Lightning Fast Generation
Procedural generation can be sloooow. But with some clever tricks, you can prevent this reality from bogging down your players.
Multithreading your Renderers and Chunk Loaders
Multithreading allows code to run parallel to the main thread of your game, meaning it won't interrupt your gameplay while doing heavy, complicated work. From the player's perspective, offloading work from the main thread can fix stuttering, lag, and freezes.
The issues multithreading aims to solve scale with the amount of work that needs to be done as well as how often. Large world or chunk sizes, large resolutions, frequent refresh rates, and the use of multiple generation passes or modifiers are examples of heavy, complicated work.
Threaded Tilemap and Gridmap Renderers
Gaea offers 2 renderers with threaded variants, the TileMapRenderer and the GridMapRenderer; they are called ThreadedTileMapRenderer and ThreadedGridMapRenderer. These threaded variants are an answer to lag and stuttering that comes from drawing many tile changes to the screen all at once.
These threaded renderers will also render multiple chunks in parallel (at the same time) when used alongside a Chunk Loader. This means threaded renderers can render the same amount of chunks in a shorter amount of time compared to an unthreaded one.
As such, ThreadedRenderers have an additional parameter, task_limit. It decides the maximum number of WorkerThreadPool tasks that can be created and run concurrently. A default, negative value (-1) means there is no limit. In most cases, you'll leave the task_limit parameter at this default value.
Example
As an example, a value of 8 suggests that a maximum of 8 chunks are allowed to be rendered at one time. Any chunks sent to the renderer beyond this limit will be queued, then rendered as soon as space becomes available.
Threaded Chunk Loader
Gaea offers a threaded variant of the ChunkLoader, called ThreadedChunkLoader. This variant allows chunk data to be generated off of the main thread, a process that can cause very long freezes as entire chunks try to generate on a single frame, interupting gameplay.
Comparison
Most threaded variations include a way to toggle multi-threading on and off. This is included to debug errors that could be hidden as a result of running in a thread, as well as just for the sake of comparison.
Unthreaded chunk loader + threaded renderer (left) vs. threaded chunk loader & renderer (right).
You can see how much it stutters without threading (it even crashed later!), vs how smooth it runs with threading enabled.
It's still running poorly...
Additional optimizations include changing chunk size, the ChunkLoader's loading radius or update rate, etc.