22/Nov 2017
By admin
5 min. read
Few years ago I published an article about love and care for your cache. Every now and then I receive emails asking for clarification or some extra question. It seems like the basic rules are easy enought, but once you add multiple cores to the mix, it might get a little bit confusing.
If we only have one core everything is fairly simple. There’s just 1 cache, which is essentially a variant of hash-table with limited number of slots.
1/Nov 2017
By admin
3 min. read
A little bit late, as Halloween was yesterday, but I think std::get_temporary_buffer is scary enough to qualify. A co-worker called me today to show me an ‘interesting’ crash. It was deep in guts of the STL, more specifically in the std::_Merge method.
Corresponding C++ line seemed innocent: *_Dest++ = _Move(*_First1++);
Nothing very interesting, not our code and yet it was crashing with: Exception thrown at 0x01293C05 in foo.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0xFFFFFFFF
23/May 2017
By admin
1 min. read
I’ve just returned from the Digital Dragons 2017 conference. I’ve been presenting there last year and enjoyed the event so much I decided to repeat it. They changed a venue this year and I must say it was even better. Last year had a very nice ‘artsy’ feel to it, but ICE has a much better infrastructure.
This year I’ve been talking about networking system. You can find the slides here - “Networking Architecture of Warframe”
7/May 2017
By admin
3 min. read
Last week I was investigating a crash originating somewhere in a code that looked like this (GPF in this C++ line):
obj->GetFoo()->GetBar().Call(player->GetCat(), this, &MyType::SomeFunc, moreArgs We could discuss the number of indirections or the fact that if this code had been split into multiple lines it’d be obvious, but that’s not the main point here. I didn’t have this luxury, I had to find out which pointer exactly was NULL here.
19/Feb 2017
By admin
2 min. read
A few weeks ago we had a discussion a forum discussion. Question was - what tips did we have for junior developers (not only programmers, all specialties). My #1 tip was: always diff before checking in your changes! I still stand by it, but thought I’d elaborate a little bit and give a quick overview of how I handle my commits these days. Not a rocket science for sure, but the presentation (and hints) were aimed at people just starting in the industry.
29/Dec 2016
By admin
4 min. read
I’ve been doing some minor refactoring recently and - once again - it got my thinking how seemingly tiny C++ changes can affect generated assembly code (and performance). It was a fairly simple scenario, had a collection of ~60 small items identified by an unique ID. ID was a 32-bit number, but realistically the range seemed to be limited to 0-5000 (although I couldn’t rely on it staying like that forever).
19/Oct 2016
By admin
3 min. read
Back in the day I wrote about the ‘dynamic initializers’ problem. Basically, older versions of MSVC (up to 2012, not sure about 2013, seems better in 2015) had problems with static const floats that depended on other static const floats. Values were not calculated compile-time, there was actually a short function generated and it’d do it. The immediate problem is a code bloat (if our constant is placed in a global header), but the other potential issue stems from the fact that these ‘dynamic initializer’ functions respect the optimization settings (/fp:fast).
1/Oct 2016
By admin
6 min. read
I’ve been planning on converting my blog to some static site generator for a while now, but the (perceived) amount of work involved seemed scary, so I kept coming up with reasons not to do it. I really like the idea of static sites. Using gamedev jargon, this basically means we “precompute” as much as possible. Instead of retrieving posts from the database and building pages on the fly (like WP), we do it all offline and then push static HTML files online.
21/Aug 2016
By admin
5 min. read
If you’ve ever done any matchmaking coding (…or played chess) you’re most likely familiar with the Elo rating system (PSA: it’s Elo, not ELO, it’s not an acronym, it’s named after a person - Arpad Elo). It’s a rating system used by most chess federations (most notably, FIDE) and has been adapted by many video games. It’s trivial to implement and get up and running, but suffers from a few issues:
12/Jun 2016
By admin
1 min. read
A video from my DD2016 talk has been uploaded and can be viewed here:
22/May 2016
By admin
2 min. read
A few days ago I came back from the Digital Dragons 2016 conference. I’ve been in talks with these guys in the past years, but timing was never quite right, this time I finally could make it. Luckily for me, it was the same year they invited John Romero, David Brevik and Chris Avellone. In December 1993 my classmate brought an old floppy disc to school. He claimed it contained the best game ever.
