WML Optimizations

[LordAwsomeness]

Hi all, so I came across a post when I was looking up LUA vs WML. I came across the term WML Optimizations and I was just wondering what are some things you can do optimize your wml to help make loading and running things a little smoother.

[octalot]

If a particular feature needs optimizing, it will often be reworked in later versions of Wesnoth; so a major trick is to have a good knowledge of the mainline campaigns, and to look at the 1.14 and 1.15 campaign WML for doing what you intend to do.

The Wiki's UsefulWMLFragments has many outdated examples, along with comments about what made them obsolete. The changelog entries for development versions (1.11.x, 1.13.x) give some hints about the new features available in 1.12.x and 1.14.x.

[Ravana]

It depends on your use case a lot. For first loading time it helps to have single-file addon instead of many files.

It is also useful to review your preprocessed WML and check if there are large duplicated fragments which should not be there.

Usually loops are faster in Lua.

[LordAwsomeness]

It depends on your use case a lot. For first loading time it helps to have single-file addon instead of many files.

I actually didn't know that.... I have my current add-on loading at least 25-30 cfgs... probably closer to 50...

It is also useful to review your preprocessed WML and check if there are large duplicated fragments which should not be there.

im not sure i quite follow preprocessed. Could you explain a little about that? Currently i have a lot of things loading in the prestart even and if you click too much then wesnoth will crash. is it something along those lines? Also do duplicated events slow things down? because i have a lot of turn counters going for various purposes and instead of searching through over 15k lines of wml that ive been scripting for this addon over the last 2 years, i just make a new one...

Usually loops are faster in Lua.

yea i think i want to start learning lua but i just keep getting confused everytime i look at it in files or try to read the wiki on it...

[Ravana]

First point is not important until it gets to thousands of files.

You can find wesnoth cache folder, and unpack the files until you find your addon. It is close enough to what you would get by preprocessing it yourself with wesnoth -p.

[LordAwsomeness]

First point is not important until it gets to thousands of files.

You can find wesnoth cache folder, and unpack the files until you find your addon. It is close enough to what you would get by preprocessing it yourself with wesnoth -p.

As in literally thousands of files? Or figuratively?
What's preprocessing?

[Ravana]

Literally thousands, it provided massive benefit for ageless some years ago. Nowadays I do not bother with it, I asked for higher time limit instead.
Effect is that wesnoth only needs to read one file instead of thousands - each file access takes time.

Preprocessing is expanding macros and files into one WML document. In https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/issues/4698 I have basic guide how to preprocess addon.