Post by KaiClavier in Unusably slow

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Hello,

This is something I've wanted to optimize for a while - but STM was originally made for flashy dialogue boxes and small UI elements, leaving large paragraphs a bit of an afterthought - I already have a working fix though! Look for STMPagination in the sample scenes - you can use this to have one STM object automatically flow into the next - even with reading effects. Splitting up the work between multiple meshes (e.g. one per line for a page) seems to work well for keeping performance up in this circumstance.

So... will keep thinking on more optimizations to my code, but the pagination script works for this scenario!

-Kai

Neon Specter89 days ago

Hi,

Thanks for the quick response. So I would have to have a bunch of separate texts then to work around this issue? I'm afraid that's not really a great solution, even if I only have to manage the text property of one of them.

My use case here is tutorials - where it would be quite helpful to have rich text formatting for headers, lists, and etc. This is a really heavy performance hit for a text object... would it be possible to add a toggle to disable whatever is causing the slowdown in the editor for this use case (no animations needed)?

I bought this asset to replace my own buggy rich text system (as well as for some other features), so I know that this is feasible without noticeably affecting editor performance. Ideally you'd want to avoid ExecuteInEditMode entirely (there are more than performance concerns with this) and rely on OnInspectorGUI instead - making playing animations in edit mode optional.

KaiClavier89 days ago

I really should make an auto-pagination prefab for this already now that I think about it... Or extend the pagination component so there's a button that easily adds an STM object and automatically adjusts line spacing/size... Adding that to the to-do list for sure!

And yes, there is a "disableAnimatedText" boolean that can be checked, which will disable all animated effects., and a mesh shouldn't update in the way it does for animations without any applied. That's why I'm suggesting splitting it up into lines, that way you can have some effects without needing the entire mesh to rebuild.

A toggle for animations in edit mode is a great idea actually, I can add that to the settings for the next update! The inspector itself has a lot of overhead for large blocks of text too, sometimes performance can increase by inspecting something else. (Will need to look into this again, but I could swear this was something I couldn't work around short of a toggle to hide the text field)

Neon Specter88 days ago

On paper this asset solves all of my text problems, so I'd really like to make it work - but it starts chugging with as few as 100 characters; essentially meaning I'd need a new object for every sentence or two. I don't really consider that to be usable.

I don't mean to criticize your code (I haven't even looked at it yet), but I feel like something is being done very wrong for it to perform this badly and you either need to find out what that something is, or separate out some of the more expensive functionality - enabling it only if it's used. I understand that Unity's own editor code is often very poorly optimized, but there are definitely ways to work around that.

Now, as for a prefab: if it's something that allows me to set a single text area (rect where text appears) and then automatically creates STM objects as needed, I would consider that to be a satisfactory workaround. I don't want to have to micro-manage a bunch of separate text areas though.

If you could do that relatively soon (next few weeks), it would work for me - ideally also committing to fix the underlying performance issues at some point. If not, I don't think the asset will work for me and I'd need a refund, as I don't think it currently meets the lightweight performance claims.

KaiClavier88 days ago

Unity's own inspector doesn't even support RTL text, ligatures, or Emoji, (I've already made packages for fixing these in-editor, but the inspector's text areas seem untouchable... Look up any "how to type RTL text in Unity Editor" question and every answer involves typing LTR and fixing it in post) so I don't think any optimization has been done on it in the last 10 years either... I'm thinking of ways to optimize this right now and everything just hits a roadblock besides hiding the text field itself. The unity editor just introduces a lot of overhead typically.

I'll write the multiline auto-pagination script asap (that would be a really good sample script for a common use-case, I want to make it) and see what can be done in terms of optimization for large fields of text on their own, but there's only so much that can be done with hundreds of Vector3s being updated on a CPU-bound mesh every frame. Splitting it into separate coroutines like the multi-mesh solution could be a good hint towards that though, if I get a free week sometime I would love to mess around with that. (e.g. instead of one coroutine for reading a mesh/maintaining animations, maybe a coroutine for each character could perform better...? Will need to test)

I originally developed STM on a 2009 macbook pro, then a 2017 mid-range windows laptop, so I'll admit I'm a bit curious about your system specs! I really do enjoy optimization, but it was consuming my life years ago, so my approach is now "if this ran fine on a 2017 iPhone, it'll be fine on anything now", haha. That said, it's been a while since I've done a peer code review, so I may pay a friend to look over my code to see if I missed anything. A couple features were added in the last few years, so maybe something got left out.

I'll take no offence to a refund, all that matters is getting your game done in a timely matter... I spent the better part of this last decade developing STM to save other developers' time, but I just can't pour quite as much into it anymore between contract work and personal life... but I will see what I can do over the weekend! STM is my baby, I want to make sure it 's still working as it should.

