djchump wrote:

C++ for netcode this intricate though?  For the physics solver, yes, but I once had the good fortune to attend a talk in which a highly ranked Facebook employee openly discussed the problems one can run into when using multithreaded C++ code to write a highly distributed web server. The system the dude described was said to parse close to 40GB of data per second, which to my mind, is mental. But perhaps less so now, as Netflix, Twitch and Youtube servers will routinely chuck about far more data than that. This will be a very different application though... There was talk of the Halo 5 team using F# for their netcode

I dunno anything about Halo 5 and hadn't heard of F# before - but from a cursory google I couldn't find any mention of it in relation to Halo 5, only that they'd used F# for the Trueskill stuff in Halo 3 - which I would presume is an offline data/analytic processing task, certainly not realtime. From cursory wiki read on F#, seems like it's a runtime interpreted/JIT language (like Java, .NET ... is C# JIT?), so in that respect it's highly unlikely to be used for their game server code simply for performance concerns. Typically you want to be as close to the ASM as possible, avoid any language with garbage collectors, use only a subset of C++ (e.g. no RTTI, pre-allocate as much as possible to avoid dynamic memory alloc/dealloc etc). Which is why I was pretty horrified when we got hired to port/tidy up Ace of Spades because it was mostly written in Python (fuck me). It's a miracle Minecraft works as well as it does in Java, but I'm pretty sure that when MS write Minecraft 2 it won't be in Java.

That's true. 

What confused me, was talk of the use of Microsoft Orleans as the tool of choice for netcode work on Halo 4.

The same dude who mentioned this (at another tech talk) suggested that Orleans was an F# project. But as Orleans is a .net project and not a pure #F library, then it's possible that 343 studios used another CLR language instead (though all of them are certainly garbage collected). An official word on whether 343 is using Orleans again for Halo 5 appears difficult to come by, although this strangely brief news items suggests they are using it for the latest Halo - http://www.gamingreality.com/2013/06/halo-5-smartglass-azure-orleans.html - Keen to find more details on that. The talk will be on the net somewhere, shurely.

The reason why you wouldn't want to use C/C++ for a webserver though? First would be synchronising the yield of each service (or parallelism)...
 
If you have two servers working in tandem to provide one service, one will need to know about the other. And as you can't account for a fixed rate of transfer between the two systems, you need to perform a few tricks to keep things moving. Some people have already solved that problem, and the tooling is said to work better than most C++ solutions (i.e. .net Orleans). 

I'd read about this in the past, but hearing a Facebook rep bring it up made the point stick, because they're not short of resources, and did actually replace a C++ system used for similar workloads (but a completely different application... The 40GB thing). The dude said the main issue was in using the tools C/C++ provided to maintain synchronous state in a massively parallel system. That would make sense, because at the very least, you'd have to have (and this is a crude explanation), and very busy central 'while' loop, that would keep running until one of the other servers (running a similarly busy loop) made a RPC call (or sends a UDP packet... whatevs) to say that it was ready. In that case, you would then have to break of that loop, perform what ever task the other server requested, spin off another while loop, but before you do, check to see if another server made a request for work... For that, you'd probably have to another separate while loop... Then discern priority... Plenty of stuff.

Like I say, I think it's fascinating, though it greatly taxes my grey little meatball...

Tangent. Apparently, these servers will be running Havok on top of Cuda. Which of course, only runs on Nvidia hardware.

http://fractalfantasy.net/#/4/uncanny_valley

Press H for options and stuff

No soz, I dunno. Probably based on UE4 or Jimenez.

He presented it at SigGraph this year if you want to read his presentation as a PDF (230MB, or compressed 34MB available: 

djchump wrote:

2015 course papers starting to go up here: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/index.html

Also, rest of SigGraph 2015 papers are pretty much out now: http://blog.selfshadow.com/2015/08/15/siggraph-2015-links/

froxel = "Frustrum-aligned voxel" 
i.e. a 3D acceleration-structure volume created in screenspace ready for raymarching.

djchump wrote:

froxel = "Frustrum-aligned voxel"  i.e. a 3D acceleration-structure volume created in screenspace ready for raymarching.

Ah, that makes sense. Well, enough of it did for me to accept the word, anyway.

It was the "aligned" that was missing.

Infinite monkeys no longer needed:

http://www.relativelyinteresting.com/the-labyrinthine-library-of-babel/

https://libraryofbabel.info/

http://www.wikihuman.org/

Is it my imagination or does that look a lot like Elmlea?

I thought this was extremely cool...



That... is uncanny valley right there...

So the guy next to me at work is reminiscing, as he's just hit 50.

Turns out he wrote Remote Desktop.  I'm slightly in awe.  Was showing me all his design notes, and presentations (printed onto transparent foils as there wasn't PowerPoint!) etc.  The day he joined the company (27 years ago...), Bill Gates was apparently over to talk business!

Meanwhile the the guy on the other side of me was one of the people who hacked the PSP.  It all makes me feel very inadequate!

To temper the above, another person on my wing has confessed to fucking a watermelon on national TV

acemuzzy wrote:

To temper the above, another person on my wing has confessed to fucking a watermelon on national TV

I bet the watermelon was dressed provocatively.

I've decided the time has come to transfer all the console and gaming stuff out of the front room into the attic room. Primarily so that the baby can't fuck with it and secondly to allow me to do some gaming upstairs a couple of nights a week.

I'll need to buy a new TV.. Something around the 50" I think. Don't want to spend a fortune and I don't really want either a Samsung (Not been happy with the sound from the current one) or a Sony (too expensive). Any recommendations?

Xiaomi is awesome!
I have the mi3c and it is fantastic. Miui is one of the most polished Android skins out there. Miles better than the Galaxy I had previously.
I have just ordered 2 mibands, one for the missus and one for me. Should be fun.