It is time for me to write my final blog on the adventure that was, ‘Vessel PS3’, since my time at Overbyte is coming to an end. This project was tough, however, it is one I am proud we have conquered. There are a lot of interesting and cool optimisations that I myself have done whilst on this project, but since I won’t have the time to write a few blogs about them all, I thought I would highlight a few of the common things I found with some examples of things we did. I will leave some of the more interesting ones for Tony to cover later.

Using containers badly

There were quite a few places in Vessel in which we had to fix up the use of vectors, lists and other similar containers. Obviously you need to use the right ones, to do the right job by understanding what your code needs your container to do and then picking the right one.

Going into Vessel we (wrongly) assumed that memory usage would be not much of an issue, at least in terms of peak memory usage and getting it running on a console. However we soon learnt that the initial build of Vessel we had could not even load the main menu or any of our smallest levels without running out of memory on a retail PS3.

The first step is to find out what memory we are actually using and where is it going to. This might sound obvious and simple, but depending on your codebase and what engine and middleware you are using, there may not be any easy ways to find this out. With Vessel using its own custom engine written for a platform where memory isn’t a great concern, we had no tools to start with.

Hi everyone, my name is Ben Driehuis and I am a senior programmer at Overbyte.

Vessel uses Lua to do it's glue gameplay code, allowing it to use most of the systems and tech built up throughout to form specific gameplay related classes. When we first looked into the performance of Lua and Vessel in general, we noticed very quickly that all of the threads were doing a lot of memory allocation and frees each frame which meant there was actually a lot of contention between the threads.