Game development considerations

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Float precision and Time in Unity

Float precision and Time in Unity Recently, I was tasked with addressing an interesting issue that occured in a Unity game. After the game run for about 2 days, it virtually stopped streaming in map assets during world locomotion. Assets were streamed in with a huge delay (up to x-teen seconds) and it simply wouldn’t do. After finding out what caused this strange bug, I thought it would make an interesting article to share with you. Both the problem, and the process of finding its origin were quite an interesting experience. Debugging Since the problem only occurred after at least 2 days of ‘soaking’, I knew time is going to play a role here. I started investigating the issue by looking at the custom streaming code used in the game. It consisted of a bunch of asset loading and unloading functions, called every tick. At the start of each tick, before calling the functions, the code would cache the current Time.realtimeSinceStartup, which is a timer managed by the Unity engine tha

My CD Projekt RED story, part 4

My CD Projekt RED story, part 4 We left off right after I had a chat with my lead, which I’m calling Dave here. I hoped that chat would help fix some of the problems brewing between the two of us. Alas, that’s not what happened. The very next day I could see Dave’s attitude towards me change for the worse. He would avoid looking me in the eyes and generally stay away from me. Hoping for the best Regardless of all the negative interactions I’ve had with my lead, I was determined to not let the conflict influence my daily work. I’d been as helpful to other developers as I could, enjoying fruitful cooperation with all the developers I worked with - gameplay designers, UI programmers, sound designers, the engine core team. This translated directly into my monthly ratings, which were always above average. The monthly feedback at CDPR at that time amounted to your lead giving you a grade of sorts. From the worst to the best, you could get either a thumbs down, thumbs up, a star, a throph

My CD Projekt RED story, part 3

My CD Projekt RED story, part 3 We are now 2 years into my CD Projekt RED adventure and so far, it’s been mostly smooth sailing. I got promoted to a QA Analyst position, an equivalent of a specialist position for developers. I was earning around 2600zł or $650 per month, which would sometimes go as high as 3500zł with additional crunch pay. At this point I felt fairly rewarded for my efforts and could even start planning my wedding. I also received the first bonus for my participation in the creation of both Witcher 3 expansions. This amounted to roughly 13.000zł or $4250, which was an amount of money I had a hard time wrapping my head around. I still lived in a single room in an apartment I shared with other people, but at this point it was mostly my own choice. I’ve had my own wedding on the horizon so I needed every coin I could save for the occasion. Getting out of QA It was during that time that I decided I want to transition away from doing QA work. I approached the audio te

My CD Projekt RED story, part 2

My CD Projekt RED story, part 2 Once the Blood and Wine expansion was wrapped up, the crunch period has ended for the majority of the teams at CDPR. Since there was quite a bit of downtime, the QA team started a series of internal trainings. These would cover many aspects of game development and were presented by embedded QA testers and designers alike. Downtime learning I signed up for as many of these trainings as I could and presented a lecture about audio myself. It was a blast, you could feel the dedication each of the lecturers had to help their peers grow as developers. Around the same time one of the gameplay designers started an internal C++ course, which I immediately signed up for. The concept of programming have always intrigued me. I made multiple attempts to learn how to code before, but would always give up sooner or later. In spite of me getting the syntax quite easily, I just couldn’t see how these skills I was learning could actually be used. When I enrolled on t

My CD Projekt RED story, part 1

My CD Projekt RED story, part 1 When I joined CD Projekt RED in October of 2015, I was positively thrilled. I did not expect to be given this opportunity with only 9 months of previous game development, or rather games testing experience. But there I was, joining one of the most acclaimed gamedev teams in the world. I was hired as a QA tester in the heat of the Hearts of Stone expansions certification process. My first contract would be a 3 months of probation. I was offered around 1600zł, or roughly $400 a month, which was less than I previously made at one of the Warsaw’s test labs. I figured the limited savings I gathered would see me through those financially rough 3 months, so I accepted the offer. Getting to work I was immediately thrown into deep waters, but with the training help I received from my leads I was slowly learning the tropes of the trade of in-house testing. I had no previous experience with any game engine, let alone one of such complexity as the RED engine.