A very minor code efficiency question.

[Reives]

Basically, I have a couple of BGMs in the BGM folder that I've used countless times now, yet whose name I need to change due to typo in file name, change of songs, etc. So instead of going back and spend a week searching & editing the name in the editor, I just made some exceptions in the bgm_play method.

def bgm_play(bgm)
    @playing_bgm = bgm

    #E.g. this block vvv
    if bgm != nil and bgm.name == "Old song name"
      Audio.bgm_play("Audio/BGM/" + "New song name", bgm.volume, bgm.pitch)

    elsif bgm != nil and bgm.name != ""
      Audio.bgm_play("Audio/BGM/" + bgm.name, bgm.volume, bgm.pitch)
    else
      Audio.bgm_stop
    end
    Graphics.frame_reset
  end

My question is, if I add a few of those exceptions there, would it slow things down noticeably? I'm pretty sure that it doesn't since it's constant time, but seeing those in a method that's run so often feels a little intimidating, so I just wanted some reassurance. If it does, is there another way of doing this?

Many thanks for your time.

 

[e]

This is a simple jump. I'm not sure exactly how the Ruby VM will interpret it, but usually it shouldn't add much more load; simple if/else jumps are, I think, translated into relative JMP operations, and those usually take ~1 cycle on x86 processors. So no, making a simple if/elsif/else shouldn't slow things down too much.

What you might do, however, if you truly want to optimize this, is put your string constants into...well, constants, instead of literals. See, each time you create a new string literal (e.g. : "Old song name"), it will create a new String object, even if the content is the same. Instead, you might want to do something like :

OLD_SONG_NAME = "Old song name"
NEW_SONG_NAME = "New song name"
AUDIO_DIR = "Audio/BGM/"

def bgm_play(bgm)
   @playing_bgm = bgm

   if !(bgm.nil?) and bgm.name == OLD_SONG_NAME
      Audio.bgm_play(AUDIO_DIR + NEW_SONG_NAME, bgm.volume, bgm.pitch)
  elsif !(bgm.nil?) and !(bgm.name.empty?)
     Audio.bgm_name(AUDIO_DIR + bgm.name, bgm.volume, bgm.pitch)
  else
     Audio.bgm_stop
  end

  Graphics.frame_reset
end

Now, I understand that your "New song" and "Old song" examples were dummies (or so I assume); still, string literals like these are never a good idea if you can predict the string beforehand. Try to use constants, class variables or something else to hold these.

 

[Reives]

Ahh I see, that's a good idea. Thanks a lot for the help and the explanations!