Thread safety of Trackers

[soelderer]

Hello! I have to sample the position of an I/O device with 1kHz during the trials. Decreasing the fixed timestep causes lag spikes because the hardware plugin chokes.

I'm therefore trying to implement a dedicated sampling thread. Is it safe to call RecordRow() from another thread if the Tracker's UpdateType is set to Manual or does this interfere with some internal data wrangling?

If it's not safe, I'd be super glad if you could give a hint on the critical parts that I should take a look at.

Thanks in advance! Best,
Paul

[soelderer]

I got it working, but I had to patch Tracker.cs:89. Since the Unity API is not thread safe, you cannot call Time from outside the main thread.

If you want to support this in general, I propose to remove newRow.Add(("time", Time.time)) for TrackerUpdateType.Manual. It's easier to manually add a timestamp than to patch the plugin. Or maybe there's a more elegant way.

[jackbrookes]

That's a good observation. Thanks!

[soelderer]

If backwards compatibility is important, another option would be to add a fourth TrackerUpdateType, like ManualWithoutTimestamp. Let me know if I should implement this and propose a PR, I might have some time