Weekend Blog

Surprise Blog

I know I don't normally blog the weekend (otherwise the ritual would paint my addled brain into a corner from whence escape would be impossible), but the momentum of doing the Perceptual Computing Challenge has given me a sense that weekends are okay for extra coding.

The day light was spent shovelling shale from one side of my garden to the other, and the evening was spent watching the Magicians with David Mitchell and Robert Webb (very funny guys).  A bit of inspiring end credits music got me thinking that maybe I could throw a few hours at Reloaded, and so I did.

My Few Thrown Hours

It occurred to me at the end of a full week of Reloaded development that one of the biggest obstacles to quick progress was the speed of the DBP compiler (currently 3 minutes on my monster Reloaded PC).  I figured if I could have a faster compiler, I could do more compiles in the day and the thing I was tweaking or fixing or adding would be fresher in my mind and next week will produce even more Reloaded goodness.

Secret Super Coder

After ten plus years running a software company, you cannot help but perfect the art of delegation, and sometimes it pays dividends.  One such delegation brokered the assistance of a top coder, who kindly volunteered his time to help me spruce up the internal version of DBP, starting with the compiler, in anticipation of larger DBP projects such as Reloaded.

The fantastic news is that an early version of the new compiler has taken my compile time from 3 minutes down to 45 seconds, which is an immense speed boost when you are typically compiling about 100 times a day minimum.  My few hours this weekend in integrating this new version with the Reloaded dev set-up will save me literally days of time over the course of the remainder of this project!  Those acquired days can be fed back into the engine to make it even better and make my coding life sane once again.

Before every DBP coder starts jumping up and down, the compiler is far from finished and the 'super secret top coder' will want paying for his efforts too, so it will not be a free update.  My priority remains Reloaded all the way through to October, and all forces will be steadily employed in this direction, but along the way if the opportunity exists to commercialise these internal DBP enhancements, you will be the first to know!

A Note On Concurrency

The term 'concurrency' is often used to describe how many cores your app is using at the same time (i.e. running concurrently side by side). For fun I draw a few rooms and dropped a light into the map editor of the current Reloaded product. I then opened the performance profiler which indicates what my four cores where doing.  Guess what.  Processor utilisation was 100% from the moment the light was placed through to when the light mapping appeared.  That means all four cores where red hot to get the light mapping done as quickly as possible on the monster machine it finds itself on.  Intel would be very proud of an app like Reloaded, and for the first time FPSC will be tapping every corner of your processing power even as you edit and tweak your levels.

I also plan to get the same (or near) when you play the game too, thanks to the multi-core DarkAI system which will be asked to calculate some fiendish math to figure out the best way to strike at the player.  Getting full concurrency when you edit and when you play will mean we have a piece of software that pushes your machine to the maximum.

Signing Off

It's now 2:30AM and I will be turning in very soon.  I'm happy with this coding stint, not least because it has just improved my life by 2 minutes 15 seconds per compile and once I have stripped out the old 'build process' and 'blue print shroud system', the code base will be even smaller which means even faster compiles. That is, until I add the new bullet physics system, terrain system and combat intelligence systems the likes of which you'll have nightmares about. A big player in the internal Reloaded team suggested this product needs a killer feature to make it stand out from the crowd.  Rick, our resident pessimist[realist], concluded there are no killer ideas left, and everything has been done, and small teams like us don't have the manpower for that level of innovation. I disagree. I think it is precisely because we are small that we can take a risk on a killer idea that might very well transform the FPS genre forever. I don't know what the idea is of course, and I dare say it may never surface, but if you have an awesome idea you've never seen in an FPS, post your comments here, I read them all!