Once again the performance problems with Coldest have been held at bay by a significant breakthrough. It boggles my mind how many times I've had to double and then redouble the performance of this engine since I first started working on it, but I've managed to pull off another minor performance miracle. Actually it might be more accurate to say that I've corrected a minor performance debacle that was blowing my cache coherency to kingdom come. Continue reading »

Nothing terribly important, but as I've been spending quite a bit of time getting very familiar with oprofile (again), and Google likes the site better when I post regularly;-) I felt like writing some things down.

Here goes:

• No amount of optimization in my collision detection and animation loops is too much. The latter is turning out to be the biggest headache because it needs to touch every dynamic vertex to do its thing and I'm finding very few good areas for optimization.

Back on the engine front there is good and bad news. The good news is that I've implemented some very simple bots (all they can do right now is connect and spawn) which allows me to do some load testing with more players than I could simulate using actual computers. The bad news is that the engine failed the load test. Not badly, and not in the way I thought it might, but it still failed. I was half expecting the netcode to blow up with 20 players connected, but in fact that held up pretty well. Continue reading »

Updated with Windows version 5/26/2009

I figure it must be a good sign that the map editor is coming together so easily. Either I'm actually learning something about writing flexible and extensible code, or I've just spent so many hundreds (thousands?) of hours on the game at this point that all of the quirks are so deeply burned into my subconscious that I don't have problems with them anymore. Six of one, half a dozen of the other really, then.:-)