A few days ago I stumbled upon an excellent talk by Shawn Hargreaves at Mix10. You can view it online, or download a high-def version of the video and PPT slide deck from here.
If you like what you see, you can get the demo Shawn shows from here.
So that said, a few points of my own to add:
I’ve seen some sluggish performance in the VS2010 ide, and thought i’d share how i improved performance:
That doesnt seem to make everything super fast, but it does help make it not-so-slow =D
-JasonS
a free ebook on dx10 stuff by some of the big guys in shader books:
http://wiki.gamedev.net/index.php/D3DBook:Book_Cover
interesting link on winning/loosing in games
http://www.lostgarden.com/2009/11/testosterone-and-competitive-play.html
here’s some resources i gathered on visual studio 2010 (new features + tricks)
Now that the Xna4 Beta is out, our team decided to take the plunge.
A few things to be aware of
Now is an ideal time to upgrade:
we are rewriting our rendering system, so best to do this as part of our shift to xna4, especially looking at a “fixed function fallback” system.
We already did some tests to make sure our code isnt a nightmare to port, so good times.
-JasonS
If you’ve ever had to do something like this:
if(someObject is MyType)
{
var myClass = someObject as MyType;
myClass.DoStuff();
}
then give this a try in critical (perf) sections instead:
var myClass = someObject as MyType;
if(myClass!=null)
{
myClass.DoStuff();
}
it reduces your cast operations to 1 instead of two, and offers similar readability.
enjoys
-JasonS
we are about 2/3 through our post e3 “fix up” month, and thought i’d share a tiny bit on what we are doing:
What was wrong with our E3 demo:
The e3 demo was pretty, but had some technical issues:
Tomorrow, I’ll start talking about the steps we are taking to resolve these issues.
-JasonS
I’m working on rendering infrastructure right now, and came up with an idea for how to store and sort renderPackets based on criteria efficiently using a binary heap.
What’s the BCL got?
That’s great, but I remembered seeing an MSDN article on a new BCL collection called SortedSet<T>
Nice features
It’s pretty sweet. As this CodeProject article describes, it has a neat Sub-Tree filter that can be used to partition the view, and it has good CPU performance with O(LogN) time.
Not good enough
Unfortunately, it seems like the BCL team is lapsing a bit on QC: SortedSet<T> is implemented using classes for Nodes, not structs. This has massive, harmfull, repercussions on CF.NET, and therefore makes SortedSet<T> unusable for a core, high-performance game system.
What’s to be done?
Thankfully, I can salvage the goodness of SortedSet’s features by implementing my own version of the class using a struct Node[] array as storage. It’ll take a little time, but I can use the BCL API’s as reference, and that will give me a SortedSet that offers good CPU and GC performance.
-JasonS
These are the holy scriptures of CF.NET performance,
specifically written for XNA’s XBOX360 CF.NET implementation 3 years ago, those people doing WP7 development should be able to learn extremely useful perf tuning tricks from these:
-JasonS