Will Godot miss lines if you try run too many things at once?

[Darkmisc]

TL;DR Summary

I have twelve buttons that are constantly moving. Sometimes they don't do what they are supposed to when pressed. Is it because I have too many things running simultaneously?

Hi everyone

I made a game for memorising Scrabble two-letter words. When you press a tile, it lights up and a button_on variable gets set to true. If the two tiles you press form a valid two-letter word, the tiles disappear (and get replaced with new tiles). I have 12 tiles running at any given time. The left column scrolls down and the right column scrolls up.

The game runs fine for the most part, but very occasionally when you press a pair of tiles that form a valid word, the tiles will light up but not disappear. (They will disappear if you press on the tile a second time)

I suspected it was because I was running too many functions at once, and maybe the button_on=true line gets missed. All the buttons belong to the "all_buttons" group and they all have a "word_made" function that gets called when a valid word is made. I gave each button its own group (i.e. one, two, three... twelve) and instead only called functions for two buttons whenever a word was made. This made the problem appear less frequently, but didn't eliminate it.

I also tried using physics_process instead of _process, but I'm not sure if this made any difference.

Am I correct in suspecting the problem stems from running too many things at once? I tried using only ten buttons, but that didn't eliminate the problem.

I had also labelled each button (not in screenshot) and kept a track of which pairs failed to light up. I've retried those pairs and they almost always work as intended.

Am I right in guessing that I'm running too many things at once? If so, can the problem be fixed?

Thanks

 

[Filip Larsen]

Am I correct in suspecting the problem stems from running too many things at once?

That callbacks should be skipped entirely is not likely, but depending on what your are doing in your callbacks and how you implemented timed actions (GUI-thread timer or separate thread) you likely have a race conditions between button presses and timed actions. Since you say the program seems to miss clicks you may also want to look at you button enable/disable timing if you have any of those. Race conditions can in general be very subtle and difficult to pinpoint even when having the code in a debugger (because debugging usually alters the timing). The right amount of code tracing (logging when entering and leaving selected functions) may provide you with data for pinpointing the situation.

Also want to mention, that if your code firing events at a very high rate (e.g. a burst or a recursive update) you may experience a build up of events in the event queue where user interactions can get perceptively delayed.