Insomniac Games » Research & Development

Andreas Fredriksson: The Register Pressure Twilight Zone

macton — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:43:36 +0000

At Insomniac Games we’re currently doing a performance push which means lots of opportunity to look at compiler output. In this post I want to share a story on fighting a particular compiler optimization that … Read More

Ron Pieket: A Client/Server Tools Architecture

macton — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:52:55 +0000

All interactive productivity tools developed over the last two years at Insomniac Games have been built on this architecture. The basic idea is that the edited document is not kept in the memory space of the editor application itself, but rather each individual modification is transmitted to a server application, running on the same machine as the editor. The server maintains the authoritative document. Any number of documents may be open at any time. Any number of editors may communicate with the same local server application. The server provides various document related services. More

#GDC12 Ron Pieket: Developing Imperfect Software: The Movie

macton — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:05:46 +0000

In game software development, we face a unique challenge: the program that we are developing is itself an important tool in our production pipeline, even in its unfinished state. Our artists and designers rely on it to see their work. … Read More

Bob Sprentall: Asset build management

carey_adams — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:56:49 +0000

To better empower our developers, Insomniac has emphasized rapid iteration in our tools. With that goal in mind, we have developed a system to build assets that is both quick and effortless to use. To minimize downtime, the system was … Read More

#GDC12 Jim Van Verth: Fluids Techniques

carey_adams — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:45:43 +0000

Fluids Techniques
Speaker: Jim Van Verth

This talk was part of the all-day Physics for Game Programmers tutorial. In it was discussed three different methods for handling fluids in games. First, the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid dynamics were presented and … Read More

#GDC12 Jim Van Verth: Understanding Rotations

carey_adams — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:43:29 +0000

Understanding Rotations
Speaker: Jim Van Verth

This talk was part of the all-day Math for Game Programmers tutorial. It covers various rotation formats in both 2D and 3D, discussing their benefits and disadvantages. The formats that were covered: 2D angles, … Read More

#GDC12 @mike_acton: Data-Oriented Design for Math

admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:51:07 +0000

This was part of the full-day Math Tutorial on Monday. To a degree, it turned into a bit of an anti-math talk (appropriate slide inserted at the last second during the day) in the sense that most of what I … Read More

#GDC12 Drew Murray: What You Don’t Know IS Hurting You: How Aggressive User Research Improved Resistance 3

admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:50:12 +0000

What You Don’t Know IS Hurting You: How Aggressive User Research Improved Resistance 3
Speakers: Drew Murray (Creative Director, Insomniac Games)
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-Minute Lecture

After participating in formal usability tests near the end of Resistance 2 production, … Read More

#GDC12 Sean Ahern: It Stinks and I Don’t Like It: Making a Better Engine Experience At Insomniac Games

admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:44:29 +0000

Speaker: Sean Ahern (Information Architect, Insomniac Games)
Track: Production
Format: 60-Minute Lecture

Video game development has progressed significantly over the years – from punch cards and user made tools to enterprise level applications. While the technology that we use on … Read More

#GDC12 John O’Brien: Math for Gameplay and AI

admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:40:14 +0000

From John O’Brien, Single Player Gameplay Programmer in our North Carolina Studio:

An overview of commonly used math for gameplay and AI programmers. Covers basic object intersection tests, a few real-world gameplay examples (including why local/world space transforms and planar … Read More

Core Coding Standard

admin — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 23:41:27 +0000

Coding practices are a source of a lot of arguments among programmers. Coding standards, to some degree, help us to put certain questions to bed and resolve stylistic debates. No coding standard makes everyone happy. (And even their existence is sure to make some unhappy.) What follows are the standards we put together on the Core team, which have become the general coding standard for all programming teams on new code development. We've tried to balance the need for creating a common, recognizable and readable code base with not unduly burdening the programmer with minor code formatting concerns. More

Guidelines for Creating Good Design Materials

admin — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:35:22 +0000

Before you explain your design, state what it is that your aiming to achieve. Whether it be a design problem you’re aiming to solve or a new twitch mechanic you have an idea for, tell the audience what is at the heart of the matter. Then they can think on the subject in the same way that you are and have a grounding point for their ideas and feedback. This is a core part of our ‘state the problem, not just the solution’ philosophy. More