Neon Specter88 days ago

I'm running on a Ryzen 5600X and CPU utilization is low with none of the cores maxed out - so it's clearly a bottleneck somewhere. On further testing I've found that it only becomes unusable when working with prefabs.

If I drop a prefab into the scene and unpack it, I can have over 1000 characters and it's super laggy but doesn't lock up the editor. If I leave it as a prefab every change takes 15-60 seconds (Unity pops up the "Hold on" window with STM's OnInspectorGUI and Unity's save scene and import assets taking the the longest). Multiple changes also get queued (like dragging to select a color from the color palette), which can lock up unity for several minutes at a time.

I tried creating completely new prefabs to test this and got the exact same behavior - it's at least 20x slower when working with prefabs. It doesn't matter if I'm working with a prefab in the scene or in prefab mode.

KaiClavier88 days ago

Huh okay that's interesting - not at all the issue I thought that was happening at all if there's a difference inside and outside of prefabs.

It could be something with a newer version of Unity forcing some editor code to be called more than it should (There shouldn't be a difference at all when editing the color value of a mesh inside and outside of a prefab), so will have to look into that for sure. I'm getting a few ideas already but will need to test them myself to see if they make a difference and don't break anything else. (Marking the textMesh variable as nonserialized is the first thing I'm going to try, but it should not be taking 15-60 seconds to save a 4k vert mesh on any CPU from the last decade regardless...?)

One guess I have that you can try is... is auto-save enabled in the prefab editor? Not sure if it would make a huge difference if it's somehow taking 15-60 seconds at any point, but that would force a save every time a value updates and force other instances to update too which could be a lot if done every single frame.

So will experiment with this soon! Sorry for the trouble.

Neon Specter88 days ago (3 edits)

I tried turning off auto save and it doesn't really make a difference (it happens both in prefab mode and in scene mode when working with prefabs). I made two more strange observations:

1. The slowdown seems to heavily depend on the text content. If I copy/paste "Hello World!" over and over it performs better and I can get about twice as many characters before it slows down to the same level as my tutorial text (which is ~900 characters). The tutorial text is just plain English text, nothing fancy.

2. With the repeated text prefab, If I save the prefab and then drop it into the scene I get the laggy, but still usable behavior; however, the moment I touch the actual text, it turns bold (in the inspector window) and starts locking up unity.

Note that when I say "usable", I mean I can edit the text settings. It's still pretty unusable for typing text into the text box.

EDIT: I'm also noticing that after recompiling Unity takes over a minute to import any prefabs that have a STM object (but only if they're in the scene). I also tried making the text mesh non-serialized and it made no difference.

KaiClavier86 days ago

Ok, update...

First, Is this the type of setup you're describing? I'm trying this in an old Unity version (My main development project for STM) so it could be something unique to a newer version, but I just want to see if I'm on the same page or not:

The bit of lag I see here seems typical for multiple prefabs getting edited, but from what you described you're seeing something a bit more than this, so is this type of setup correct, but just with a *lot* more text? Additionally, I tried this both inside and outside of Unity UI and didn't see a difference in UI text - if anything, the UI text had better performance than the above gif? So will try in Unity 6 soon.

Second, I went ahead and wrote the auto pagination script, but I don't actually see a visible performance boost on my end vs. just editing a normal text mesh, but I'm going to share it regardless:

https://pastebin.com/UReTwUEf

You just attach this as a component to an STM object and it sets up others like this:

There's an option to automatically grab the amount of lines from the text mesh, redo the layout if the amount of lines changes, and the amount of lines each STM object will render. It's useful, but I unfortunately don't think it'll be the answer to this problem just yet. Worth a shot, though.

So I will try it in Unity 6 soon, but I want to make sure I'm understanding the problem correctly as I'm not seeing any locking up on my end just yet? I feel like I must be missing something obvious, sorry I've been bouncing between so many different projects and I might be getting stuff mixed up.

Neon Specter86 days ago

I'm getting strange results when testing. If I drop a prefab with a moderate amount of text into the scene, I get "normal" lag until I edit the text, at which point it starts locking up. Then if I unpack the prefab, it's back to normal. The more text I add to the prefab (beyond the amount initially there), the slower it gets. I recorded a video demonstrating this - do you have a support email I can send it to?

The one consistent thing is: whenever the text in the STM text box turns bold, it starts locking up unity. When I edit the text as described above, it turns bold and this happens. For my tutorial prefab, I notice it's already bold when I try to edit it, meaning everything is super slow right from the start (even just opening it in prefab mode).

As for the auto pagination script: I couldn't get it to work. If I set it to auto it does nothing. If I click manual setup, it creates one empty STM object. I couldn't get it to overflow text into other objects no matter how much text I added.

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