Memory management in MonoGame

@StainlessTobii wrote:

Hi Guys,

I have started porting my terrain system to MonoGame and have come across an interesting issue.

To prevent garbage collections, I have written a memory manager for my renderer.

At boot up it allocates some arrays and uses a grow only allocator

The problem is that C# is manically type safe.

So I cannot read an array of shorts into a buffer in one hit.

As far as I can see the only way to read the data into an array is to loop over each value in the array reading a single short at a time. MUCH , MUCH , too slow.

I have thought about using a binaryformatter, but that doesn't use my memory allocator and everything falls apart.

I have thought about having a temporary byte array, but it is entirely possible that I may have several terrain patches streaming in at the same time, so that becomes impracticable.

So I am going to try using a struct instead of an array and using [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit)] to effectively create a union of two arrays (byte and short). So the code becomes....

ShortHeights.Shorts = RenderMemoryManager.GetShortMemory(RenderMemoryManager.MemoryUsage.HeightMap, 
                                                  AllocationSize, out ShortHandle);
stream.Read(ShortHeights.Bytes, 0, AllocationSize);

Anybody got a better solution

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