Draw-Call Discipline
Treat draw calls as a published budget — one population, one call — so a forge stays honest when the count climbs.
Heracles: Foundational labour. Difficult, necessary technique.
Why it matters
Scene graphs that issue a draw per object look fine at twelve meshes and collapse at twelve hundred. The failure is rarely the GPU fill rate — it is the CPU submitting work. Publishing the call count next to the fps is the only way a spatial study stays a lesson instead of a demo reel.
Key techniques
- Instance attributes for offset, phase, and heat uploaded once.
- One draw call per particle or mesh population.
- A HUD that prints calls alongside frame time so cost is legible.
What to steal
The transferable part.Budget the calls, not the triangles. Raise instance count until the frame budget complains, then stop. Document the number.
What not to copy
Context-specific or costly.Do not batch unrelated materials into one call if it forces a worse shader. Honesty beats a lower number.
Inclusion rationale
This is the operating law behind the Instanced Forge — without it, Hephaestus is decoration.
Technical register
Performance
Vertex cost scales with instance count; draw submissions stay flat. Dispose the program and buffers on unmount.
Mobile
Cap instances under a coarse pointer or a low DPR tier. The lesson survives at 400 instances.
Accessibility
The HUD is real text, not canvas pixels. Reduced motion freezes the spin and keeps the field readable.
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