Game Engine Architecture

386 9. Tools for Debugging and Development

mer’s job is ensuring that his or her code runs effi ciently and within budget.

As we saw when we discussed the 80-20 and 90-10 rules in Chapter 2, a large

percentage of your code probably doesn’t need to be optimized. The only way

to know which bits require optimization is to measure your game’s performance.

We discussed various third-party profi ling tools in Chapter 2. However, these

tools have various limitations and may not be available at all on a console. For

Figure 9.11. The Uncharted 2 engine also provides a profi le hierarchy display that allows the

user to drill down into particular function calls in inspect their costs.

Figure 9.10. The profi le category display in the Uncharted 2: Among Theives engine shows

coarse timing fi gures for various top-level engine systems.