Measuring your addon

The game is usually limited by the processor, not by the graphics card. Viewpoint shows the cost of each package to the player. You can use the same values.

The Performance tab

On the card of a package, open Info, then Performance.

Row	What it shows
Assets	The assets by kind, and their sizes
Video memory	The estimate and the measured value
Memory	The estimate and the measured value
Processor	The time of your hooks on the main thread, the time of your work on the render thread, and the time of your work on other threads
Graphics card	The time of your draw callbacks and your shader snippets, as measured by Viewpoint. For a Shaderpack: the time of each pass.
History	The average and the range for the last 8 sessions

The measured values:

• Main thread: the time of your handlers. Viewpoint measures a sample of the calls, and calculates the total. The profiler counter addon.<id>.mainMs gets the value each frame.
• Render thread: the time of your draw callbacks and your RENDER hooks. The profiler counter addon.<id>.renderMs gets the value each frame.
• Graphics card: the time of the work that your addon asks the graphics card for, at each draw point, in addon.<id>.gpuMs. If two addons put a snippet in the same shader, Viewpoint can time only that shader. The card then says “shared with N”. Use Measure GPU cost to find the cost of each addon.
• Other threads: the time to decode your assets.
• Memory and video memory: the bytes of your package in the pools.

Viewpoint measures the time of draw callbacks. It cannot measure the time of your assets or your snippets one by one. To find that cost, do the measurement below.

Measure the graphics cost

1. Go to a scene where the game shows your assets.
2. On the Performance tab, click Measure GPU cost.
3. Do not move. The game shows measuring, keep still.
4. Wait. Viewpoint compares frames with your assets and your snippets on and off, 10 times.
5. Read the result on the tab. Viewpoint keeps the median difference, with the date.

Shaderpacks

The card of a Shaderpack shows two values.

• Video memory: an estimate of the targets that the pack declares. It is the number of targets, times the size of the output, times the size of the format.
• Time on the graphics card: the time of each pass of the pack, measured while the pack is in use.

Measure against base is planned. It can come after API 1.0. It compares your pack with the pack that it builds on, in the same scene. Use it to see what your changes cost.

History

Viewpoint keeps the history in Zomboid/viewpoint-addons/_manager/usage.properties. It keeps the last 8 sessions for each package, and the session that is still running. It removes a package that it has not seen for 90 days.

A session holds only: the day it ended (not the time), the number of frames to the nearest thousand, the mean time on the main thread, the memory and video memory that the package held, how many assets it held, and the first eight characters of the hash of its jar. Viewpoint writes the file every five minutes while you play and when the game exits. The file stays on the player’s computer and nothing sends it anywhere. It is in the cache folder that players often zip for a bug report: a player can delete it at any time.

Viewpoint’s profiler

Your hooks, your draw callbacks and your work on the render thread show in Viewpoint’s profiler, in the group ADDONS. Open the Profiling page or the profiler window. Compare a frame with your addon on and a frame with your addon off.

An addon with no active hooks, no callbacks and no assets adds no cost to the frame.

Tip

Measure in the scenes where the game is slowest: a street with many zombies, a car that moves, rain. A hook that costs 0.05 ms in an empty field can cost ten times more in a mall.