Profiler

[problemecium]

I sure hope I didn't miss somewhere that this got suggested already, as usual, because as soon as I thought of this it seemed like an obvious thing for someone to have suggested. ANYWAY.

Software like the Unity Engine and Minecraft have "profilers" or "debug screens" which show nifty graphs of what the game is doing every frame so that users can diagnose where the lag is coming from:

In Minecraft's case there is a nice pie graph on the side with sectors illustrating how much of each frame is being used on lighting, rendering, terrain generation, etc.

In the Unity Engine's case there is a very snazzy stacked line graph and a clickable list of which tasks are occupying the most processing power.

Long story short I want SQUAD to add something akin to one or both of these to KSP. I'd ask a modder to do it, but the low-level nature of a profiler screen makes it the kind of thing that the original developers would have a much easier time implementing, assuming it's even possible for a modder to do it at all. It doesn't need to be quite as fancy as Unity's, but I feel like a few profiler features would be very useful, e.g.:
- How many milliseconds per frame are being spent on aero and thermal FX
- How many milliseconds are being spent on part physics and traversing the vessel part tree
- How many milliseconds are spent waiting for the GPU to render pretty pixels.

This would help out a lot of people who can't tell whether their game is truly CPU- or GPU-bound and find the optimal balance of rendering quality, physics fidelity, and vessel complexity (can I REALLY handle an EVE or Scatterer installation?), and with any luck help cut down on the number of threads going "I have a [crap processor] and a [pwntastic GPU] and [large amount] of RAM, why is KSP unplayable?"

If some L33t pr0 modder thinks s/he can handle this, by all means go ahead, but I suspect it's a task better suited to those in possession of the KSP source code and scene files.

[Alshain]

Don't take this the wrong way, but that would be a lot development for them to put in a tool for the user to use that only developer really needs.

Why would you need this information? Unless you have the KSP source code you can't really do much about it.

Sure it might be neat to see if they could get it in easily, but that isn't likely.  The one in minecraft exists because the developers needed it, since Java doesn't really provide it.  However, the KSP developers use the one in Unity, they don't need it in the game.

Edited May 3, 2017 by Alshain

[TheRagingIrishman]

@problemecium it is possible to set up an in game profiler

Edited May 24, 2017 by TheRagingIrishman

[pizzaoverhead]

Sarbain has also released this mod for graphing memory usage in-game: