All posts tagged with "shilling for The Man"

Modules, Interrupts, Memory Leaks

The Road to Early Access basically looks like the Road to El Dorado, except the musical numbers are worse. Right now I am still in a land where I have to actually sit down and do all the stuff I’ve been putting off for the course of the product. Two things that fall into this category are “putting modules in the corner of a building” and “interrupts.” Oh, and “fixing the memory leaks.”

In The Colonies there are unfortunate occasions wherein real estate looks bigger on the outside than it is on the inside. (See also: "Mad Architects Of The Frontier And Their Terrible Creations".)

In The Colonies there are unfortunate occasions wherein real estate looks bigger on the outside than it is on the inside. (See also: “Mad Architects Of The Frontier And Their Terrible Creations”.)

Putting modules in the corner of a building has been something that, since the start of the project, would blow up the game. There were a number of things causing problems here: first off, the code to actually handle the case of inserting the small “module footer” that forms the foundation of a module was blowing up if you put it in the corner of a map. This has been fixed. Second, when we finished a module’s foundation, we would delete the edges on the floor plan, and merge the leftmost and rightmost edges together. Obviously, this is not the right thing to do if a foundation piece is at the leftmost, or rightmost, edge of a blueprint – you end up collapsing two edges together that are at 90 degrees. So this has been fixed for the outside of modules. The inside of modules still breaks, because there is some funny business going on with how we construct interiors that I have yet to track down – but we’re making progress on long standing issues.

{ read this article }

Posted in Clockwork Empires | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
14 Comments

CPU and GPU Run-time Profiling in Simulation Land

[Warning: This is a very technical post.]

It’s not easy writing a complicated simulation. There are lots of complex, interconnected moving parts to worry about and when something goes wrong, it can be hard to figure out where that small, broken thing is in the midst of a larger picture. We recently discovered that the game was running… unreasonably slowly, shall we say? My desktop was getting 15 FPS, and it wasn’t clear what the problem was. On Chris Whitman’s machine, which uses a slightly different graphics card than my computer, our FPS was in single digits. I don’t like optimizing too early – as Donald Knuth pointed out famously, “premature optimization is the root of all evil” – but something was going on. Finally, sick and tired of the problems, I decided to get some answers.

There were three solutions for profiling that we looked at: Intel’s VTune, what we might call a ‘classical’ profiler which you can download a 30-day trial of from their website, and Telemetry, a different sort of profiler made by RAD Game Tools (specifically by Brian Hook, who you might know from such games as Quake 3.) RAD Game Tools also provided us with a 30-day trial of Telemetry, and this gave me an interesting opportunity to compare two profilers. Finally, we tried our luck with NVidia’s GPU Perfstudio to see if we could figure out what was happening on the graphics card.

Three profilers. One slow down. Who cracked the mystery? Find out below.

These actually have nothing to do with what Nicholas is doing but It Was Decided that the post needed some more visual accompaniment. Think of it as a tenuous thematic connection.

{ read this article }

Posted in Clockwork Empires, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
19 Comments