Discussion topic for post: http://www.starsonata.com/blog/weekly-d ... 9th-march/

But everyone keeps telling me that the game is dying.

Maybe there is a secret server, hosting all the other customers!

Why exactly do you wait on intel vtune free trials? If you actually are waiting for it to give you a trial again then it's clearly worth purchasing, right?

sekret to getting debt free: use free trials

Because it's pricey software (iirc the cheapest is 1k USD, not sure if there's per year, per user or per computer or what though) and reasons that Jey knows because it'd be his money (and piracy is wrong, children).

SS makes over 50k a year easily. Wouldn't 1k for such a huge improvement in performance be a no brainer as an investment? Especially if it's a 1 time purchase

Probably, but that's between Jeff and Jey.

nope we have to keep hiring (hahaa) volunteer devs and living off the scraps

Didn't know Pixel and Jey were the same person.

I have no idea how that happened, but fixed.

While id love to convince jeff to fork the grand for vtune (believe me i would !) I cant really give a good argument to do that every years since generally by the end the trial is over i optimised all that i could and i end up restricted on rather hard to optimise scenarios (like right now with my scenario containing 15000 projectiles and some laser spams) Any further optimisation would have to be more on a structure side of things.

The code that execute the projectile movement and render now use less cpu than the time the cpu spend to read the data from the ram. I did improve that by adding some prefetch hints to the variables we know will be needed shortly but the impact of those is extremely cpu/motherboard dependent. Ram might have high bandwidth compared to hdd/ssd but its still incredibly slow when you look at it in term of latency. Accessing a variable that was not in cache at the time is anywhere between 50 to 300 cpu cycles (in comparison, an if logic operator is 1 to 3) and with that amount of sobs theres very few cpu out there with enough cache to just fit everything and you end up with some cache miss.

Not to say i dont have plans to improve that further, but they dont fit in the scope of this optimization pass.

Speaking of optimalisation... Any ETA on the patch?

The eta is 2 weeks ago ! as for the specific release, youll know it at the same time i do XD. Still gotta a few issues to fix on it. I rather delay the patch, than patch something i know will crash.

Why I'm i mentioned everywhere in this? Yes I'm totally Jeff + Jey + Ryan into one condensed pixel!