Performance Week

At long last I have finally broke free of visual thoughts and hidden thread bugs to spend a whole week on performance. When not trying to find ways NOT get distracted with 'other things' I will be using Intel VTune to find all CPU bottlenecks and squash (or redirect) them as much as possible.  I have some major areas I think need work, but I will let the profiler be my guide this week (and my own task list of course).

Before I started this week of speed, I had one last visuals related conference call with one of our former top artists. Taking five minutes away from his cut and thrust industry artist lifestyle, he helped us come up with a plan on how we might balance the lighting system in our engine and create a more impressive final render.  I will only be starting this work mid-October but it's great to have another pair of eyes, attached to a brain and mouth that can talk in the language of code and the language of art. We can only benefit from his help!

I have arrived at the visuals settings that 'I' like, and when we do the light balancing we can come up with something both 'generic and cool'. There was even talk of disabling some of the sliders by default (released in SETUP.INI) so you can be protected from messing up the lighting balance. For example, no good comes from increasing ambience if we can provide the ambience via a skybox cube map (spherical, hemispheric or cube mapping) for the perfect natural lighting (i.e. when you change the sky to blue or red, the ambient contribution is affected by the colors in the sky and is very effective).  More on this when I start my experiments next month.

Experiments for the rest of this month include hunting down and eliminating lazy, bloated or overworked algorithms and teaching them the true meaning of speed.  My personal goal is to go from 35 fps which is what I am getting from my aged PC and Graphics card to well over 60 fps to achieve a smooth and exciting game play.  My hope is that I will find a single line of code which is the cause of all the slow down but I don't think I am going to be that lucky. It's more likely to come from some effective investigation, lateral problem solving and a few hard choices too.  Having been a victim of these slow patches, I am pretty excited to get stuck into the heart of this beast so going to grab a bite to eat now and then set forth on a journey of discovery to slay a few code sloths!