Navigation #GDC11

admin — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 07:00:34 +0000

Navigation of the level is increasingly becoming one of the necessary components for an immersive and fun AI. In this presentation given at GDC this year Reddy Sambavaram shares how Insomniac's AI navigation evolved while satisfying our needs in the … Read More

New generation of @insomniacgames tools as webapp

admin — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 08:00:19 +0000

This year at the Sony GameTechConference (GTC11) I spoke about the next-generation of Insomniac Engine and Tools development. One of the biggest changes we shared was our move to develop our new suite of tools as a web application.

Applying Usability Lessons from Resistance to Engine

admin — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 08:00:13 +0000

Over the last 18 months or so, we have been making major changes on the Core team on our approach to usability with our Tools and Engine. We now conduct regular (both formal and ad hoc) usability tests on every … Read More

Creating Satisfying Combat Experiences #GDC11

admin — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 08:00:10 +0000

It was really awesome to see hundreds of developers interested in Insomniac’s combat experience! I was a bit nervous with the technical difficulties at the outset, but cheers to the AV team for coming through!

One important thing to

Intro to Perl

admin — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:00:53 +0000

s(elf) exploitation

admin — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:00:12 +0000

How Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal (PS2) hacked in patching using a common security exploit.

(5 Minute Show and Tell) Rotoscoping

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:00:03 +0000

Scott Michalek (Engine Support Technician) recently did his own 5 minute show and tell for the team. He shared a bit about the the history of rotoscoping. A classic, brutally and mind-numbingly tedious animation technique. (Which can largely be automated

(5 Minute Show and Tell) 5 Minutes to a Better Bowler

admin — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:00:42 +0000

Giac Veltri (Engine Programmer and expert bowler) shared his experience with the team in a recent 5 Minute Show and Tell.

PDF… Read More

(5 Minute Show and Tell) Simplicity

admin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 08:00:11 +0000

Here are the slides from the 5m presentation about simplicity.

As a follow up thought, another article I came across talked about the difference between Doom and the Modern FPS. The main idea being that modern games have things like

(5 Minute Show and Tell) Minecraft

admin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 08:00:10 +0000

Tasked with thinking of something I’d like to talk about for five minutes in front of the rest of the core team, I wracked my brain trying to think of something that not only I, but others would actually be

Useful Results in Spherical Harmonics (mainly 2-band)

admin — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 07:00:30 +0000

See attached PDF for a writeup of some handy results in spherical dynamics.

PDF

JSON Exporter for Excel

admin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:00:15 +0000

Lately we’ve been using JSON as our text-based interchange format of choice internally. While most of our tools are internal and save this data in a way that’s invisible to the user, we still do work with a lot of … Read More

Procedural Content Generation in RCF2

admin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:00:11 +0000

Procedurally generated content has the potential to add interesting, replayable content to our games while avoiding spiraling development costs. Here is a presentation from Gameplay Programmer Chaz Pratt about his research into procedurally generating arena challenges for RCF2. Chaz describes … Read More

A Dynamic Component Architecture for High Performance Gameplay

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 07:00:54 +0000

Delivered at GDC Canada on May 7, 2010, this presentation details a dynamic component architecture used in the Resistance franchise to represent aspects of entity and systems' behavior. This component system addresses several weaknesses of the traditional game object model … Read More

TGC – MEL Scripting for Animators

admin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 07:00:51 +0000

With a little coding knowledge you can turn repetitive tasks in Maya into the click of a button. This presentation will show animators the basics of MEL scripting by introducing MEL commands, variables, syntax and the script editor. Walking through … Read More

Three Big Lies: Typical Design Failures in Game Programming (GDC10)

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:00:59 +0000

Recovering from another inspiring GDC. This presentation went pretty well I think. Unfortunately we had to turn away something like 200 people because the room wasn't big enough. And quite a lot of those people were exactly the folk I … Read More

Synchronizing Bots

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:00:08 +0000

Here’s an introduction to a method for synchronizing AI in multiplayer games. It addresses an implementation that uses the Sync Host system that was described in the previous presentation as well as outlining the methods it uses to synchronize the … Read More

Introduction to Sync Host

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:00:13 +0000

Online functionality has become a fundamental component of our games. This is an introduction to Sync Host, a system developed to address some of the tougher issues we’ve encountered when implementing network synchronization.

