CppCon 2015: Scott Wardle “Memory and C++ debugging at Electronic Arts”

Scott Wardle discusses memory management, debugging tools, and the history of EASTL in game development at Electronic Arts.

Cppcon.org — Presentation Slides, PDFs, Source Code and other presenter materials are available at: github.com/cppcon/cppcon2015 — Scott Wardle a senior software engineer Electronic Arts will talk about the current memory and C++ debugging setup and tools used in games. PS4 and Xbox One have virtual memory and 64 bit address spaces, GPU and CPU are getting closer in the ability to work virtual memory. So our tools are getting better and better and closer to PCs. Most of a games memory goes towards art and level data like bitmap textures and polygon meshes. So artist and designer need to understand how much their data takes up. Giving them call stacks of memory allocations does not help. They want to know how big is a group of building is. Why is this group of building bigger than this one? Maybe this one has some animation data or one of the textures is too big. But there are 10,000s of objects built by 100s of people all around the world. — Hey Everyone, I am Scott Wardle, I have been in games over 20 years. Much of that in EA Canada Vancouver (though I started my career in EA Japan.). I like to solve hard problems. I love good data visualization and metric systems and using them to fix hard bugs. Also, I like to find good interfaces that use both tech and people together to flip throw hard problems such that they become easy and solve them selves. — Videos Filmed & Edited by Bash Films: BashFilms.com Work at Hudson River Trading (HRT): tinyurl.com/safxfctf