Archive for February, 2010

Let there be multithreading

It’s been a fascinating odyssey/nightmare, but the Vessel engine is finally multi-threaded! What does this mean? Much larger volumes of fluid, much larger fluid creatures, and generally just a lot more splashing about.

Martin had already done his share with rendering being multithreaded ages ago, but it wasn’t until after the IGF/IGC builds that I decided to bite the bullet and pull apart the physics and gameplay code into separate threads. This caused a seemingly never-ending stream of issues because the gameplay and the physics are so tightly coupled in Vessel, but luckily they proved to be a finite number and it’s working well now. We’ve got three threads running pretty solidly, and the stage is set to easily break the physics thread up into even smaller individual jobs which can then be scheduled from a thread pool (which will really speed things up when we make our way to PS3/XBox and have a lot more hardware threads to play with).

This was something I wanted to get out of the way ASAP because it will have such a dramatic effect on the design of the game – the design of the Fluros, the types of puzzles we create, etc. It also represents a direction we want to push the game in generally – more about interactions with the simulations on a grand scale.

So just for fun I dropped a tsunami in the workshop level:

Vessel makes the Indie Game Challenge, needs votes!

We’ve been announced as a finalist in the Indie Game Challenge! Congrats to the other finalists, and click through to vote for Vessel.

Awards will be given out at the DICE summit in Las Vegas, with separate prizes for student and professional, and an audience award depending on votes.  See you in Vegas!  If we win it’s all going on Red…