PDF… Read More

An Algorithm for Lockless Processing of Sound Data

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:46 +0000

An algorithm has been developed to asynchronously load, unload, play and relocate sound files without the use of locks. The algorithm allows the programmer to arbitrarily assign different logical subsections of the underlying system to different threads, all while remaining … Read More

Wavelets for the Layman

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:39 +0000

Here's an internal presentation I gave just about a year ago on using wavelets for image compression. A nice and gentle introduction to a subject that's really pretty simple that is often buried under so many details that people don't … Read More

Color Spaces and You

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:00:34 +0000

A basic introduction to the concept of a colorspace for artists, programmers, and anyone who's just curious about the meaning of terms like "sRGB, "gamma," and "color profile." Talks about where colorspaces come from, what they look like, and why … Read More

Three New Systems of Dynamic Components

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:00:42 +0000

The Dynamic Component System is now firmly established in our gameplay architecture. We’ve realized substantial benefits in workflow and performance from implementing gameplay as Dynamic Components. In this presentation, I provide a brief introduction to a few gameplay systems of … Read More

Down the concurrency rabbit hole

admin — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 07:00:36 +0000

This presentation was an introduction to solving concurrency problems. In particular it was about breaking down previously held beliefs and approaches that in fact make multi-threading and multi-core problem solving seem much more difficult than it actually is. The key … Read More

GDC09 – SPU Wrangling

admin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:22 +0000

Here's a GDC presentation outlining our SPU job-manager and some tried-and-tested SPU debugging practices – it touches on details such as job-layout, the job-building process and some of the debugging assistance it provides – it concludes by walking through two … Read More

Resistance 2 Water Rendering

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:00:27 +0000

Fundamentally, the system simulates waves propagating across a planar surface. Each component wave is a sinusoid, and a detailed height field is generated by summing many such waves. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) provides an efficient way to perform the … Read More

GTC09 – How a Physics Solver Works

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:00:27 +0000

This year I spoke at GTC about how a physics solver works. My intention was to provide a simple run-through of rigid bodies, constraints, and how they are used to pre-condition a solution. The presentation is meant to be comprehensive … Read More

GDC09 – Resistance 2 Prelighting

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:00:17 +0000

Resistance 2 had a big dynamic lighting overhaul from previous Insomniac titles. Here Mark Lee describes the new lighting and shadowing schemes used and touches on some of the implementation gotchas.

PDF… Read More

GDC09 – Insomniac Physics

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:00:14 +0000

This year I had the opportunity to be part of Insomniac’s all day tutorial for GDC. I gave a presentation on Insomniac’s proprietary physics system, describing the evolution of its pipeline from inception to current day. In this presentation I … Read More

GDC09 – Gameplay Systems on the SPU

admin — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:00:05 +0000

This presentation, given as part of the Insomniac tutorial at GDC 2009, describes some of the systems and conventions used to support gameplay code on the SPUs.

PDF… Read More

Online Co-op Bot Synchronization

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:00:07 +0000

Heather Barclay (Multiplayer Lead Programmer) gave an introduction to the programming team on our approach to synchronizing the network data for Resistance 2 Co-op mode. For those of you playing the game now, you know how crazy these games can … Read More

Ratchet & Clank Worldwide Studios Debrief

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:00:06 +0000

In February, we gave a presentation to the Sony first-party studios on how we progressed during the development of Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Technology. The purpose of these presentations is to share with other developers and to give … Read More

Normal Maps and Cube Maps For Everyone

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:00:03 +0000

Continuing our For Everyone series. Chester Hsieh (Associate Engine Programmer) had a go at describing how normal and cube maps work to the general studio population. This presentation is for the curious that might want to know a bit more … Read More

