Store data/objects in memory efficiently (GDScript)

Niiclas

Hi, I'm currently working on a project where I need to store data in a 2D grid. First I created a simple class that only contains a single integer value and stored multiple objects of it inside an 1D array. What I found out was, that a single object of that class already needs 712 bytes of memory to be saved, while a normal integer only needs 4 bytes. So that class already takes up 708 bytes in memory, which is way too much for me, because a small 2D grid of 100x100 would then already take 7.12 mb of memory.

My goal is to create an array with multiple objects, that look like this:

Object: var id : int var name : String var pos : Vector2

Without creating multiple pools, like:

var ids = PoolIntArray() var names = PoolStringArray() var positions = PoolVector2Array()

Is there another way? Please let me know. Thanks, Niclas.

Bimbam

How are you getting that byte value out of curiosity? I dabbled with get_static_memory_usage() but found the results were inconsistent. Also I would not be so sure an int is 4 bytes for a dynamically typed language, as I believe an Int is still a variant and therefore has a minimum size of 20bytes (28 in Python). For more serious memory optimisations you will probably want to look at C# (which I know next to nothing about).

As for a broader answer, I am an OOP hater so forgive me (I use nodes as classes, no classes within nodes), but is there any reason you can't do this with a list of dicts? I imagine this would have a lighter overhead (albeit an empty dict will also have a cost)?

Niiclas

I know that my numbers are not totally accurate, but this is the way I got them: In my main scene I have a label that shows the current memory usage (OS.get_static_memory_usage()). When I let the program run without that array of objects, I get ~27.56 mb of memory (due to sprites, etc.). When I run the program with an array of 100,000 of these objects, I get ~97.61 mb.

That means that the objects take up ~70.05 mb. So one object is ~705 bytes. And that value is pretty much consistent.

When I do the same steps with a PoolIntArray instead, I get a value of ~4 bytes per element (per integer).

The problem of an dictionary is that it also increases the size of an simple integer, because (as you already mentioned) GDScript is dynamically typed.

But if there is no other way to reduce the size of a class object, I have no problem of using multiple pools of values, there is just more to care about and in the end I would just prefer classes but don't need them necessarily.