Profiler Improvements for the Godot Game Engine

Abstract

Godot is an open-source game engine, a large, complex and growing open source software project. As one, it’s in constant need of improvement and volunteers to contribute to the codebase by adding features and fixing bugs. The goal of this thesis is to improve the current built-in code profiler in Godot. The main improvement made was the repair of a major bug in the profiler. This bug caused all internal Godot functions to fail to be reported on, and the time spent in them to disappear from the profiler. The actual cause of the bug was the lack of a mechanism to profile these functions. The fix was accomplished by adding such a mechanism to the existing profiler, enabling previously unavailable information gathering. In addition, two related profiler usability improvements were contributed: sorting entries by column and plot zoom/pan. These improvements were completed and contributed back to the project as pull requests.