Unity3d onSomeEvent() vs update() performance - unity3d

I've been using Unity3D lately, and soon I discovered thorugh multiple topics online that using OnMouseUp event is much slower than checking for mouse clicks on the update() function. Can someone explain why is that?
Is that also valid for other on functions like OnTriggerExit2D and others? As a design pattern, should I abandon the on() functions completely and only catch events on Update()?

I prefer neither of them but use the 'new' (since 4.6) Unity Event system when possible. In short you have to implement the appropriate handler interface like IPointerClickHandler.
I recommend to have a look at the Events tutorials, for example UI Events and Event Triggers. Note that although this tutorial is focussed on 2D, you can use the event system in 3D as well. You just need to add a Raycaster to your camera.

Agreed with the previous answer but as a reason to WHY the "On" functions are so much more inefficient lies in how they function.
How does unity know that an "OnMouseUp" event has fired? The mouse object would need to have an event handler attached to it that knows to fire the OnMouseUp event. Beyond that something would need to listen every single frame for that event and then run the required code. Also the OnEvent functions tend to get very dispersed because you could in theory have the same event in multiple different functions/classes.
I think the update method in general is a more efficient way to check, because there is a lot less overhead involved when you handle these things yourself.
tldr: There's more overhead involved in using the "On" events instead of in "Update"

Related

Event Types In Unity Scripting

i just wanna start to codding more clean and dynamic codes and i start to learn "events" but im so confused about events because all videos show different things 0.0 did i understand wrong or there are three types of events ? i mean
c# event
unity events
game events
if i understand true this all different event systems right ? and i can use which i want, and i should spesific.
i hope i understand right can someone explain shortly ? if i understand right just can say yes :)
There are UnityEvents. Usually AddListener(YourFunction)
There are Unity Events (meta, haha!)
There is an official Unity Tutorial on C# Events. Usually with the += operator: .OnClicked += YourFunction;
There is an Event System for the "Unity UI 1.0.0" Package, but there is also still the old Event System for Ui/Canvas interaction (until Unity 2018?).
There is the Event System for UI inside of Unity, if you want to build an Editor Tool, to paint prefabs in the Scene for example.
The "old" Input System (Input.GetKeyDown("Space")) is also an Event System.
But there is also a still optional, new Input System Package that handles local Coop (multiple Controllers) a bit better. You can only use one at a time. (You have to switch form one to the other in Settings)
As you can see, there a a lot of Event Systems. You can write your own, if that is required for a Task. Event Systems are a general way to handle changes without polling and comparing values every frame, but listening to changes and occurances.

How to add an Event object to Unity's EventSystem

If I have an event from Event.current and I want to 'replay' it by making the event system process it again, how do I do that? Can I access the scripts responsible for raising events?
You might be able to track down how events are created using IL Spy then use reflection to invoke that, but unfortunately there is no public API for creating events manually.
I found a neat C# library which simulates input called Windows Input Simulator which does a good job of raising all the keyboard events I needed. Looks like it also works for things like mouse input!

PureScript Halogen How to create an event which fires every frame?

I need to do specific animation in Halogen.Each frame should be asked to update the state in order to properly draw each step. Is there any subscription mechanism for such cases? I tried to use FRP.Event.TIme, but I do not understand how to raise queries from the subscribe function.
This SO answer gives an excellent explanation of how subscribing to event sources works in Halogen. The type signatures are tricky so it's worth taking the time to study that answer.
I would only add that you might need to use a lifecycleComponent in order to initialize the subscription.

Why do we need event.stopPropagation() in DOM? Is it bad architectural pattern?

In the everyday front-end development I often use DOM as a global event bus that is accessible to every part of my client-side application.
But there is one "feature" in it, that can be considered harmful, in my opinion: any listener can prevent propagation of an event emitted via this "bus".
So, I'm wondering, when this feature can be helpful. Is it wise to allow one listener to "disable" all the other? What if that listener does not have all information needed to make right decision about such action?
Upd
This is not a question about "what is bubbling and capturing", or "how Event.stopPropagation actually works".
This is question about "Is this good solution, to allow any subscriber to affect an event flow"?
We need (I am talking about current usage in JS) stopPropagation() when we want to prevent listeners to interfere with each other. However, it is not mandatory to do so.
Actual reasons to avoid stopPropagation:
Using it usually means that you are aware of code waiting for the same event, and interfering with what the current listener does. If it is the case, then there may (see below) be a design problem here. We try to avoid managing a single thing at multiple different places.
There may be other listeners waiting for the same type of event, while not interfering with what the current listener does. In this case, stopPropagation() may become a problem.
But let's say that you put a magic listener on a container-element, fired on every click to perform some magic. The magic listener only knows about magic, not about the document (at least not before its magic). It does one thing. In this case, it is a good design choice to leave it knowing only magic.
If one day you need to prevent clicks in a particular zone from firing this magic, as it is bad to expose document-specific distinctions to the magic listener, then it is wise to prevent propagation elsewhere.
An even better solution though might be (I think) to have a single listener which decides if it needs to call the magic function or not, instead of the magic function being a stoppable listener. This way you keep a clean logic while exposing nothing.
To provide (I am talking about API design) a way for subscribers to affect the flow is not wrong; it depends on the needs behing this feature. It might be useful to the developers using it. For example, stopPropagation has been (and is) quite useful for lots of people.
Some systems implement a continueX method instead of stopX. In JavaScript, it is very useful when the callees may perform some asynchronous processing like an AJA* request. However, it is not appliable to the DOM, as the DOM needs results in time. I see stopPropagation as a clever design choice for the DOM API.

Why is a "main" game loop necessary for developing a game?

