That is probably because elements with no background color don’t get rendered (or with fully transparent background color) as separate objects - container panels.
Anyway, there seems to be lots of similar problems. Maybe we need some NiftyBatchFactory? 
Redid the PTE with images instead. FPS is still near the roof.
Resized the font a bit. Unsure if it’s too big. What do you guys think?
http://www.disenthral.com/files/pte2.png
I’d turn the main font (with the Cr, Fe, etc) down a tiny bit. Other than that it looks good though.
So Nifty is actually much faster drawing an image than it is drawing a plain blank background colour? That sounds like something that @void256 might be interested in knowing as I’d have thought it should be easy to optimise…
1 Like
Yeah… One thing is sure though, it’s a whole lot easier to read. XD
For now it’ll stay that way. It takes a really long time to do these. 118 elements where each line has to be centered manually.
As for being faster drawing images, that’s mostly handled by the engine, but I agree that the combination of backgroundColor + multiple labels in many panels is very expensive to render. I can’t really tell why it’s that way though.
Nifty does not support batching due to lack of Z-order concept, essentially nifty elements drawn first should appear before elements drawn last. This requirement kills batching which requires out-of-order rendering. Right now, each element of the GUI is equivalent to 1 … N draw calls on the GPU.
With proper Z-order, we can batch the render calls. On OpenGL2, we can use a specialized shader for this purpose, making the maximum number of elements on the GUI limited by the number of textures used. So if you use 1 texture, you will have exactly 1 additional object rendered for your nifty gui … no matter how many actual elements are on screen. Performance would improve dramatically.
@void256: Perhaps you can take a look at this? I believe we talked about having undefined render order inside layers, but layers themselves still following the regular first-is-behind concept of ordering.
1 Like