Sunlight

To finish my little series on CPU optimisation (here were part 1 and part 2 , today I bring out the big guns: threading and timing! This is where optimisation really shines as a form of pure entertainment and delight. I can honestly hardly imagine why anyone ever does Sudokus or crosswords. Puzzling to find the best optimisations is so much more fun! Hiccups are horrible without the right tools Framerate hiccups are a special case. This is when the game is running at a high enough framerate, but once in a while a single frame takes a lot longer. Hiccups cause that a game running at 55fps might look a lot less fluent than one running at 30fps, if every second the 55fps consists of 54 smooth frames and one really long one. The difficulty here is that when you gather performance data, the time spent in each function will usually be averaged. This means that if a function runs really fast most of the time and is really slow only once per second, then it will look like a normal function in...

Yesterday we have announced that Awesomenauts is coming to Steam! Woohoo! We have been working on it for quite a while already, so it will release really soon. There will even be a closed beta, which will start within a week. Exciting times! I am kind of surprised that I managed to write those optimisation blogposts in the past weeks at all, because we have been crunching like crazy to iron out all the bugs. In particular we spent a lot of time on getting the controls just right for PC, and personally I feel it plays great, so I hope the players in the beta will agree! Here's a trailer showing Coco and Derpl on PC:

Last week I talked about some rather general things that I learned about CPU optimisation, when spending a lot of time improving the framerates of Awesomenauts , Swords & Soldiers , and even Proun . Today I would like to discuss some more practical examples of what kind of optimisations are to be expected. Somehow I like talking about optimisation so much that I couldn't fit it all in today's blogpost, so topics around threading and timing will follow next week. Anyway, forward with today's "lessons learned"! Giant improvements are possible (at first) The key point of my previous blogpost was that you should not worry too much about optimisation early in the project. A fun side-effect of not caring about performance during 'normal' development, is that you are bound to waste a lot of framerate in really obvious ways. So once you fire up the profiler for the first time on a big project, there will always be a couple of huge issues that give giant frame...

Optimisation is a very special art form, with lots of tricks and realisations that give it a place of its own in the programmers toolbox. Until I had to do it for the first time on Swords & Soldiers for the Wii, I had never done any optimisation. At university I had already learned a lot about time complexity (big O notation, like O(n) ), but optimising an actual game with a big codebase is a different beast entirely. I was like a virgin that had never been seduced by a handsome profiler yet. I just started fooling around with optimisations, reading tutorials and articles on Nintendo's dev website and the internet in general, and learning as I went along. Since no pro ever taught me how to optimise, I guess I might still be unaware of some really important tricks. Yet somehow I managed to get Swords & Soldiers from an initial 10fps to 100fps on the Wii (if VSync is turned off), and Awesomenauts from 10fps to 70fps on the Playstation 3. In past five years I spent some six ...