Technical Discussion March 31 2009

SFU Burnaby 12:30pm - 1:45pm

Topic 1: Code profiling

  • Eclipse has a built in profiler
  • Nokia Carbide has a PC-side profiler (smartphone dev: hard to use)
  • use comparitive profiling with automated test tools to compare algorithms?
  • memory leak tools are "profilers" too (Valgrind)
  • Some profilers (Carbide, demos of commercial profilers) are very complicated
  • important for applications and languages that can't fail (Erlang)
  • Java has many more profilers that don't require much work and is easy to hook into JVM and to understand; C++ has fewer
  • Linux kernel module for profiling
  • some profilers use hooks
  • others use sampling of state from another process
  • the "easy" way: wrap functions in timers
  • nice to have: break down into bitmaps, handles, etc.
  • time for RAM/hard disk accesses: reduce load times
  • GTA4 was very good with area transitions and load times; World of Warcraft also
  • Super Smash Brothers Brawl (Wii), ATV racing (PSP), some online games have poor load times

References:

Topic 2: Implementing a game engine with special relativity

  • length contraction is easy (matrix operations)
  • how would time dialation work?
    • A character moving fast may see different animations
    • animation timer gives time and position; one for each player (frame of reference)
  • multiplayer would require extrapolation of actions
  • interface for the FPS would stay constant: player's frame of reference

Topic 3: Super Mario Bros. with accelerometer

  • similar idea to LocoRoco (PSP)
  • Shake to make Mario jump
  • compression of objects (blobs) in LocoRoco: how?

Future discussion topic suggested: collision detection

Members Present

  • Colin Hume
  • Karol Krizka
  • Jon Derrick
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