Week 66: tools (Patreon)

This week I focused on tools. I am attaching a video that shows some of the stuff I did.

During the weekend I created a tool to measure how long it takes for the game to carry out various tasks. The game must produce at least 60 frames every second. That corresponds to 16 milliseconds per frame. In this time, the software needs to process input from the user, calculate the physics and render it all on the screen. The tool shows a plot of what is happening in real time. Note that capturing the video skews the measurements. On a non captured run, it always takes 2 milliseconds or less to process a frame on my PC. Things are different on mobile phones (running on browser). While I don’t plan to have the final game running on phones, I want my demos to run decently on high-end phones. That’s why I need to keep an eye on performance.

I created another very useful tool. I called it Lua Console. The tool allows running Lua code while the engine is running. I already found the tool very useful for developing game logic this week. It was time well spent, I think.

I worked on many other things this week. I created software components that I’ll use next week to improve how the camera follows the player. I did some work on the game editor. I made it easy to run tools like valgrind and gprof on the game. Fortunately, Valgrind couldn’t find any issues. Phew!