Saturday 1 March 2014

A Change Is As Good As A Rest

Work

It seems my buss-mans holiday paid off this time. Within two hours of hitting the code again, I discovered that although the LOAD OBJECT command was gobbling a little more memory than it should, the real villain of the piece was LOAD IMAGE which had been placing MOST of the texture content in system memory as a managed backup.  My building ate 23MB in the old Image DLL, but with some extra code to ensure certain commands could still lock a video memory texture, my new Image DLL loaded the same building in at 9MB. Multiply this effect by an entire level and you will start to appreciate how this single tweak has improved your lives in Reloaded land :)

My investigations also saw the LOAD OBJECT memory usage double when the LOAD EFFECT applied it's magic to it, so there is something very suspicious happening there too.  Going to stop my weekend work for how, and celebrate my code win with some good, and Sunday/Monday I will chase down the reason for the shader taking my 3MB model up to 6MB (and then find out why my model was 3MB in the first place given that the vertex data cannot be more than 1MB).

Play

In order to think laterally, you need to approach a problem for an entirely new direction. Leaving your code for a week, then returning to it is one way to do that, and leaving it to talk geek for a week is probably the best way to prepare your brain for the comeback.

5 comments:

  1. Any ETA on the Construction kit?

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  2. As of the Beta 1.005 is LUA the sole scripting language now or is FPI still available before total extinction? Not asking to favor one over the other, just trying to get some custom scripts done and not sure in which language to script...?

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  3. PS: any know ETA for the construction Kit /\ ???

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  4. As far as I know, FPI was only integrated minimally or not at all in Reloaded before LUA came in. In any case, you definitely should be learning LUA because FPI will not stay.

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  5. LUA is all we will support. We have lots more to do in this area and you'll see that developing significantly over the coming weeks.

    The Construction Kit is being developed and we'll show more videos of it later this week. We have been making an easy mode first to ensure it's very simple to make a room in similar speed to FPSC Classic.

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