Long initial pause/freeze on mousepicking

Troubleshooting General Help
1

Hello. I’d like some advice on how to optimise my mousepicking behaviour.

When the game first loads and the player first picks something with the cursor, there’s about a 2 second pause - the game freezes - when retrieving the closest node. However, subsequent clicks are instant and work as expected.

[java]CollisionResults results = new CollisionResults();
Vector2f click2d = inputManager.getCursorPosition();
Vector3f click3d = cam.getWorldCoordinates(new Vector2f(click2d.x, click2d.y), 0f).clone();
Vector3f dir = cam.getWorldCoordinates(new Vector2f(click2d.x, click2d.y), 1f).subtractLocal(click3d).normalizeLocal();
Ray ray = new Ray(click3d, dir);
rootNode.collideWith(ray, results);
if (results.size() > 0) {
Node clickedNode = results.getClosestCollision().getGeometry().getParent(); // Long initial pause occurs here
return clickedNode;
}[/java]

Is there something I’m doing wrong or a better way to optimise this so there is no initial freeze?

2

When you first click an object, the Meshes that don’t have collision data need to generate it:
http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/javadoc/com/jme3/scene/Mesh.html#createCollisionData()

You can either do this manually right after you load it or just run a collision on the loaded models. You will get a pause either way but you might be able to spread it out at a less obvious time.

It can be done on a background thread also but only before you’ve attached it to the scene graph. So that dance is a little more complicated.

1 Like
3

Perfect, thanks. Mesh.createCollisionData() is just what I was after.