To yield or not to yield? THAT is the question?

SynapticBytes

yield - wait for next invocation of main engine loop (e.g., next frame in a game)

That is the definition of yield from the MiniScript manual, and from what I know of Unity, it's essentially a "stop executing here until the next frame", which matches your description, so I think I'm good there. The question is, do we really need to use it in MiniScript (or more specifically, MiniMicro)?

In Unity, where you may be using co-routines, yield makes sense to give other threads a chance to run. But since MiniScript doesn't (natively) allow co-routines, do we still need to yield for any behind-the-scene processes to run?

My game was naively yielding at the end of each game loop as I wasn't having any performance problems. Now that I'm implementing my own game tick system and have started analysing what "frame rate" I can run my game ticks at, I realised the yield statement I was using was throttling my code to 60 TPS (ticks per second), which I guess is the target frame rate for the graphics engine, which normally wouldn't be a problem, but as I was trying game tick values between 10-100 fps , and the yield was adding onto the time per tick, I was seeing very poor game tick rates.

When I removed the yield, I can get about 500 TPS.

I know if I embedded MiniScript in my own project, maybe I would implement something that would benefit from a yield command, but the crux of the question is, in MiniMicro, is the yield command there for our benefit, or yours? Can we ignore it if we don't need it?

Thanks. Russell.

SynapticBytes

Some more investigation shows some of my information above may not be totally correct, as the deciding factor is what graphics operations you are doing. So the practical limit on my tick speed may be the frame rate anyway, but still, the question remains.

Russell.

jstrout

I use yield in the main loop of my own games all the time. It is indeed tied to the refresh rate of the display, and in most cases, there is no point in moving your graphics around faster than the display is going to update, since nobody could see it anyway.

When doing an animation for example, if you don't either yield or wait, then often the animation will be too fast for the user to see. Of the two, yield is probably preferable, since it results in updating the sprite or whatever on every frame, which is hard to do cleanly with wait.

That said, if you have some reason to want to go faster, by all means don't yield. E.g. in a Mandlebrot generator, you want to crunch those numbers as fast as you possibly can, and the display can update whenever it darn well wants. So I wouldn't use yield in this case.