General Spark Questions
UrbanConflict
Join Date: 2004-01-01 Member: 24939Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2004-01-01 Member: 24939Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">This is mostly for Max...</div>Hey Max,
Love the work you are doing. I just had some questions about the Spark Engine and a few of its inner workings, and perhaps able to send some advice / feedback.
1) I guess the big one stands out is that in a previous interview you stated you were using Visual Studio 2k5, not sure if have migrated to a newer version or not, but what types of processor optimizations are you implementing? Are you simply setting the /arch and /O2 ( or /Ox ) flags or are you implementing your own vector math classes that can take advantage of SSE3, 4, 4.1, etc., Also 2k5 is terrible for optmizing loops and timers that use QueryPerformanceCounters and GetTickCount.
2) Are there any consistency checks being performed on the game modules such Engine.dll or NS2.exe? I asked you in Twitter about the anti-cheat and you said a simple consistency checks on the Lua files, but this doesn't stop client sided cheats ( what happened with NS1 ).
3) I know it is a plan for multi-threading and multi-core support which will help with a lot of the CPU intensive processes, is there a plan already designed for these? Have you considered using CUDA for off-loading the FPU calculations onto a graphics card? I know you are using PhysX along with D3D ( forgot version number, but I think its 9 ).
I'm sure I'll think of more later, but if I can lend a hand in any way, I would love to.
Love the work you are doing. I just had some questions about the Spark Engine and a few of its inner workings, and perhaps able to send some advice / feedback.
1) I guess the big one stands out is that in a previous interview you stated you were using Visual Studio 2k5, not sure if have migrated to a newer version or not, but what types of processor optimizations are you implementing? Are you simply setting the /arch and /O2 ( or /Ox ) flags or are you implementing your own vector math classes that can take advantage of SSE3, 4, 4.1, etc., Also 2k5 is terrible for optmizing loops and timers that use QueryPerformanceCounters and GetTickCount.
2) Are there any consistency checks being performed on the game modules such Engine.dll or NS2.exe? I asked you in Twitter about the anti-cheat and you said a simple consistency checks on the Lua files, but this doesn't stop client sided cheats ( what happened with NS1 ).
3) I know it is a plan for multi-threading and multi-core support which will help with a lot of the CPU intensive processes, is there a plan already designed for these? Have you considered using CUDA for off-loading the FPU calculations onto a graphics card? I know you are using PhysX along with D3D ( forgot version number, but I think its 9 ).
I'm sure I'll think of more later, but if I can lend a hand in any way, I would love to.
Comments
Thank you for the kind words, let me (Max) offer you some insights in how I work:
1) My flag is set in the morning, and it goes down in the evening;
2) I try to keep a low profile whenever I'm cheating with my clients;
3) Last time I multi-threaded, my - at the time being- second wife left me, let's not go over this again.
thank you, greetings, Max.