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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.
Of course they can. If you calculate stupid stuff, the result will be stupid stuff.
Why do I feel like this is an ad for the code analyzer?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Only idiots "tend to blame drivers" for that shit.
The vast majority of changes in driver updates for AMD and nVidia are hacks for specific games to fix their broken shit and get them to not run like ass.
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.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
It does make a good case for their product. I look at most of that stuff and think "I have done that" and think how much time has been wasted diagnosing such bugs.
However, what concerns me is the potential noise that is not in the article. I am pretty sure there are a few things that it reports that are actually OK and these things weren't included. Though I admit that I don't know for certain this is the case.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Should have used OpenBSD. Freeing a object gets that memory address nuked immediately. Great dev platform for finding bugs because they do everything they can to make undefined behavior break instead of work most of the time.
The big question for me is do coding errors affect video rendering issues?
Sure. Just remember that the video driver is a whole bunch of code. It's code all the way down.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
At least the part about:
The vast majority of changes in driver updates for AMD and nVidia are hacks for specific games to fix their broken shit and get them to not run like ass.
Is quite true I'm afraid. NVidia frequently releases "Game Ready" drivers tuned for a specific game. Usually for high-profile new game releases, such as the Witcher 3 most recently.
This most recent batch of new "Game Ready" drivers fucked up my and other users systems by frequently crashing, causing the driver and the display to reset, sometimes even on the desktop while browsing. Sometimes this happens multiple times within a minute, rendering some games unplayable. This is one of the threads on the latest clusterfuck on this issue: NVidia display driver stops responding.
Still no fix from NVidia.