Question

I’m working on my first game, and it works fine, but clearly needs some optimizing. Initially, I had everything running on one thread (I used the LunarLander API to get started on gaming). Since then, I’ve added 2 new threads to the game. It still works just fine, but I see no improvement. I must be doing something wrong..

This is the basic setup:

class GameView extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback {
    private Mover mover;
    private Collider collider;
    private GameThread thread;


    class Mover extends Thread{ 
            //methods
    }
    class Collider extends Thread{ 
            //methods
    }
    class GameThread extends Thread{ 
            //methods
    }

    public GameView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
            mover = new Mover();
            collider = new Collider();
            thread = new GameThread();
            thread.start();
    }

}

Then, in the GameThread class I call methods on other threads when needed:

collider.checkCollision();

Is this the proper way to reduce load on the main thread?

Answer 1

Well, until they bring out dual-core phones, multiple threads isn’t going to buy you anything in terms of performance improvements.

Multi threading can help when you’re doing I/O intensive stuff on the additional threads (because they’ll spend most of their time blocked on I/O, allowing your main thread to continue processing). But when you’ve got CPU-heavy stuff like collision-detection happening then you’re just going to have those two thread fighting for the one CPU core.