Unreal Engine Code Issues Fixed By Third-party Company

An anonymous reader writes: Unreal Engine is the famous game engine that was used to implement such games as Unreal Tournament, BioShock Infinite, Mass Effect and many more. On March 19, 2014 Unreal Engine 4 was made publicly available from a GitHub repository. It was a big event for the game development industry. One of the companies that took an interest in this was PVS-Studio, who created a static C/C++ code analyzer. They analyzed the Unreal Engine source code and reported to Epic Games's development team about the problems they found. Epic suggested a partnership with PVS-Studio to fix those bugs, and their challenge was accepted. Now, PVS-Studio shares their experience in fixing code issues and merging corrected code with new updates in a major project that shares its source code.

Comments

Re: Problems causing Video effects?

[donscarletti]

You don't know what you are talking about. Drivers never quite follow the DirectX, OpenGL spec and always have some idiosyncrasies on this card or that to make them generate correct-ish results faster by cutting corners. I find my card getting completely different results to the reference implementation on a monthly basis (sometimes even missing draw calls completely or rendering with the wrong state). I found this particularly true when using DX9 style render states on DX11 class hardware. Neither AMD nor Nvidia will change a driver for you unless you can prove to them that the application is using the spec correctly and the observed results are demonstrably wrong. If you are an independent developer it's even worse since they don't make it easy to contact them.

Re:Problems causing Video effects?

[Zardus]

A long time ago, I set up Siege of Avalon (at that point, already a 5 year-old game) and, upon getting to some specific level, found that performance had gone down the toilet. I fiddled around for a while, then (for some reason) called the support number. They told me to update my video card drivers. I told them that the video card drivers were already about 4.5 years newer than the game itself, and so their suggestion made no sense. We debated for a while, but they stuck to their guns. I hung up, frustrated.

Updating my video card drivers fixed the issue.