Sound Formats for Everyone

admin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:00:47 +0000

Driven by hardware design and media requirements, sound file formats are constantly changing. For example, on the PS3 we encode and decode an AD-PCM format for the majority of our sound sources during playback. On computers and portable music devices, … Read More

Gameplay on SPUs

admin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:00:29 +0000

What does a next-gen engine look like? Well, for one thing, it needs to take advantage of the multi-CPU architectures. Scalable systems don't just happen, they're designed that way. I was lucky enough to give a presentation at Sony Devcon … Read More

Dynamic Component System

admin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:00:11 +0000

A year ago, we talked about a Gameplay Architecture for Performance, and since then, we’ve been hard at work putting our ideas into practice. The Dynamic Component System is our way of expressing gameplay in bite-size chunks that can be … Read More

Optimization 101

admin — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:00:26 +0000

Usually in presentations, what we (or anyone else really) usually give to the audience are answers (hopefully!) to some interesting problem. Especially when it comes to optimization techniques. It seemed to me there was a big gap there – certainly … Read More

MobyAsyncUpdate

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:00:56 +0000

We here at Insomniac don't discriminate – we think all code belongs on the SPU. Engine programmer and good looking S.O.B. Joe Valenzuela describes the AsyncMobyUpdate and Guppy systems, which we use to make sure our gameplay and AI code … Read More

GPU Pipeline for Everyone

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:00:52 +0000

This is article features a simple introduction to how Directx 9.0 graphic-processing units (also referred to as GPUs) operate.

The article will briefly cover polygons, vertices, indices, transforms as well as Fragment and Vertex programs.

Correction 10/26/09:

On page … Read More

Moby Bounding Spheres

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:00:34 +0000

On R1 we had the PPU dynamically update moby bounding-spheres using collision primitives bound to animated joints. This scheme was reworked for RCF to run asynchronously on the SPU and to also create separate bounding-spheres for rendering related tasks and … Read More

AsyncCharacterX

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:00:18 +0000

One of the things I've been most excited about lately here at Insomniac is our push to move higher-level gameplay code on to the SPUs – and have this be done by our gameplay programmers – AND make sure they … Read More

SPU Shuffle Mask Helper

admin — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:00:42 +0000

here’s a small snippet of code which calculates shuffle-masks using the

standard convention we use (which came from ICE / SCEE-ATG)

here’s the brief details of the naming convention

(see shuffles.pdf for more info):

characters A-P specify bytes

Faster SPU Clamp

admin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:00:41 +0000

Mike Day wrote:

I just had a thought…

Using the ‘standard’ approach it takes 4 spu instructions to clamp a floating point value (or vector of 4 values) to the range [0.0f, 1.0f]… compare against zero, select x … Read More

Dyadic Interpolation

admin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:00:24 +0000

Given a set of equally-spaced samples of some function, we’d like to be able to make educated guesses for the values which the function would take on at points located half-way between the samples. If we had a scheme for … Read More

Progressive Mesh

admin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:00:24 +0000

For a while during the development of Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, we were using a progressive mesh system for our LODs. We've since abandoned this approach for various reasons which I'm not going to get in to … Read More

Debugging Tips

admin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:00:23 +0000

Methods of debugging aren't usually discussed that much – people have their own tried and tested methods – in this presentation we tried to share some of the strategies used by members of the tech team.

PDF… Read More

GDC 2008 – Insomniac SPU Programming

admin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:00:34 +0000

This year, Eric Christensen and I were planning on speaking together at GDC on our SPU programming practices. But we were told that they prefer presentations with only one speaker, since they tend to be rated higher. So I went … Read More

Morphing

admin — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:00:21 +0000

For Resistance 2 we added vertex-morphing support to allow more expressive facial animation. This was augmented with a system for compositing textures on the SPU to support features such as animator-driven dynamic-wrinkles.

