People were complaining about getting 10 FPS or so in Galactic Melee, which made no sense at all. You got like 10 ships, a background (billboard), and a carrier (large, but only one).
So I hop into the game, and notice even on my system my usual 200 FPS has dropped to 50 FPS when there’s a lot of bullets on the screen. Bullets are just billboards, this makes no sense at all.
As is usually the case, anytime there’s some major …feature… like this it’s code that someone else did, and this is no exception. Looking over the code, the programmer that did this created a billboard set for each individual billboard.
I create one billboard set per material, set infinite bounds, center it, and manually update the positions and orientations of each billboard.
4X speed increase (on my system) for 15 minutes of work.
People wonder why I do most of the code myself. The reason is I have to do it myself one way or another. It’s just doing it myself from the beginning saves the time and money of hiring, paying, and firing someone first.