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Showing posts from August, 2021

Hierarchy - UI improvement

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This time light topic of UI designing :] But before this let's discuss how the hierarchy in the engine works. So it was easier to understand these, let's look at the tooling of it:    We have there: World (ID:0) Loaded Stream (Citadel Island) Loaded SubStream (CI.Citadel) Unloaded SubStream (CI.Logic) Folders (f.ex. Park) Entities (f.ex. Ferry) If you are curious what a Stream is, you can think about it as a scene or a level. Now that we know all of this let's look a little bit closer at what we have.  Streams and SubStreams are exactly the same  I change the name based on their position in the hierarchy. The  Folders  may look different than Entities but they are exactly the same. They are  Entities  with a folder component. If we go this way streams are also just  Entities  with a Stream Component. This leaves us with a bunch of the entities under the World . Which as you can suspect is just an  Entity with ID equal to 0....

Nvidia - unsigned integer issues

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Yesterday I experienced another bunch of fun while using my laptop. My normal working environment is a desktop with an AMD graphics card, while choosing a laptop it was important for me to get some Nvidia GPU so I could test code on both machines. This was a smart decision as there are so many differences between them. This time I encounter another one. History Like always a little bit of the background: while doing tooling you need to think about nice interactive objects selections. The beginning was rough as I decided to use a physics ray-trace system to execute picking. This was a simple system where I was sanding a ray thru the world and tried to pick objects that collide with it.  The issue was: every object needed to have a collision body  it did not work very well with objects that had an alpha mask  did not support geometry that was deformed in shaders. I did not like any of these limitations so I decided one day to change the whole thing. I took this time a diffe...

Resource Center - High CPU usage

This is one of the recent issues that I was tracking This issue is pretty simple but because of that, its solution is not so trivial. So let's dig into it. The resource center is a standalone app that: Is a remote file system server  Integrate with Version Control System (currently P4) Is a resource server that is responsible for building resources Manage remote resource builders.  Manage the creation of game build Have UI which allows to browse the file system and trigger compilation of resources and build.   All communication uses TCP/IP sockets and most operations are async for performance reasons.  Recently I was doing changes to speed up the remote file system. I decided to switch all calls into async processing. While doing that I was put in front of the decision: Should I put all processing of connection read/write operations to a single thread? or maybe I should create a separate thread for each of them? I naively decided to go with a sing...