PDF… Read More

Remez Exchange Algorithm

admin — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:00:16 +0000

I was just telling Mark about some stuff I’ve been doing at home lately, and I thought I’d share. I’ve been trying my hand at the so-called Remez Exchange Algorithm, which is an iterative technique for finding coefficients of minimax … Read More

Prelighting

admin — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:00:07 +0000

During the development of Resistance 2, one of the things we decided we wanted to do was improve our lighting model toward more of a focus on runtime light performance. With deferred rendering all the rage, we certainly considered it. … Read More

Ragdolls and IK

admin — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:00:52 +0000

The purpose of this presentation is to briefly outline the igPhysics system and to aid in understanding about Ragdoll and IK. As a primer, it describes some of the most common joint types used in the system as well as … Read More

Win32 NTFS Journal Dump

admin — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:00:39 +0000

Below is the code for a very simple tool that will dump the change journal, in its entirety, directly from the NTFS device driver. The journal normally holds a couple of weeks of disk history. The code below dumps everything … Read More

Win32 Profile Tool

admin — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:00:21 +0000

I dug out the old win32 profiler code, it needs a little clean up but it’s all functional. Samples are 32 bytes each and each function call takes one sample, there is a buffer of samples in memory and this … Read More

More on SPU Shaders

admin — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:00:10 +0000

SCEA had a little get-together with a small group of SPU programmers recently. It was a chance for us to share the kinds of techniques we use and discuss our approaches with developers with similar levels of experience. It was … Read More

Resistance: Fall of Man Debriefing

admin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:00:52 +0000

What's in this presentation?

Everything you wanted to know about Resistance: Fall of Man, but were afraid we wouldn't tell you.

Mark Lee (Master Engine Programmer) gave a talk to some Sony first-party studios last year on Resistance: Fall … Read More

Insomniac and SCEA Talk SPU Physics

admin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:00:45 +0000

Recently I had the pleasure of working closely with SCEA’s Erwin Coumans, author of the Bullet open-source physics engine. Our plan was to create a presentation for Sony’s SPU seminar in which we compared and contrasted the run-time pipelines of … Read More

Introduction to B-Trees

admin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:00:43 +0000

The b-tree data structure is container system somewhat like a binary tree (although the “b” stands for balanced and the tree is not binary). The API to a b-tree is usually similar to other key-to-data systems such as a hash … Read More

Curiously Small Code

admin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:00:35 +0000

Here’s an email thread Mike Day and I had on the tech (engine) mailing list a while back trying to find a really quick way to do a texture swizzle on the SPU. There’s a few techniques in there that … Read More

Tier System

admin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:00:58 +0000

Giac Veltri (Tools Programmer), among other things, wrote the loading system for RCF. The loading system is where all the edge cases for the systems tend to collect – dealing with initialization, memory layouts, movie players, TRC issues, etc. – … Read More

Occlusion Systems

admin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:00:54 +0000

In a Tech presentation, Al Hastings (CTO) shared the details of both the static and dynamic occlusion systems that we used for both Resistance: Fall of Man and Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

Our static occlusion system … Read More

Texture Streaming

admin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:00:14 +0000

One of the big changes we made in going from Resistance to Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction was the adding our texture streaming system. Through a little Al Hastings's magic, we managed to increase our texture budgets significantly … Read More

Virtual Memory System on Nintendo Gamecube

admin — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 07:00:54 +0000

Here at Insomniac we’re dedicated to making the best games we can for Sony’s Playstation 3 – that’s all we do and that’s all we’re concentrating on. But at the same time, that’s not to say our guys haven’t worked … Read More

Sound Occlusion and Diffraction

admin — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 07:00:22 +0000

Providing dynamic sound occlusion and diffraction effects enhances listener immersion in 3D space. In his presentation, David Thall (Sound Programmer) introduces a system for calculating and processing these effects in our game engine. Topics such as input data reliability, calculation … Read More

Shadows in Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction

admin — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 07:00:22 +0000

A couple of months ago Mark Lee presented a good breakdown of our dynamic shadow system for one of our internal Tech Presentations. Shadows are sometimes frustrating, often a pain, and always have more edge-cases than you anticipate. Mark spoke … Read More

Custom Shaders and Effects

admin — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 07:00:17 +0000

From another weekly presentation – Rob Wyatt reviewed with the programmers some of the different options for applying custom graphics shaders within the engine. Rob gave some really detailed implementation examples for anisotropic, cloaking and fur that were added during … Read More

Networks and Networking

admin — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 07:00:10 +0000

Eric Ellis, our Multiplayer Lead Programmer, recently did an internal presentation on the basics of networking. Here Eric overviewed fundamental network concepts and summarized the techniques used in Insomniac’s previous networked games. While a lot of the detail that Eric … Read More

SPU Instruction Cheat Sheet

admin — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:00:58 +0000

Here’s a handy three page cheat sheet some of our guys use for quick reference when writing SPU code.

