Been a while..

Well it’s been a while since I last updated my blog. For the past few months i’ve been settling into my new role in my new london based company. So far things have been really great both in terms of socially integrating into the community of the company (really important in terms of encouraging a strong work ethic) and as well as developing my knowledge base and skills as a games programmer. It’s strange because i’m the only junior coder in the entire company which is a little daunting sometimes when your surrounded with a whole wealth of knowledge and experience but I’ve been keeping myself open to learning new things and have tried to be as careful as I can be when writing critical code in terms of making sure it’s stylistically consistent with the rest of the guy’s work whilst adding my own little flavour to keep my stuff readable, well structured and maintainable.

So far i’ve been working on a PSP project which is great being my first forray into the handheld hardware space which does throw up alot of considerations you can just ignore on the PC. It’s suprising how close the hardware is to the ps2 (with some interesting differences) and I’ve had a whale of a time getting my head around vFPU programming; vectorizing and laying out my accelerated math libs with major considerations towards data access/storage across the vector registers. It was a little disheartening though to find out that after spending several weeks writing and testing my vFPU math libs (which ran like lightning in my remote tests when compared to running the FPU equivalents..), they not only didn’t provide much savings with respect to overall, real-world performance (when used with our animation system in particular) but in some cases actually ran slower due to excessive stalls during load/store ops to and from the vFPU registers. I suspect that using an intrinsic-based library would have worked much better but in the end the quickest fix came from graphics-side optimisations our lead did in the engine and thus, we ended up shelving my vFPU code and moving onto other things.

Ah well such is the nature of the job I suppose!

That’s about it for now anyways. I’ll try and get back soon to drop some more goings on in between writing lip syncing (viseme generation) tools, working on SMC (my xna game) and Orbit (a small xna puzzle game I started on at work..) & playing Halo 3 (at home)..

Until then..