Hi everyone,
I am trying to visualize some data. However, this is quite a lot of data, and jME can barely manage to keep up with it.
Do keep in mind that I started this project not knowing how much data I actually need to visualize
Data:
- About 700 ‘things’. Let’s call these things ‘network nodes’.
- Each node has about 250 connections to another node. That is a total of 178500 connections.
- Also, an update is sent every 0.01s. On every update, I must change the color of the corresponding node and probably connection(s) too.
Which adds up to ~180k objects. Hooray!
Visualisation:
- The network nodes aren’t that important; they can be displayed as low-poly spheres (I currently use
new Sphere(8,8,0.3f) - The connections should preferably be arrows. The debug arrow (com.jme3.scene.debug.Arrow), however, does not look good at large distances - the arrowhead becomes disproportionately large.
This leaves with me with ~180k objects, each with not too many vertices. Trying to display this, I get 1 fps (or at least, that’s what it displays, it’s probably lower than that).
I thought of several solutions:
- Use BatchNode
The problem is that batching probably takes forever. I tried batching ~50k objects, and it worked pretty well (my fps jumped to 43!). However, when I tried batching ~100k objects, the application froze for like, 30 seconds, and I used task manager to kill it. - Use GeometryBatchFactory
I have not tried this yet, but I imagine I get the same problems as with BatchNode. - Make some sort of custom mesh that works like BatchNode and GeometryBatchFactory, but is more customised for this particular project
I have not tried this yet, but it currently seems like the best way to go.
What are your thoughts and opinions on this? What else can I do to improve perfomance?
P.S.: The wiki says that I should not make a lot of (java) objects, keep a low geometry count, and not update too frequently - basically the exact opposite of what I’m doing right now.