This commit contains a number of performance improvements for the
BGE in the Scenegraph (parent relation between objects in the
scene) and view frustrum culling.
The scenegraph improvement consists in avoiding position update
if the object has not moved since last update and the removal
of redundant updates and synchronization with the physics engine.
The view frustrum culling improvement consists in using the DBVT
broadphase facility of Bullet to build a tree of graphical objects
in the scene. The elements of the tree are Aabb boxes (Aligned
Axis Bounding Boxes) enclosing the objects. This provides good
precision in closed and opened scenes. This new culling system
is enabled by default but just in case, it can be disabled with
a button in the World settings. There is no do_version in this
commit but it will be added before the 2.49 release. For now you
must manually enable the DBVT culling option in World settings
when you open an old file.
The above improvements speed up scenegraph and culling up to 5x.
However, this performance improvement is only visible when
you have hundreds or thousands of objects.
The main interest of the DBVT tree is to allow easy occlusion
culling and automatic LOD system. This will be the object of further
improvements.
This situation corresponds to a group containing only a portion
of a parent hierarchy (the Apricot team needed that to avoid
logic duplication). The BGE will instantiate only the
children that are in the group so that it follows the 3D view
more closely.
As a result, the logic links to the objects in the portion of the
hierarchy that was not replicated will point to inactive objects
(if the groups are stored in inactive layers as they should be).
To keep the logic system consistent, these links are automatically
removed.
This last part of the patch is a general fix that could go in
2.47 but as this situation does not normally occurs in pre-2.47
games, it is not needed.
Profiling revealed that the SceneGraph updated every physics object, whether it moved or not, even though the physics object was at the right place. This would cause SOLID to go and update its bounding boxes, overlap tests etc.
This callback handles the special case (parented objects) where the physics scene needs to be informed of changes to the scenegraph.
Added Python attributes (mass, parent, visible, position, orientation, scaling) to the KX_GameObject module.
Make KX_GameObject use the KX_PyMath Python <-> Moto conversion.
