I have implemented a renderer for shapes described with a L-System grammar. Implementation of that is not important. Basically you feed it an angle and some rules, and it spits out a string of characters that represents instructions. For example, "+" means turn right n radians and vice versa. The instructions will only be computed once.
The job of .draw
is to read the instructions and draw it on a canvas continuously. The angle is always changing (however the instructions stay the same) and therefore this method will be called repeatedly:
LSystem.prototype.draw = function(ctx, x, y) {
var self = this;
var path = this.path;
var table = {
"F": function(ctx) {
ctx.moveTo(0, 0);
ctx.lineTo(0, -5);
ctx.translate(0, -5);
},
"+": function(ctx) {
ctx.rotate(self.angle);
},
"-": function(ctx) {
ctx.rotate(-self.angle);
},
"[": function(ctx) {
ctx.save();
},
"]": function(ctx) {
ctx.restore();
}
};
ctx.save();
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.moveTo(x + 0.5, y + 0.5);
ctx.translate(x + 0.5, y + 0.5);
for (var i = 0; i < path.length; i++) {
var char = path[i];
var cmd = table[char];
cmd && cmd(ctx);
}
ctx.stroke();
ctx.restore();
};
A path (in my case) consists of over 6000 characters. It has no problem in drawing at 60FPS. However the main problem is that it uses a lot of CPU and I can hear the fans in my laptop starts spinning. This is not optimal and I'm looking for a way to solve this.
By looking at the profiling tool in Chrome, we can see that it doesn't like .rotate
and .restore
being called repeatedly.
What is a good way of optimizing the rendering and minimize CPU usage? Would calculating the coordinates for the entire path first then pass it to .lineTo
a better choice? Keep in mind that the angle is different every time .draw
is called, so the coordinates cannot be cached and reused.