 670 objects).

There are a few solutions to this we can consider:

• Suffer the speed penalty and hope it gets fixed in future DB updates. This has the disadvantage of increasing dungeon loading times from almost instant to very slow.
• Don't delete objects, just hide them. This works in the short term, but in the long term the number of undeleted, hidden objects may have significant performance and resource implications.
• Delete objects slowly as time permits. This has the potential to slow down frame rates, even if only one object is deleted a frame since the time per DELETE OBJECT seems to vary greatly in 5.8 (0.2 to 200 ms for example).
• Re-use unneeded objects, either with CHANGE MESH or with the new manipulation commands added in 5.8. This is a good option since we already manipulate object data directly, but it remains to be seen exactly how possible it is to implement.