noh VS DOOM

Related, I released the source code to Heroes of Newerth (a dota 2 competitor) after the company died (after dota 2 pulverized them). https://github.com/shawwn/noh

One big problem holding devs back from enjoying gamedev is a lack of quality 3D assets. The engine can be wonderful, but mods were successful due to the availability of existing models and textures that they can poach from the parent game.

I’ve been trying to fix this. It’s not quite ready for showing, but whatever: https://github.com/shawwn/noh

I used to work on Heroes of Newerth, a dota clone. The parent company (S2 Games) sold it to Garena, who shut it down last year. In other words, there are ~80 unique characters with wonderful animations that no commercial entity cares about. I offer them to you.

My gamble is that no one will care; Garena is a massive entity focused on the bottom line, and they’re based outside of the US.

The main thing I’d like to do is to get together the names of all the artists that made these cool characters and promote their current work. HoN’s main strength was its graphics and fluidity, which even today some prefer over dota. That was thanks to an incredibly talented art team whose office was based in California, and I had the pleasure of watching them work for six months or so before the devs were relocated to Michigan. I miss them, and I should’ve spent more time learning the tricks of their trade.

Sadly no, and nowhere. And with my primary focus being gamedev for the foreseeable future, the only way I see it being resurrected is if I need some generated music. That’s fairly low on the priority list for now, but it might preempt other things. https://github.com/shawwn/noh

To be immodest for a moment, my work serves as an example that it’s possible to do it, and better than anyone else, long before they figure out how. Many examples of this pop up throughout history, and I am gratified to be a small but real one.

I’m more interested in the reverse. I’ve been building (resurrecting?) a game engine https://github.com/shawwn/noh and I was looking forward to my new M2 primarily so that I could finally do cross platform gamedev on a single machine. Mac, windows, Linux, all on one box.

Hah! Fat chance. It’s frustratingly close to working. But Linux Ubuntu arm has trouble using the M2’s GPU through Fusion, and Windows 11 ARM is … well, let’s just say that arm64 Windows isn’t a priority. Fucking fmod people won’t release an fmod lib for it, so the engine straight up has no sound. And I don’t know if I was able to get the graphics to work either.

It’s OpenGL man. This shouldn’t be that hard. But graphics is perpetually trapped in 1999 era developer experience.

Yes. Sorry for the low brow comment, but fuck unity. I really dislike the fact that if someone wants to become a gamedev in 2023, their only practical options are to write everything themselves, learn unity, or learn unreal engine. I’ve been putting together an alternative. https://github.com/shawwn/noh

It’s frankly amazing to work with a production grade engine that compiles in three minutes. I wouldn’t trade it for all the complexity in unity, regardless of how many extra copies I’d sell. But I realize I’m in the minority.

commercially exploit or use for any commercial purpose."

[1] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/commit/4eb368a960647c8cc...

The original Doom had third-party audio playback routines, so the source came with a rewritten sound server: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/tree/master/sndserv

    The bad news:  this code only compiles and runs on linux.  We couldn't

Here's a repo for you with no test coverage and no auto-generated DI. They using unsafe pointers all over the place, too!

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM

Shall I prepare the postage for the letter in which you'll call John Carmack an MBA? Should we send another to Chris Sawyer? I heard he didn't even write a formal design doc for Roller Coaster Tycoon!

cURL is one of the most used C libs and is an example of good quality C code. If you follow the style used there, see e.g. https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/lib/dynhds.h (and associated dynhds.c) you will be good.

Looking at the source of some of the old game-engines from the era that have since been released as open-source can also be helpful, like https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM.

In both cases notice how simple and elegant a lot of the code is. There is already enough complexity inherent in the problem they are solving, and that is where the focus should be.

Any IDE with a working language server to make it easy to jump around and refactor should work fine. Limitations might be due to the C language itself?

Error handling on such a fixed platform does not need to be super-advanced. You should always be within the confines of the system so there shouldn't be much that can go wrong. If stuff goes wrong anyway just being able call a function Fatal("FooBar failed with code 34") when unexpected stuff happens and have it log somewhere to be able to dig around should be enough. You never need to be able to recover and retry.

Make sure to use https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html or a similar tool when developing outside of the PSOne.

That said, consider statically allocating global buffers for most stuff and avoid using the heap for most stuff.

Good luck working within the confines of the PSOne! Many hackers have pulled the hair from their head on that platform ;)

Probably more easily than you'd think. DOOM is open source[1], and as GP alludes, is probably the most frequently ported game in existence, so its source code almost certainly appears multiple times in GPT-4's training set, likely alongside multiple annotated explanations.

[1] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM

I'd define an arena as the pattern where the arena itself owns N objects. So you free the arena to free all objects.

My first job was at EA working on console games (PS2, GameCube, XBox, no OS or virtual memory on any of them), and while at the time I was too junior to touch the memory allocators themselves, we were definitely not malloc-ing and freeing all the time.

It was more like you load data for the level in one stage, which creates a ton of data structures, and then you enter a loop to draw every frame quickly. There were many global variables.

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Wikipedia calls it a region, zone, arena, area, or memory context, and that seems about right:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region-based_memory_management

It describes history from 1967 (before C was invented!) and has some good examples from Apache ("pools") and Postgres ("memory contexts").

I also just looked at these codebases:

https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public (based on code from the 70's)

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM (1997)

I looked at allocproc() in xv6, and gives you an object from a fixed global array. A lot of C code in the 80's and 90's was essentially "kernel code" in that it didn't have an OS underneath it. Embedded systems didn't run on full-fledges OSes.

DOOM tends to use a lot of what I would call "pools" -- arrays of objects of a fixed size, and that's basically what I remember from EA.

Though in g_game.c, there is definitely an arena of size 0x20000 called "demobuffer". It's used with a bump allocator.

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So I'd say

- malloc / free of individual objects was NEVER what C code looked like (aside from toy code in college)

- arena allocators were used, but global vars and pools are also very common.

- arenas are more or less wash for memory safety. they help you in some ways, but hurt you in others.

The reason C programmers don't malloc/free all the time is for speed, not memory safety. Arenas are still unsafe.

When you free an arena, you have no guarantee there's nothing that points to it anymore.

Also, something that shouldn't be underestimated is that arena allocators break tools like ASAN, which use the malloc() free() interface. This was underscored to me by writing a garbage collector -- the custom allocator "broke" ASAN, and that was actually a problem:

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/01/garbage-collector.html

If you want memory safety in your C code, you should be using ASAN (dynamically instrumented allocators) and good test coverage. Arenas don't help -- they can actually hurt. An arena is a trivial idea -- the problem is more if that usage pattern actually matches your application, and apps evolve over time.

Doom