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
page revision: 2, last edited: 24 Apr 2009 00:05