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Archives
Posts from Mark Randel 
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President & CTO of Terminal Reality Inc. |
Sandy Bridge and Game Development
By Mark Randel (9 posts) on January 11, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Comments (0)
When we were making Ghostbusters a few years ago, we were approached by Intel to try out their new 4 series graphics media accelerator systems. After working closely with Intel for over a year, we were very happy with the resulting performance of the game, and the Graphcis Performance Analyzer tool. Ghostbusters out of the [...]
Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media
Tags: Sandy Bridge
Game Editor Parallelization in the Infernal Engine
By Mark Randel (9 posts) on May 10, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Comments (1)
In previous blog entries, I have talked a lot about parallelization of the game loop and how to make good use of two or more threads while your game is running. But this is only the tip of the iceberg of what you can actually parallelize. While it is still ongoing (it may never end...), [...]
Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media
Tags: parallel programming
Faster Scenery Displacement Mapping
By Mark Randel (9 posts) on February 9, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Comments (0)
Often times, the simplest and most elegant algorithms are obvious, but take the longest to figure out. In one level for an Infernal Engine game, we wanted to fully displacement map every pixel in our scenery, but we couldn't afford the complexity of the shader on each and every pixel. One solution would be to [...]
Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media
Fun with CULV and Ubuntu 9.10
By Mark Randel (9 posts) on January 11, 2010 at 1:12 pm
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For the past few years, Ubuntu has been my favorite Linux distribution. With a fresh install of Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 on my CULV Core2 Duo SU7300 Timeline 1810T, I was getting around 3.5 hours of battery life. This was not even half the promised battery life (8 hours) from the manufacturer. Diagnosing and fixing the [...]
Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media
Tags: CULV
Fun with CULV
By Mark Randel (9 posts) on January 4, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Comments (0)
CULV is the line of Intel's new ultra low voltage processors for laptops - this means higher performance and great battery life. It gives you more computing power when you need it (it even can run the Infernal Engine Editor!!!), hardware HD video playback, and stellar battery life that you are used to with your [...]
Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media
Tags: CULV
Highlights and Challenges During Ghostbusters Development, Part 4
By Mark Randel (9 posts) on July 7, 2009 at 8:07 am
Comments (3)
Synchronization between threads in the Infernal Engine Thread synchronization is a complicated problem and rarely discussed in practice. We came to our own conclusions via experimentation and what worked well for us during the production of Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters used two kinds of synchronization primitives, "crude locks" and "critical sections". A crude lock is the lowest [...]
Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media
Tags: Game Development, GPA
Highlights and Challenges During Ghostbusters Development, Part 3
By Mark Randel (9 posts) on June 30, 2009 at 7:05 am
Comments (4)
Game Optimization Challenges for Modern Hardware Although we seem to have hit a ~3GHz limit in processor speed, Moore's law may still be holding as more and more cores are added to a processor at this speed. As processors have gotten faster and faster, memory latency has gotten longer and longer over time. This means [...]
Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media, Parallel Programming
Tags: Game Development, parallel programming
Highlights and Challenges during Ghostbusters Development, Part 2
By Mark Randel (9 posts) on June 24, 2009 at 9:42 am
Comments (2)
Game Loop Parallelization in the Infernal Engine In the old days of single processor computers, your game loop would run every process for the game in single step, the results were 100% deterministic. Your game loop looked much like the following: 1. Run the tick code for every actor 2. Perform rigid body simulation 3. [...]
Category: Game Development, Graphics & Media, Parallel Programming
Tags: Game Development, parallel programming
Highlights and challenges during the Ghostbusters development, Part 1
By Mark Randel (9 posts) on June 15, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Comments (4)
Ghostbusters was an unusually long project for us - we started in January 2006 with a prototype. For the first nine months of development, we were working on recreating the ballroom scene where Slimer is captured from the first movie, obtaining the movie license, and getting a green light to develop the project. At the [...]