Dropdown Menu OG Speed Test (VIDEO) proves it does nothing
Someone asked me to show a comparison for interactions. Honestly, i haven't tried it myself and I'm missing the right telemetry to return me the actual time in milliseconds to see how bad the difference is.
For me this was a "good enough"
but its NOT GOOD ENOUGH no more.
This is a mind dump contemplating why instant menu can not work:
ok, maybe its Its the same time....
That's fine, its not my fault that the pie-menu and the dropdown load at the same speed. The appear exactly at the same time, one with 9 options and the other with 23 options. Dropdown wins but thats not the point, why? Because EA gives us both information when its fully loaded, the pie menu breaks that info into multiple extra categories and makes it unusable Even exploding all the pie-sub-menus does not make it faster, making it into a stream of actions does not make it faster... But i have all actions now, right here...
Maybe there is no way to make it faster after all, base-game tells me no.
Wait are those actions they appear in the pie-menu... are they randomized...?
No way.
They can't be... They are Prioritised to your needs and wants? Right?
Nah. This cant be right.
Maybe i can cache what we get? Yes, thats just normal caching. Okay. I made that.
Maybe i can recreate what we cache and then load everything when it loads and just expand the menu? Yes - that will glitch. But it will work.
May-maybe i can just hide everything that is not there yet inside their respected submenus to avoid glitches. Yeees-yes.
And then i can cross-out everything that is no longer available after the 9 second load, yes-yes-yes.
Instant menu is possible!
/me KICK GNOME
Just need to go into it without any guarantees, Yes. In theory (spoiler: yes 100% possible)
So there is no way to make an instant menu? No-no. There is ... and there is a complicated yet simple solution to this, it is called
*Queue Hanz Zimmer playing*
Instant menu is possible because of : Optimistic Preloading and Speculative execution (link is wikipedia, dont click it- its cool to stay good where you are, its for nerds that like deeeeep conceptual thinking)
The thing to remember is this: OPTI-MISTIC PRE-LOADING
*Drums out*
The idea is this: Dropdown caches the first thing it sees, and it assumes its the same thing seen last. (lets be fair its always the same, but you are made to think its not) next time you click the same thing, you get a new option "insult" or "gossip" that wasn't there before, and yet it show up randomly. EA just throws them at you because pie-menu is imperfect and they know they dont know how to fix it since 2009. Which is we are trying to solve.
Dropdown knowns that: The last time you used your mouse to click a target, and it saw "Friendly Introduction" it would show you the same "Friendly introduction" without thinking to you otherwise because it wouldn't have changed without you doing an introduction - that is Optimistic - It assumes you haven't met the person you.
Unless that changed, then it would reload. then it doesnt need to reload the 15000 other activities before i show it.
Then EA gives me the metadata i need to display the information.
The pie menu would hide that meta-data behind its options, youd never know. It also does not matter because it sucks llama droppings