Hello,<\/p>\n
I’m developing an XNA game for Xbox and PC, and about half-way through my development cycle I realised I had a problem with memory allocation – or more precisely, with garbage collection.<\/p>\n
Garbage Collection (GC) occurs when the XNA framework determines that you have allocated and freed a certain amount of memory (currently 1MB), and attempts to return the freed memory to the system so it can be re-used. It’s a useful and elegant system that makes creating software easy and fun. However, when it comes to performance, especially on the Xbox, it might bite you in the ass. A single garbage collection can cause a stutter in your application, and if this is happening multiple times per second, it’s going to make your app unusable.<\/p>\n
So I went through my game and removed all the unnecessary allocation and freeing, and replaced it with static allocation and pools of objects to re-use.<\/p>\n
I also created this string class, which uses a static 256 char buffer. It has lots of functions for formatting text and numbers, and a function for getting a plain C# string out of it. I found it very useful… Perhaps you will too? Feel free to use it in your projects.<\/p>\n
Remember to make it a member or a static variable, don’t re-create it every frame! And don’t create a silly number of them… Every 4 will cost you (just over) 1KB of memory. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
ESPString.cs<\/a><\/p>\n ESP Games<\/a> is the name of my indie development studio (which is… \u00a0me).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello, I’m developing an XNA game for Xbox and PC, and about half-way through my development cycle I realised I had a problem with memory allocation – or more precisely, with garbage collection. Garbage Collection (GC) occurs when the XNA framework determines that you have allocated and freed a certain amount of memory (currently 1MB), … Continue reading XNA Allocation-free string class<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[29,30,28,27,26,25],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","tag-allocation","tag-games-development","tag-garbage-collection","tag-string","tag-xbox","tag-xna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions\/188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidaddis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}