I find that most game development requires a main game loop, but I don't know why it's necessary. Couldn't we implement an event listener and respond to every user action? Animations (etc.) could then be played when a event occurs.
What is the purpose of a main game loop?
The argument that you "need a loop because otherwise what calls the event listener" does not hold water. Admittedly on any mainstream OS, you do indeed have such a loop, and event listeners do work that way, but it is entirely possible to make an interrupt driven system that works without any loops of any kind.
But you still would not want to structure a game that way.
The thing that makes a loop the most appealing solution is that your loop becomes what in real-time programming is referred to as a 'cyclic executive'. The idea is that you can make the relative execution rates of the various system activities deterministic with respect to one another. The overall rate of the loop may be controlled by a timer, and that timer may ultimately be an interrupt, but with modern OS's, you will likely see evidence of that interrupt as code that waits for a semaphore (or some other synchronization mechanism) as part of your "main loop".
So why do you want deterministic behavior? Consider the relative rates of processing of your user's inputs and the baddies AIs. If you put everything into a purely event based system, there's no guarantee that the AIs won't get more CPU time than your user, or the other way round, unless you have some control over thread priorities, and even then, you're apt to have difficulty keeping timing consistent.
Put everything in a loop, however, and you guarantee that your AIs time-lines are going to proceed in fixed relationship with respect to your user's time. This is accomplished by making a call out from your loop to give the AIs a timeslice in which to decide what to do, a call out to your user input routines, to poll the input devices to find out how your user wants to behave, and call out to do your rendering.
With such a loop, you have to watch that you are not taking more time processing each pass than actually goes by in real time. If you're trying to cycle your loop at 100Hz, all your loop's processing had better finish up in under 10msec, otherwise your system is going to get jerky. In real-time programming, it's called overrunning your time frame. A good system will let you monitor how close you are to overrunning, and you can then mitigate the processing load however you see fit.
An event listener is also dependent on some invocation loop whether you see it or not. Who else is going to call the listener?
Building an explicit game loop gives you absolute control on what's going on so you won't be dependent on whatever some toolkit/event handling library does in its event loop.
A game loop (highly simplified is as follows)
initialise
do
input
update
render
loop
clean up
This will happen every frame the game is drawn. So for games that run at 60fps the above is performed sixty times every second.
This means the game runs smoothly, the game stays in sync and the updates/draws per cycle happen frequently enough. Animation is simply a trick of the eye, objects move between locations but when played quickly enough they appear to be travelling between these locations.
If you were to only update on user input, the game would only react when the user was providing input. Other game components such as A.I game objects would not react on their own. A loop is therefore the easiest and best way of updating a game.
It's not true that all kind of games require a dedicated main game loop.
Action games need such a loop due to frequent object updates and game input precision.
On the other hand, I implemented a minesweeper game and I used window
messages for the notifications.
It's because current operating systems aren't fully event based. Even though things are often represented as events, you'll still have to create a loop where you wait for the next event and process it indefinitely (as an example the Windows event loop). Unix signals are probably the closest thing you get to events on an OS level, but they're not really efficient enough for things like this.
In practical terms, as other people have indicated, a loop is needed.
However, your idea is theoretically sound. You don't need a loop. You need event-based operations.
At a simple level, you can conceptualize the CPU to have a several timers;
one fires on the rising edge of 60Hz and calls the blitting code.
Another might be ticking at 60kHz and be rendering the latest updates of the objects in the game world to the blitter buffer.
Another might be ticking at 10kHz and be taking input from the user. (pretty high resolution, lol)
Another might be the game 'heartbeat' and ticks at 60MHz; AI and physics might operate at heartbeat time.
Of course these timers can be tuned.
Practically, what would be happening is your would be (somewhat elided) like this:
void int_handler1();
//...
int main()
{
//install interrupt handlers
//configure settings
while(1);
}
The nature of games is that they're typically simulations, and are not just reacting based on external events but on internal processes as well. You could represent these internal processes by recurring events instead of polling, but they're practically equivalent:
schedule(updateEvent, 33ms)
function updateEvent:
for monster in game:
monster.update()
render()
vs:
while 1:
for monster in game:
monster.update()
wait(33ms)
render()
Interestingly, pyglet implements the event-based method instead of the more traditional loop. And while this works well a lot of the time, sometimes it causes performance problems or unpredictable behaviour caused by the clock resolution, vsync, etc. The loop is more predictable and easier to understand (unless you come from an exclusively web programming background, perhaps).
Any program that can just sit there indefinitely and respond to user's input needs some kind of loop. Otherwise it will just reach the end of program and will exit.
The main loop calls the event listener. If you are lucky enough to have an event-driven operating system or window manager, the event loop resides there. Otherwise, you write a main loop to mediate the "impedance mismatch" between an system-call interfaces that is based on I/O, poll, or select, and a traditional event-driven application.
P.S. Since you tagged your question with functional-programming, you might want to check out Functional Reactive Programming, which does a great job connecting high-level abstractions to low-level, event-based implementations.
A game needs to run in real-time, so it works best if it is running on one CPU/core continuously. An event-driven application will typically yield the CPU to another thread when there is no event in the queue. There may be a considerable wait before the CPU switches back to your process. In a game, this would mean brief stalls and jittery animation.
Two reasons -
Even event driven systems usually need a loop of some kind that reads events from a queue of some kind and dispatches them to a handler so you end up with an event loop in windows for example anyway and might was well extend it.
For the purposes of animation you'd need to handle some kind of even for every frame of the animation. You could certainly do this with a timer or some kind of idle event, but you'd probably end up creating those in some kind of loop anyway so it's just easier to use the loop
directly.
I've seen systems that do handle it all using events, they have a frame listener that listens to an event dispatched at the start of each frame. They still have a tiny game loop internally but it does little more than handle windowing system events, and create frame events,