Monk’s Blog

I’m looking for the old hlds_amd64 code, if anyone has an older install of 1.6 somewhere please shoot me a link.

Main

 
[03:21:58PM] <MaxFrag|Anthony> Hello
[03:23:20PM] <Infamy|Prod|FAME`afk> whats up
[03:25:26PM] <MaxFrag|Anthony> Just letting you know we will no longer be sponsoring Infamy. We've had a great run with you guys but we see the sales haven't been coming.
[03:25:38PM] <MaxFrag|Anthony> We will leave your server up for 3 more hours as a courtesy.
[03:25:41PM] <Infamy|Prod|FAME`afk> i stopped advertising
[03:25:44PM] <Infamy|Prod|FAME`afk> when your voice went to shit
[03:25:49PM] <Infamy|Prod|FAME`afk> 3 hours?
[03:25:51PM] <Infamy|Prod|FAME`afk> WTf
[03:25:52PM] <Infamy|Prod|FAME`afk> rofl
[03:25:56PM] <Infamy|Prod|FAME`afk> you are a complete fucking douchebag
[03:25:58PM] <Infamy|Prod|FAME`afk> go fuck yourself

This is why you don’t sponsor kiddie teams, or sponsor anyone at all. They just silently think they can get away with shit like this.

-M

Main, Networking

So you’ve got a little linux box and you see FPS drops. Why?

Well, FPS is more or less measured by how long it takes for a sleep to wake up. The differences are subtracted and then multiplied by 1000f to get you the number. Don’t be fooled by those idiots who tell you to run a real time kernel. Scheduler latency is a norm, and Linux sucks when it comes to latency; actually x86 more or less sucks because of high interrupt latency. Get used to it folks.

Current VALVe code issues on Linux:

1.) SourceTV drops FPS.
SourceTV runs in the same thread/context as the engine does, so don’t be suprised if the engine has to yield() for TV to work. This is normal behavior and cannot be fixed at all (And that library program or whatever does not fix it. It just makes the engine appear to be fixed, when in reality it does absolutely nothing but make a number stay higher. Don’t lie to the users, tell them the truth.)

2.) Tickrate slipping.
This is an interesting issue that is generally caused by SMI interrupts, CPU Speed, ACPI etc. Try changing the priority of the process to SCHED_FIFO. If you do not know what that is, go back to windows.

3.) Perma-boosted servers on Linux.
Linux binaries for VALVe games are NOT OPTIMIZED PERIOD. They are compiled with an older version of gcc, with -fPIC. This eats up an additional register to use on the stack.

4.) Lack of x86_64 binaries.
We need these at some point. They provide additional benefits that x86 cannot give, such as additional XMM registers and other neat thing.

Main

I get bored with hacking FreeBSD to pieces.

Anyways, I’ve been messing around with improving glibc a little bit, one of the first things I did was remove building it with frame pointers.. This gave a little bit of a speedup so far (will post benchmarks).. omit frame pointers does not use a register a frame pointer, freeing up %ebx (usually).. it makes debugging impossible, but we want speed, not debugging.

Still working on x86 vsyscalls for 2.6.18

Main

I’ve been toying around with new themes. Enjoy the breakage.

I’m quite impressed with NetBSD’s performance, I’ve been using it in semi-production on some game server boxes. Only downside is these AMI bios’s do not correctly announce HPET in the ACPI tables, so no HPET timer

Main

Once upon a time, about 7 months ago, a user on gamesurge was bugging me for help on how to do process injection on *NIX (aka LD_PRELOAD).. He was more or less curious to how I did it, so I kindly explained to him. He wanted to know how to get ultra stable FPS servers, which is pretty useless because of interrupt latency anyways. I didn’t give out any of my sourcecode for summit’s extreme module, but I kind of told him it’s useless to try and get 1000fps all the time due to the aforementioned reasons.

Fast forward to now. It appears this same user has become an expert in coding in 6 months, and now he’s taking my idea and selling it to make profit from other GSPs. Apparently this program he ‘wrote’ (or stole, whatever) is now connecting to some auth server, sort of like a license server. My advise is, if you don’t have access to the source code for something like this, do NOT buy it. Why? It’s hard to tell what the user is doing with the license server stuff, he could be hooking the rcon_password function and sending it to a remote server.

Anyways, my point is, in this market, you do not help people. Period. They will steal your ideas and claim them as their own, then the person that helped them out will be shit out of luck.

-M

PS. I’m talking about Distant.

Drama