Text version: spu_ops.txt
PDF version: spu_instruction_cheat_sheet.pdf

Supporting Cylinder Collision

admin — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:00:54 +0000

Reddy Sambavaram did some work recently to add cylinder support to our collision system. He had to work out a couple of good, fast methods for testing cylinders versus every other type of collision primitive we already have. He shared … Read More

SPU Shaders Introduction

admin — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:00:17 +0000

In a previous post (Dynamic SPU Code), I hinted at something we’re calling “SPU Shaders”. Now that we’re fairly comfortable, as an engine team, with building systems for the SPUs we’ve been working on how to step things up for … Read More

Autodesk Mental Ray

admin — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 07:00:14 +0000

As part of our static lighting pipeline here at Insomniac, we use Autodesk's mental ray. We often get questions about how we process this data and how we encorporate it into our tools.

Here's a quick summary for those … Read More

SPU Ninja Homework #3

admin — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 07:00:48 +0000

Here at Insomniac we’ve started an SPU training class which we call SPU Ninja Training. It’s an optional class open to our programmers. The main idea is that we introduce some problem to solve on the SPU and programmers … Read More

Configuring VNC on PS3

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:54 +0000

André Leiradella, who has started doing some consulting work for us from Brazil has written a document describing how he set up VNC with his PS3/Linux box. We've been using PS3/Linux to do development here and there when we're working … Read More

A Hair-Tearing Out Bug

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:20 +0000

A couple of weeks ago Mike Day (one of our engine programmers) sent this email out to the group. He collected up a particularly painful moment and turned it into a little quiz that everyone could enjoy. Check out the … Read More

Gameplay Architecture for Performance

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:18 +0000

Here is a presentation given to the programmers at Insomniac Games on July 6, 2007. It covers two related topics. First we consider a case study of an optimization to NPC AI used on Resistance: Fall of Man. Then we … Read More

Beware of Statics

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:17 +0000

While working on an optimization for the FXVis system, I managed to make some code slower just by rearranging some statics it was using. Not one to take something like this lying down, I looked into it, and learned something … Read More

Process Memory Utility

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:15 +0000

The amount of content that needs to be managed, converted and otherwise manipulated by our PC tools never stops growing. Games are getting bigger all the time. The struggle with hard drive space, memory and network speed is part of … Read More

Effects Conduit

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:15 +0000

Here is a presentation given to the programmers at Insomniac Games on Febrary 28, 2007, about our Effects Conduit. The Conduit is a system for coordinating various types of effects (e.g. visual, sound, and dialogue). It allows programmers to focus … Read More

Curved Surfaces on the RSX

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:11 +0000

While the Cell processor is certainly the heart of the Playstation 3, understanding its graphics processor (the RSX) is also an important part of the engine team's work. The game we're currently working on, Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of … Read More

Multithreading Optimization Basics

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:08 +0000

We're now knee deep in the world of multi-core processing. Virtually everything we do must consider synchronization and parallelism as part of the fundamental design – it's not ported to multi-core, it's designed multi-core. However, there's still legacy code as … Read More

Dynamic SPU Code

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:06 +0000

When Eric Christensen and I were speaking at Georgia Tech, one of the big points we'd made was that on the SPUs, "Code is just data." There's nothing special about it and really no reason at all why you shouldn't … Read More

Why rotqmbybi is Broken

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:04 +0000

I feel that the operation carried out by the instruction rotqmbybi is broken. The instruction executes as documented, but I don’t believe it achieves what its designers originally planned. (Or, if it was designed that way, I contend that it … Read More

igCollision

admin — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Garrett gave an internal talk about igCollision a while back. This was one of our weekly presentations where we try to share something we've done, something we're working on, or something we just think would be generally helpful to … Read More