# Objective
Improve performance scalability when adding new event types to a Bevy
app. Currently, just using Bevy in the default configuration, all apps
spend upwards of 100+us in the `First` schedule, every app tick,
evaluating if it should update events or not, even if events are not
being used for that particular frame, and this scales with the number of
Events registered in the app.
## Solution
As `Events::update` is guaranteed `O(1)` by just checking if a
resource's value, swapping two Vecs, and then clearing one of them, the
actual cost of running `event_update_system` is *very* cheap. The
overhead of doing system dependency injection, task scheduling ,and the
multithreaded executor outweighs the cost of running the system by a
large margin.
Create an `EventRegistry` resource that keeps a number of function
pointers that update each event. Replace the per-event type
`event_update_system` with a singular exclusive system uses the
`EventRegistry` to update all events instead. Update `SubApp::add_event`
to use `EventRegistry` instead.
## Performance
This speeds reduces the cost of the `First` schedule in both many_foxes
and many_cubes by over 80%. Note this is with system spans on. The
majority of this is now context-switching costs from launching
`time_system`, which should be mostly eliminated with #12869.
![image](https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/assets/3137680/037624be-21a2-4dc2-a42f-9d0bfa3e9b4a)
The actual `event_update_system` is usually *very* short, using only a
few microseconds on average.
![image](https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/assets/3137680/01ff1689-3595-49b6-8f09-5c44bcf903e8)
---
## Changelog
TODO
## Migration Guide
TODO
---------
Co-authored-by: Josh Matthews <josh@joshmatthews.net>
Co-authored-by: Alice Cecile <alice.i.cecile@gmail.com>
# Objective
Time clamping happens consistently for apps that load non-trivial
things. While this _is_ an indicator that we should probably try to move
this work to a thread that doesn't block the Update, this is common
enough (and unactionable enough) that I think we should demote it for
now.
```
2023-10-16T18:46:14.918781Z WARN bevy_time::virt: delta time larger than maximum delta, clamping delta to 250ms and skipping 63.649253ms
2023-10-16T18:46:15.178048Z WARN bevy_time::virt: delta time larger than maximum delta, clamping delta to 250ms and skipping 1.71611ms
```
## Solution
Change `warn` to `debug` for this message
# Objective
Current `FixedTime` and `Time` have several problems. This pull aims to
fix many of them at once.
- If there is a longer pause between app updates, time will jump forward
a lot at once and fixed time will iterate on `FixedUpdate` for a large
number of steps. If the pause is merely seconds, then this will just
mean jerkiness and possible unexpected behaviour in gameplay. If the
pause is hours/days as with OS suspend, the game will appear to freeze
until it has caught up with real time.
- If calculating a fixed step takes longer than specified fixed step
period, the game will enter a death spiral where rendering each frame
takes longer and longer due to more and more fixed step updates being
run per frame and the game appears to freeze.
- There is no way to see current fixed step elapsed time inside fixed
steps. In order to track this, the game designer needs to add a custom
system inside `FixedUpdate` that calculates elapsed or step count in a
resource.
- Access to delta time inside fixed step is `FixedStep::period` rather
than `Time::delta`. This, coupled with the issue that `Time::elapsed`
isn't available at all for fixed steps, makes it that time requiring
systems are either implemented to be run in `FixedUpdate` or `Update`,
but rarely work in both.
- Fixes#8800
- Fixes#8543
- Fixes#7439
- Fixes#5692
## Solution
- Create a generic `Time<T>` clock that has no processing logic but
which can be instantiated for multiple usages. This is also exposed for
users to add custom clocks.
- Create three standard clocks, `Time<Real>`, `Time<Virtual>` and
`Time<Fixed>`, all of which contain their individual logic.
- Create one "default" clock, which is just `Time` (or `Time<()>`),
which will be overwritten from `Time<Virtual>` on each update, and
`Time<Fixed>` inside `FixedUpdate` schedule. This way systems that do
not care specifically which time they track can work both in `Update`
and `FixedUpdate` without changes and the behaviour is intuitive.
- Add `max_delta` to virtual time update, which limits how much can be
added to virtual time by a single update. This fixes both the behaviour
after a long freeze, and also the death spiral by limiting how many
fixed timestep iterations there can be per update. Possible future work
could be adding `max_accumulator` to add a sort of "leaky bucket" time
processing to possibly smooth out jumps in time while keeping frame rate
stable.
- Many minor tweaks and clarifications to the time functions and their
documentation.
## Changelog
- `Time::raw_delta()`, `Time::raw_elapsed()` and related methods are
moved to `Time<Real>::delta()` and `Time<Real>::elapsed()` and now match
`Time` API
- `FixedTime` is now `Time<Fixed>` and matches `Time` API.
- `Time<Fixed>` default timestep is now 64 Hz, or 15625 microseconds.
- `Time` inside `FixedUpdate` now reflects fixed timestep time, making
systems portable between `Update ` and `FixedUpdate`.
- `Time::pause()`, `Time::set_relative_speed()` and related methods must
now be called as `Time<Virtual>::pause()` etc.
- There is a new `max_delta` setting in `Time<Virtual>` that limits how
much the clock can jump by a single update. The default value is 0.25
seconds.
- Removed `on_fixed_timer()` condition as `on_timer()` does the right
thing inside `FixedUpdate` now.
## Migration Guide
- Change all `Res<Time>` instances that access `raw_delta()`,
`raw_elapsed()` and related methods to `Res<Time<Real>>` and `delta()`,
`elapsed()`, etc.
- Change access to `period` from `Res<FixedTime>` to `Res<Time<Fixed>>`
and use `delta()`.
- The default timestep has been changed from 60 Hz to 64 Hz. If you wish
to restore the old behaviour, use
`app.insert_resource(Time::<Fixed>::from_hz(60.0))`.
- Change `app.insert_resource(FixedTime::new(duration))` to
`app.insert_resource(Time::<Fixed>::from_duration(duration))`
- Change `app.insert_resource(FixedTime::new_from_secs(secs))` to
`app.insert_resource(Time::<Fixed>::from_seconds(secs))`
- Change `system.on_fixed_timer(duration)` to
`system.on_timer(duration)`. Timers in systems placed in `FixedUpdate`
schedule automatically use the fixed time clock.
- Change `ResMut<Time>` calls to `pause()`, `is_paused()`,
`set_relative_speed()` and related methods to `ResMut<Time<Virtual>>`
calls. The API is the same, with the exception that `relative_speed()`
will return the actual last ste relative speed, while
`effective_relative_speed()` returns 0.0 if the time is paused and
corresponds to the speed that was set when the update for the current
frame started.
## Todo
- [x] Update pull name and description
- [x] Top level documentation on usage
- [x] Fix examples
- [x] Decide on default `max_delta` value
- [x] Decide naming of the three clocks: is `Real`, `Virtual`, `Fixed`
good?
- [x] Decide if the three clock inner structures should be in prelude
- [x] Decide on best way to configure values at startup: is manually
inserting a new clock instance okay, or should there be config struct
separately?
- [x] Fix links in docs
- [x] Decide what should be public and what not
- [x] Decide how `wrap_period` should be handled when it is changed
- [x] ~~Add toggles to disable setting the clock as default?~~ No,
separate pull if needed.
- [x] Add tests
- [x] Reformat, ensure adheres to conventions etc.
- [x] Build documentation and see that it looks correct
## Contributors
Huge thanks to @alice-i-cecile and @maniwani while building this pull.
It was a shared effort!
---------
Co-authored-by: Alice Cecile <alice.i.cecile@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Cameron <51241057+maniwani@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Jerome Humbert <djeedai@gmail.com>