Parallel Luau Developer Preview


it doesnt open

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I’m not a mac user but on windows usually when you click the little question mark or show more icon it will give you an option to override the warning.

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That just links me to a support page about malware.

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This might be off topic for the thread so it could get deleted but I found this

Not a security expert but from my understanding this is a dev build so it doesn’t have a security certificate

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Converted your raytracing example into a simple path tracer. Runs 4 times faster than my old single threaded path tracer, 10 times faster if you compare to the pre-luau optimizations. These renders took about a minute each.



Rendering at 1 sample per pixel, it runs at around 3-4 fps at 200x200 resolution

Edit: Here’s a more difficult render with mostly indirect light and higher resolution, took about 2 hours to render this.

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I want to first say thank you all for this update/preview!! I been working making a navigation mesh generator, and I will finally be able to implement parallel processing and make it far more performant!

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@zeuxcg Studio simulation isnt running. Is this a memory leak? Lol.

Same place you posted for raytracer except I added some lighting effects.

image

I also found an unrelated crash.

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Will there eventually be a way to separate code entirely from the main thread, so as to not slow single threaded workloads being performed there?

Also, is pathfinding going to be enabled for multi-threading?

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Yes finally. Been waiting for multithreading a long time ago. Hope it won’t be too different of a workflow.

I’m a bit confused about this, does this mean if I’m using a 4-core system, 16 actors are spread between each core if i create 64 actors, or?

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He’s implying you should not target specific core counts or hardware, just create however many parallel tasks you need logically. The engine takes care of spreading it over cores (or not) depending on internal heuristics. Hardware that only has room to run single-threaded Lua will run your 64 actors sequentially and better hardware might run 1 actor per core, or anything in between.

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This is great news and will raise the bar significantly, my only worry is that this seems very complex. Will games have to move to this new system with Actors or is that only if they want multi-threading?

The general rule is that a new feature is optional unless explicitly specified otherwise. This will be optional.

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Ah yes time to run into many race conditions whilst implementing this into my game cause i have absolute no experience with parallel execution XD However I am totally ready to tackle this feature and get used to it :smiley:

Few questions I have have:
Since actor instances are required per process logical needs, does that mean single script architectures such as AeroGameFramework will not be able to utilize the full functionality?

My other question is not related to technical aspects but I am wondering why the function is named “task.desynchronize” instead of “task.desync”? Although auto complete exists, it still feels like a long text to type it out.

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I’m glad the Raycast method is usable! A number of people have been pestering politely asking me to implement parallel Luau into FastCast to allow more projectiles to simulate at once, and I plan on doing just that. I anticipate great performance gains from being able to cluster various ongoing raycasts onto different cores so that only a fraction of the work is done on any single core.

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Does this apply to very very large amounts of tasks?

I am trying to determine how I will work with this system.

Let’s say I want to simulate over 1,000 NPCs and constantly update them. Also let’s ignore other methods to optimize them such as only doing a certain amount each second/frame. In this case we’d basically be running 1,000 tasks in parallel at the same time.

Does this mean it would be better to create 1,000 actors or tasks, instead of using say 10 actors each doing 100 NPCs?

It seems the only potential benefit is someone with a high number of cores.

If that is the case then I think I’d rather add some abstraction and go with the former because I could also be potentially running other intensive tasks that I’d like to prioritize.

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Super excited by this one, nice job!

I appreciate you’re still actively working on this but do you have a timeline with regard to release? Have quite a few cool ideas I’d love to throw into some projects.

Also, assuming the internal tech spec doesn’t include sensitive / trade info, any chance that’ll be released to the community? I would love to read it to get a deeper understanding of RBLX.

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In regards to module scripts, I hope that I will be able to run some functions in parallel from inside the module script while keeping the rest of the module script global. (In this hypothetical case, the script requiring the module script would not be inside an Actor or otherwise used in parallel.) Though, perhaps there could be an issue with module variables which are accessed from the parallel code and accessed from the serial code (or maybe not, I’m thinking with the general C mutex mindset where you need to lock things down).

I am super excited by this update, can’t wait to start using it.

Alright - finally been able to play around with this thing. I’m hyped!

I managed to get a simple Lua-based API working for a job-based paradigm:

The idea is pretty simple: you can pass in pure functions with a set of arguments, and they’ll be run in parallel as fast as possible. The system should be easily expandable to let you return values from those functions too, if you’re looking to use them to run computations.

I’ll most likely end up using a refined version of this in Blox to run terrain generation and greedy meshing calculations :slightly_smiling_face:

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