Welcome to my new blog. Some may have noticed that updates to the http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/ website were very infrequent, to say the least. By installing a standard solution for blogging (WordPress) my hope is that I will be better able to share some (hopefully) interesting comments with the world.
Of interest in this update is that I’ve added an article that revisits the topic of combining absolute and relative tolerance comparisons into a single test. This article expands on the coverage in both my book as well as my coverage in the GDC presentations on numerical robustness.
Read the article here: Combined absolute and relative tolerances revisited.
Hi Christer, I’m glad to see you on the blogging circuit.
I read a post of yours on some forum a long time ago where you referred to some interview question as being a nice study of memory management. Do you remember this? It would be great to see an article about the particular problem (or any other cool memory management ideas).
Hi Erin, nice of you to stop by!
You are refering to Sucker Punch‘s programming problem for programmer applicants. I think it’s a brilliant problem, testing data structures, memory management, bit twiddling, and a bit of everything in a single easy-to-understand task. When I first saw it I had to write an implementation just for the sake of it, because it was such a cool problem. (No, I didn’t apply.)
I’m afraid I can’t really comment on the particular problem, because I know several of the Sucker Punch guys, and they would be very angry with me if I posted a solution to the problem, which might force them to drop the test and come up with another one (which, from experience, is no easy task in and of itself).
But duly noted anyway. Any particular type of memory management you were thinking of?
Well thanks for the link at least. :) It is a nice problem, I’ll have to give it a shot.
Currently I’m interested in allocation schemes that reduce the number of heap allocations, such as stack allocators, small block allocators, etc. I’m curious what your opinions and advice are for memory usage inside the game loop in terms of fragmentation and performance.
I know that some games have shipped that have zero heap allocations inside the game loop, while others make thousands of heap allocations per frame.
I am so stoked about this! Your RTCD book remains one of my three favorite dev-related books of all time, and I am very pleased indeed to discover that you’ve started blogging.