Day 66: Shutting That Factory Down

Wow! It seems like the assignment wasn't as bad as expected for the Factory assignment. It was a bit tricky figuring out what pieces I was missing for properly compiling the code (static template member, storing pointers instead of members due to lack of abstract instantiation), not to mention the fact that whitespaces never come after macro backslashes for multi-line macros. Yegh. However! Due to the helpfulness of the professor and the overall simplicity of the assignment and testing, the factory is ready to roll!

As for capstone work, feast your eyes on this glorious imagery:

What is that? Profiler use for the first time in Ley Lines! Yes, it's ugly and for in-engine functions quite unintelligible for most uses, but it led me to realize an important CPU bottleneck for our game thread while running the vertical slice level.

It seems that leaving the Overlap Events tick box on actually does a lot of CPU harm, especially when the objects are constantly overlapping due to something like duplicate Procedural Floors. Fixing that up, it reduced the tick time by a large enough margin to take it out of the equation.

However! How does one profile C++ code? The Visual Studio profiler doesn't work; it definitely crashes the system. What can we do? Expose stats to the in-engine profiler! I can set the stat in a C++ function and it will be identified by a specified name while in-engine profiling. We shall see tomorrow!