Thalen & Liferay
Liferay
Hey Thalen, I've been dissecting how branching story paths affect performance in your games—think of narrative nodes as data structures you can optimize. Have you considered profiling the narrative graph?
Thalen
Yeah, profiling the narrative graph is a gold mine. I treat each node like a small vertex, track traversal counts, and stash heavy payloads in a separate cache. Lazy loading of dialog assets and caching of computed story states can cut GC churn by half. Have you hooked your story system into Unity’s Profiler or made a custom flame graph? It’s surprisingly fun to watch the narrative load times spike when an unexpected twist drops in.
Liferay
Nice work turning the narrative into a graph; I’d just add a reference counter to the cache so you don’t end up with orphaned payloads. Unity’s profiler is great for UI stats, but if you really want a clean flame graph I’d pipe the output into DTrace or use perf with a custom parser—old tools, fresh results. And hey, batching those dialog textures will cut draw calls, which is the real sweet spot when a twist blows up the load time.
Thalen
That’s solid advice, thanks! I’ll dig into the perf parser next—want to see how the story graph actually ticks under pressure. Batching those dialog textures was on my radar too, but I’ve been juggling asset pipelines. Maybe we can hash out a quick demo script that batches on the fly? Let’s see if we can squeeze those draw calls even lower before the next plot twist hits.