T w e n t y S i d e d

Let’s talk about these speed problems I keep alluding to. The framerate is half of what it should be. I’ve mucked about, looking for inefficiencies. I’ve made some minor changes but haven’t seen the framerate change all that much.

I suppose I’ve been spoiled by my days at Activeworlds. Back then I used Microsoft Developer Studio 6 to write my code. It was pretty old (1998) but it was the Professional Edition, which had top-notch tools for profiling performance. You could just fire up the program, run it for a couple of minutes, and then it would show you where all the time went.

This is far more accurate and convenient than manually measuring time from within the program as its running. You’ve got to put this timing code everywhere you want to measure, then you’ve got to surround it with additional lines of code to disable it when it isn’t needed. Then you have to run the program again and again, measuring performance and adding more and more clock-checks to zero in on the source of the problem.

But now that I’ve gone indieSUPER indie. I’m so indie, I’m not even working on an actual game! I’m using Visual Studio: Hippie Freeloader Edition, which doesn’t include the profiler.

This is an interesting look at how we perceive pricesOr at least, how I perceive them. But I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one.. I would say that $1,200, while steep, isn’t unreasonable for a robust tool like Visual Studio. You can use it to make retail-ready software. Companies can and do use this thing to make millions of bucks. But since Microsoft gives away the free version and the free version does nearly everything the pro version does, it doesn’t feel like I’m paying $1,200 for a development environment. It feels like I’m paying $1,200 for a profiling tool. And there’s no way that’s worth itSeriously. This is NOT me shaking my tin cup or beating around the bush for more donations. No matter how much money I had, I’m not sure I could ever bring myself to spend that much for the profiling tool.. I keep hoping MS will discount some old version and I can pick up the pro edition for a few hundredI do see offers here & there around the web, but they always strike me as being sketchy. It’s always some company I’ve never heard of and I’m always worried I’d be buying a bootleg version..

The point of all this bellyaching is that we’re going to have to look for our performance bottleneck the hard way. But before we get to that, I need to talk about my normal map some more. You’ll see why in a bit.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Unearth Part 5: Speed Boost”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.