A howl on the wind…

BioShock for PC from Steam.

In a word: Underwhelming.

I expected so much more from this game, and it failed in every way. Weapons are boring, plasmids are bland and don’t feel very powerful, enemies are annoying and get really old really fast, scripted events are predictable, story totally failed to capture me, and the environment is almost exactly opposite of what I want.

I got all that from the 1.5 hours I spent playing it. And then I watched the Spoiler Warning play-through of it which confirmed my assumptions; it is simply not a game I would ever enjoy. Maybe if they juiced up the plasmids a lot and let the “mana” regenerate on its own…

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for PC from Steam, played with keyboard and mouse.

Looks great, but the controls are awful. Hitting your target with a force thrown object is basically random chance. And switching to 2D mode for boss battles makes them stupidly difficult…suddenly, all that you learned playing in the 3D mode is taken away and you’re put in a platformer, only with even more broken controls; you think you’re about to Force Lightning the boss, and it just fizzles right next to them. And to top it all off, there are quick time events…

This could have been an awesome game if they fixed the controls and removed the QTEs, but as it is the controls ruin the experience.

For a longer review, this guy tells it like it is.

(Updated 2010-10-27: Re-run the test with latest clang++ from subversion)

A performance comparison of the speed of dynamic_cast operations in C++.

Idea from http://www.nerdblog.com/2006/12/how-slow-is-dynamiccast.html, who did not provide any source so I wrote my own more extensive tests.

Sources

• Ticks counted via cycle.h (local mirror)
• Source: speed-dynamic-cast.cpp

Things Tested

• reinterpret_cast on a known type
• virtual function call + reinterpret_cast
• member variable access + reinterpret_cast
• successful dynamic_cast to its own type
• successful dynamic_cast from the derived levels to lower levels
• failed dynamic_cast from the derived levels to an unrelated type

Continue Reading »

(there are also some older std::map benchmarks for GNU g++ 4.3.2 and MSVC++ 2010 beta 2)

A performance comparison of the speed of operations on the various set implementations used in C++. There are 16383 unique elements across which 1000000 insert, lookup, iterate, and erase operations are performed.

And this time I’ve left the raw tick numbers and enabled table sorting so you can compare for yourself. Just be aware that the Linux and Windows numbers cannot be compared against each other.

Sources

• Containers: std::set, std::unordered_set, boost::unordered_set, sorted_vector, sorted_deque
• Ticks counted via cycle.h (local mirror)
• Source: speed-set-int.cpp and speed-set-string.cpp

Continue Reading »

The task: Write a portable tool that takes a file name as first argument, and from that file outputs the number of lines, the longest line, the length of the longest line, and the line number of the longest line, in a binary-safe fashion (meaning, \n is the only reason a line should be delimited; embedded \0s may occur).

My sinister side goal is showing how complex the C code has to be in order to get performance near C++. It is possible to write a simpler version in C that is 20% faster for /usr/share/dict/words, but it is then 4x slower for the random files. It would also be possible to write a faster non-portable version using memory mapping, but can’t really call that simple. C++ has both readability and speed. If I missed some obvious portable optimization in the C code, let me know…

The contestants are: