Posts by AlexM

  • What are you playing now?

    Quote from Vilham

    There is an end game, its very difficult to achieve, you have to go through 5 Maxwells doors to new worlds without dying otherwise you get kicked back out to your regular world. At the end you basically complete the game and unlock new characters.

    jebus :X

  • What is the place of scientists/engineer in the gaming industry ?

    Destruction itself isn't SUPER costly. When you do a whole batch of destruction it can be costly. Also when you have a complex system managing object lifetime (.NET/JVM garbage collector for instance) there starts be some overhead.

    The main issue is that the GC has a different set of rules for when it runs it's cleaning function than you might want with a realtime system. Say you have a batch of entities that are now dead, you might want to wait for a point where you are loading a level to delete them all from memory. The GC isn't smart enough to know this and will probably do a cleaning at some point during gameplay causing a frame hitch.

    The timing and explicit control needed for real time systems sometimes doesn't work well with a generalized GC. This is more for low level stuff like heavy data manipulation though. At the gameplay logic level a GC is generally a viable solution.

  • What is the place of scientists/engineer in the gaming industry ?

    The reason arrays can be faster is because of the way cache works on a computer. If you are iterating along an array the elements are contiguous in memory. This means when you want element n from the array the computer is probably grabbing element n and the next m elements and putting them in a cache line. So when you need element n + 1, the computer already put that element in cache when you fetched element n. Now it can get element n + 1 from cache instead of RAM. Getting an item from cache is much faster than RAM. A linked list on the other hand could have each element in a completely different place in RAM which means when you pull the value, unrelated data will be loaded into cache and you will have the slower RAM access speed far more often than when using an array.

    Does that make sense?

    As for speeding up a process by writing in a language closer to machine code. I personally would say that the language doesn't matter as much as being able to control memory layout of structures and types. Also being able to explicitly control when the destruction of objects occurs.

    The issue with higher level languages is that most of them attempt to automatically handle object destruction for you. If they do cleanup at a bad time you will have framerate issues.

  • What is the place of scientists/engineer in the gaming industry ?

    I worked at ATR in Kyoto Japan. Here's their website http://www.atr.jp/index_e.html . The other place I worked was on a project for the University of British Columbia but I dont think it's published yet.

    I'm guessing data structures are probably good when you know mathematical structures. I dont have a formal math background so I don't tend to know the proper terminology for math. Are math structures like sets and rings? If so then I would say it certainly helps a lot. I suppose the one area that doesnt cross over and that isn't even addressed all the time in computer science are which structures are easily processed by computer hardware. The short answer being that arrays are the most friendly in regards to speed.

  • What is the place of scientists/engineer in the gaming industry ?

    Quote from laminutederire

    @AlexM which of these two fields were you working on?

    That's what I was hoping to do, behind the curtains, working on the base of engines, in order to optimize them the most. Am I wrong to think that it could be kinda like the project I worked on this year, in which I tried to optimize an algorithm, which built bus lines based on statistics?

    @Klems you are saying that on the game developing part, there is not much to do, but in the development of engines game developers use there are some opportunities ?

    Was it a realtime algorithm or an offline algo? The thing about optimizing an algorithm is that sometimes certain optimizations can have a negative effects on a real time system. Specifically if you optimize by representing data in a linked list rather than a vector or some type of non-contiguous data strcuture. In that case you are scarificing potential cache optimizations. Maybe the tradeoff is worth it, maybe it isnt but it's certainly something you want to keep in mind.


    Before I was in games I was in robotics and AI. Doing stuff like image recognition etc.

  • What is the place of scientists/engineer in the gaming industry ?

    Some programming jobs at game company's require more of a science background than others. Rendering and AI being 2 of the big ones.

    I worked for a few years at research companies that basically just publish science papers. Mostly in robotics and artificial intelligence. The robotics stuff was actually pretty applicable because you are working in simulations. That means you are basically working with a game loop and need to focus on stuff like constant multiplier in your big O time. A huge fallacy schools teach you is that the constant doesn't matter, that's only partially true for offline calculation. A constant multiplier of 2 could mean a game running at half the framerate.

    So if you have a background in simulations then transitioning into the game industry should be fine. If you do massive offline calculations you might be able to work on the pipeline side of things. For instance taking in unoptimized terrain patches and running an algorithm on them to transform them into a format that works well on a specific API/Hardware configuration.

  • What's going on with your life?

    Welp just got back from Japan and have a entire suitcase of video games and video game related stuff I bought. I'll do a proper post later when I take pics.

    The big thing is though I asked my partner to marry me and she said yes. WHEW. I'm engaged now.

    I bought a 12$ totoro ring and put it in a gachapon egg because she's a jewlery designer and there's no point in me trying to pick a ring. After she said yes, her and her friend went to pick one out themselves.

  • What's going on with your life?

    Dux is pretty much on the money :v

    I accidentally walked into a bunch of yakuza shaking down a restaurant and I looked for too long. About a block up 2 of them marked me and started walking way too close. One of the dudes had telltale meth marks (lots of scabs on his skin, I used to have a roomate who was addicted so the signs are a bit on the obvious side to me). Anyways after a block or two my partner noticed and pulled me to the right so we could get out of gang territory. They followed us out for a block or two until she started staring them down and pulled us towards a more police controlled area.

    She actually pulled me into a basement of a subway line to get away which in my head seemed crazy because I've seen so many movies where that doesn't go well. The underground path lead us to umeda which is one of the 2 most dense areas of Osaka and is full of cops so they broke off and gave up.

    I shouldnt say they are actually yakuza though, they are called "yankee" which is basically street level scrubs. The actual yakuza are dressed really nice and are actually really polite. They don't want to fuck up their business jacking a tourist for a couple hundred bucks.

  • What's going on with your life?

    ^^^ Cuuuute. Glad to hear you got your cats back. I would not be able to be away from mine (and it makes finding an apartment in the city very difficult)


    So the other day I apparently got marked by a Yakuza and may have almost gotten stabbed or something except my partner was savvy and managed to get me out of a situation. Apparently we wandered into gang territory without knowing it.

  • The random model thread!

    Quote from SuperDuperYeah

    Hey men !

    There's a small wall border at the bottom on the left photo. Are going to add it ? (eagle eye type stuff right here).

    Definitely. I'm also going to fix the other 5 massive ugly issues in that image such as the light bleed on top, the dark spot on the bottom and the shadow softness issues.


    ...When I get back from Japan ;)

  • GTA V

    Just started playing the ps4 version. I didn't like GTA4 at all and I am looooooving this already. Such an improvement. So happy they fixed the car handling.