22/Feb 2016
By admin
1 min. read
You have probably heard about an AI algorithm defeating a human professional in a game of Go. The algorithm itself has been developed by Deep Mind, an English company that’s now owned by Google. One of the founders is Demis Hassabis. If you were playing Bullfrog games in the late 90s, the name might ring a bell, he’s one of the designers of Theme Park. Back in the day I remember reading a column in Edge magazine titled “The Elixir Diaries”.
20/Jan 2016
By admin
1 min. read
Recently, we’ve been collectively complaining on Twitter about going crazy in C++ (as we do every few weeks). This reminded me of my dark period around 2002 when I was really excited about templates and metaprogramming. I tried finding my old code, but turned out my previous website was completely gone. Fortunately (?), good folks from The Wayback Machine had some copies. I moved some of my articles to a new server.
22/Nov 2015
By admin
8 min. read
I’m playing in a fantasy football league with some coworkers this year. I have always liked all kinds of sports, but it’s a little bit challenging to follow NFL from Europe. There’s not too many stations that actually show it (except for the Super Bowl) and even if they do, the time difference make it difficult to watch. I still followed major news and managed to catch a game every now and then, but I was very far from expert.
4/Aug 2015
By admin
5 min. read
I’ve been debugging a rare memory corruption bug recently and - as usual - it turned out to be an exercise in frustration. This time only part of that was because of the bug itself, the other was because methods I chose were not very helpful (in my defense, it’s been a while, so I was a little bit rusty).
The bug itself was fairly boring - sometimes, when leaving a certain UI screen game would crash.
3/Jun 2015
By admin
4 min. read
An entertaining head-scratcher from today. Application has suddenly started crashing at launch, seemingly inside steam_api.dll. It’d be easy to blame external code, but as mentioned - it’s a new thing, so most likely related to our changes. To make things more interesting, it’s only 32-bit build that crashes, 64-bit seems fine. High-level code looks like (simplified):
1struct tester
2{
3 virtual bool foo();
4 virtual void bar()
5 {
6 }
7 virtual void lol()
8 {
9 if(!
3/Jun 2015
By admin
4 min. read
An entertaining head-scratcher from today. Application has suddenly started crashing at launch, seemingly inside steam_api.dll. It’d be easy to blame external code, but as mentioned - it’s a new thing, so most likely related to our changes. To make things more interesting, it’s only 32-bit build that crashes, 64-bit seems fine. High-level code looks like (simplified):
1struct tester
2{
3 virtual bool foo();
4 virtual void bar()
5 {
6 }
7 virtual void lol()
8 {
9 if(!
30/Apr 2015
By admin
3 min. read
I’ve been doing some micro-optimizations recently. One of the things I’ve been trying is eliminating virtual method calls in ‘leaf’ types. Consider the following snippet (simplified):
1struct Bar
2{
3 virtual bool Func1() { return false; }
4};
5struct Foo : public Bar
6{
7 virtual bool Func1()
8 {
9 return true;
10 }
11 virtual void Func2()
12 {
13 if (Func1())
14 printf("Hello");
15 }
16};
17
18void DoSomething(Foo& f)
19{
20 f.
4/Apr 2015
By admin
4 min. read
I’ve been planning to write a post about debugging multiplayer games (post-mortem) for a while now, but it keeps getting bigger and bigger, so instead of waiting until I can get enough time to finish it, I thought it’d be easier to share some quick’n’easy tricks first.
I’d like to show a simple way of “instrumenting” a crash dump so that it gives us more info about the crime scene. Let’s assume we’ve received a crash from the following piece of code (it’s actually very close to a real-life scenario I encountered).
12/Mar 2015
By admin
3 min. read
A nice thing about Twitter is that single tweet can bring so many memories. It all started when Fiora posted this: This reminds me of how HLSL very carefully defines "saturate" in a way that makes NaNs turn into 0: https://t.co/0tWzaa6H2K @rygorous
— Fiora (@FioraAeterna) March 11, 2015 It reminded me of an old bug I encountered few years ago when working on a multi-platform (PC/X360/PS3) title. One day we started getting strange bug reports.