Shader warm-up¶

Godot compiles shaders the first time it draws something, so the first frame of play stutters. A warm-up does that work behind your loading screen instead.

If your game is just the map, you do not have to do anything. Every map warms itself up after it builds or loads in the running game, and emits warmed_up when it is done.

A map's own warm-up only covers the map, though. If your game adds its own content like a player, enemies or weapons, their first appearance still stutters. In that case untick Warm Up Shaders on the FuncGodotMap in Godot's Inspector, and warm everything in one pass once it is all in:

loading.show()
await build_maps()
spawn_player()
await TrenchDotWarmUp.warm_shaders([get_tree().current_scene, preload("res://enemies/crawler.tscn")]).finished
loading.hide()

warm_shaders takes nodes, scenes, meshes and materials. Pass scenes that are not spawned yet, like the enemy above, so they are ready when they appear. It draws nothing on screen and runs none of their scripts. Connect its progress(done, total) signal to drive a loading bar.

On a test game with five maps, it took the first frame of play from 360 ms to 22 ms, for half a second of warm-up.