Very specific Papyrus Performance Question

[anghelos92]

Hi, I am an amateur modder with an interest in scripting but with no formal education in programming or software engineering, I work in an Hospital no IT formation at all but the "How to use a pc for medical use" exam at university xD

 

I made a mod for AAF, from which it receives an event and do some calculations on an array of actors.

Before doing so I copy the received array into an array of my own sorting the elements into some specific index that I need for my calculations depending on the returned index of the playerref.

Event AAF:AAF_API.OnSceneInit(AAF:AAF_API akSender, Var[] akArgs)
        Actor[] akArgs2 = Utility.VarToVarArray(akArgs[1]) as Actor[]
        Actor second1
        Actor third1	
        If akArgs2[0] as Actor == PlayerREf
		Second1 = akArgs2[1] as Actor
		Third1	= akArgs2[2] as Actor
	ElseIf akArgs2[1] as Actor == PlayerREF
		Second1 = akArgs2[0] as Actor
		Third1 = akArgs2[2] as Actor
	Else
		Second1 = akArgs2[0] as Actor
		Third1 = akArgs2[1] as Actor
	EndIf
       ; [...] etc etc various functions called on playerref, second1 and third1
EndEvent

Knowing that this event return at least an actor array of 1 element (the playerref) so some calculations are always done with it, and that if the returned array.length is less than three second1 and/or third1 can be none this can fire an error in the papyrus log about the akargs[2] array being out of range, my question is:

 

What is more performance friendly?

- Let the virtual machine automatically aborting the lines with functions called on none actors, consider that I disable papyrus logging in Fallout4.ini? (When the VM abort those function calls because of second1 or third1 are none, the script goes on with its execution without other consequences)

- Or make a serie of If statements to check for the returned array length before doing my calculations?

 

Obviosly the checks before using the returned array would be a better coding practice to at least don't pollute the logs but mine is a pure performance question and I am not 100% sure of doing a correct profiling.

 

I know that probably we are talking about microseconds xD but curiosity burns.

 

Thank you!

Edited September 23, 2019 by anghelos92