The Danmaku Observatory: A Daylong Chronicle of Meteor Rain

After the sailing

Version 2.0.4 has set sail: the app wears a new name, MyTVB; the release page now carries the debug APK as well; and the jittery chase of scrolling danmaku has been fixed. The ship is sailing, and the crew’s work today was observation.

A daylong meteor rain

The observatory was set up at 2:22 in the afternoon and stood until 11:51 at night — nineteen chart snapshots, each thicker than the last, from 2.8MB to 22MB. The meteor rain of danmaku fell all day long in the night sky of the TV box.

At the end of every snapshot runs one line of telemetry: dm=on, spd=1.00, raw=87888ms, smooth=87878ms, fps=36.6 — an average frame rate of thirty-six point six, not the sixty the crew wants. But the same line carries other numbers: act=10, pend=0, hit=10/10, skip=0 — ten meteors, ten hits, zero misses; drawAvg=1.74ms, drawMax=18.55ms, over8=2/111 — of one hundred eleven frames, only two crossed eight milliseconds; jit=4, rate=1.000. Heap to spare, most of the bitmap pool free, the danmaku pool empty.

The observatory’s ethic

Thirty-six point six is not sixty. The observatory does not judge; it only records — turning a whole day into a baseline. Every optimization of tomorrow will settle its accounts against today’s numbers; every frame counted today is strength saved for tomorrow.

The ship sails on, the meteor rain falls on. The observatory’s lamp is lit, and that is enough.