So in two weeks I’ll be at Gamescom with the Fun Punch Games team, showing off Strikers Edge, the multiplayer battle arena game I’m working on.
I’m taking the opportunity to show “Gateway” as well, to shop it around and see the public interest for it!
For that, I’m preparing a bunch of stuff to take with me, so expect some news on the blog soon, including the new teaser trailer and a new site for the game! To get updated on the latest online game trend, look at more info or just visit this site canadascasinos.ca
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Well, it’s a been a long time since I wrote something here…
The main reason is that I’m working in game development as a job, so most of my free time I don’t feel the urge to code games so much as before…
In case you’re curious, I’m working on “Striker’s Edge”, an arena based multiplayer game (both online and couch mode)… I’m working mainly on the network, AI and replay systems.
Here’s the teaser for it:
Anyway, this week I got some new art assets for the enemies, and I put them in the game to see how they look…
I’m not very happy with them… The sawblade is too large, the red one is difficult to make up in this area, the yellow one is hard to see on the desert… So, they still need a lot of work, even if they already look way better than the previous ones.
Anyway, it felt good working on Gateway again… Need to get my act together and really plunge into it once again!
Now listening to “Epsilon” by “Blood Stain Child”
Today I kind of had some time to work on “Gateway”, so I started working on loads of bugs I’ve found while working on the prototype.
Most of the ones I tackled today were pirate lair related…
It was some bad spawns, the whirlwind laser wasn’t hitting the player, cannons were firing on the wrong place, and such other stuff…
Now listening to “For Aeons Past” by “Solution .45”
No, the game isn’t dead! 
I’ve been working a game/multimedia development studio in the last few months, and my schedule has been a bit hectic, hence no updates for a while.
A lot of good things have come out of it… I’m loving my work, and I’m making new contacts!
Anyway, there has been some small interest in a couple of publishers about “Gateway”, so I’ve been preparing a demo for them to try it out and see if that interest can translate in some agreement to finance the last of the development of Gateway.
So, I did a lot of work on making the game more stable and intuitive, and I’ve prepared some documents and a gameplay video as well:
Hopefully this will help me and the company I work for secure funding to finish the game! Fingers crossed!
As updates to the blog are being a bit sporadic, a little explanation is in order…
I’ve started work on a new company, in game development… The problem with most new companies is that things are always really busy, getting contracts, financing, the instability of it all, etc, etc, etc, and as such, I’ve been working really hard, with no time beyond that to work on Gateway or any of my other projects and hobbies…
So, while this doesn’t mark the end of my projects, it will take me a while to be able to dedicate some time to them again, especially in this first month!
Things will go back to normal one way or the other! 🙂
Until then, just keep looking into the blog or on the Facebook page for some more info!
Today I squashed an old bug…
I had a cave planet whose generation ended up being this:
So the player couldn’t get out of the initial drop zone!
I have a lot of code to try to prevent this sort of thing, but sometimes some stuff falls through the cracks… That’s actually one of the big problems of procedural generation: you either have very boring and similar areas, or you risk having bad gameplay situations.
As most (all?) coders in the world, I hate writing documentation…
That’s what I did today, to finish off my work for OldJob™… So, I’m theoretically done with it (although I probably have some bugs to fix still, but let’s see)!
Next couple of days I’m going to finish getting ready for my NewJob™, go on a short vacation, then I’m getting some friends over for a week while starting the NewJob™…
So, I’ll have a busy couple of weeks, and I don’t expect much to get done on Gateway, so expect the blog posts to be a bit more sporadic!
Now listening to “Legend of the Shadowking” by “Freedom Call”
Today I finished getting my lab ready (well, it’s never really ready, but close enough):
I’ve installed Linux Mint, but it has some issues with my friend Synergy… Hopefully I’ll be able to fix them and still use it, since it’s quite nice (at least until now)…
Anyway, I’m finishing my work for my old employer… Just need to write some documentation to pass over the code, which will be quite boring… 
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to finish this and say goodbye once and for all! My heart really isn’t in this anymore!
Now listening to “Colony” by “In Flames”
So working on two things at the same time: getting a Linux Mint install to work properly, and finding a good way to debug/profile compute shaders…
Decided to try Linux Mint because I ran into a problem with some updates on Ubuntu 14.04… It’s not the first time this happens. I install something on Ubuntu and something breaks down and I spend several hours trying to figure out how to recover from it… This time, it was once too much, so I decided to try something different.
Unfortunately, when I try to install the NVidia drivers from their site something goes wrong and I get stuck on the login screen… I think it has something to do with how I’m uninstalling the nouveau drivers. For now, I’m leaving the drivers as is, since I need to do some work for my OldJob™ and I require a working Linux machine for it.
At the same time, I’m also trying to figure a good way to profile compute shaders. I got AMD’s GPU PerfStudio working, and it provides me some good info (apparently my reduce shader is taking 2ms to reduce 33 million elements), but this doesn’t account for retrieving the actual data, because everytime I add the code to lock the output buffer (through a Map method), it crashes the PerfStudio server…
So, not sure on how to proceed on that… Don’t see anybody else on the Internet with this issue, but I’ll keep on looking… 
Now listening to “Dreams and Imaginations” by “Two Steps From Hell”
After getting compute shaders working properly yesterday, decided to check some profiling…
After some moving code around, got some rudimentary profiling working. In terms of CPU flow, running the compute shader to sum 33 million elements took about 0.2 ms (against 37ms of CPU time)… This looks great, in theory…
But the reality is way more complicated…
This sort of commands are asynchronous, which means that when I run a compute shader, it’s not running immediately… It just gets placed in a queue for consumption later, so the time it takes me to actually setup the operations is what I’m measuring… So, if I want to do a bit more accurate measuring, I have to actually fetch the results. Here we hit a huge bottleneck in PCs: reading from the GPU to the CPU…
My initial work was pointing to 7 ms to fetch the result, which is way too much!
After some mucking around, I figured out this the time waiting on a result to be ready; but here is where things get tricky… For example, if I run a Present() command, that time goes down a bit (but that could be just because the present itself takes some time)… But if I do 2 Presents, the time goes to zero, and there’s no way 2 presents take those 7 ms! Even weirder, it seems that if I do a sleep of one second, the data is not ready as well..
My working theory is that the compute shader is not taking that long to run, but it only is marked as “done” (so the results can be fetched) when I do the Present call… So after the first present, the data is not ready yet… But when I do the second present, the data is there, and that’s why the time goes down to zero…
Although this is a theory that could explain some of the practical results, I’m not happy with it… There’s still some stuff that doesn’t jog with it… For example, if I do only one present, preceded by a sleep, it should have the data ready for me, but it doesn’t…
Anyway, I’ll investigate this in greater depth, and I’m going to see if I can find any tool that can give me some performance measurement on the GPU calls…
Now listening to “Roots” by “Sepultura”
