The weekend went by and productivity was rather low. Friday night I was in the mood to code, but an over-excited friend convinced me to, not only go out, but actually drink to an excess.. like it happens once or twice in a year. We really enjoyed ourselves at the time, but from the time I came back home, straight into Saturday, regret took over 8)
Saturday I mostly slept, then I partied.. but with water ! Went back home before 5 AM, watched a movie on TV, went to sleep at 7AM. Slept the rest of the day, till late afternoon, were I went to some cafe/pub with a friend. There was some sort of artsy American crowd. They had some events, strange music, pictures slide-show using a projector and a computer (I wont say which computer (..you can guess (…..Mac people !!!))).
And.. it seems I won’t be able to take my summer vacations ! No Italy for me this summer. I usually take two weeks (one standard + one of paid holidays). But this time around, there is some project starting and I’ll be in Tokyo busy hitting deadlines.
To fly over to Italy and back it’s a pain. However, I was really looking forward to meet my friends and relatives. I kept promising to my relatives that I’d try to go back more often and instead the situation is getting worse. Ummmmmm !!!!
On the coding side, I started pretty much to rewrite M4D (again !). I’m going to use new and delete and organize everything with a scene-graph. The final plan is to overload new and delete so that objects are allocated in specific pools. Basically, a scene should have a different pool of objects, one for each type. That is one pool of one type, for each scene. Not just one pool for one type. That means that new and deleted are overloaded not just per class, but using an extra parameter: an handle to a pool manager. This should generally improve memory management, and also give me the chance to safely handle the scene teardown: kill all the pools at once, no need for individual releases of objects.
I did read a bit about memory management in OOP. Some paper from Microsoft claims that it’s not necessarily a good thing to write a custom OO memory manager. Apparently the default memory manager is usually smart enough to avoid bad fragmentation and excessive CPU usage. Still, I like the idea of a more tight management. It may end up not making a big difference in performance, but I can see eventual benefits for debugging. However, in general, when a game is running, one shouldn’t fiddle too much with memory allocation and deallocations.
Time to zzzzz !
Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized