3 ms·
I'd say practically none, we were quite memory starved most of the time and even regular scripting engines were a hard sell at times (perhaps more so due to GC
by whizzter 9mo ago
I'd say practically none, we were quite memory starved most of the time and even regular scripting engines were a hard sell at times (perhaps more so due to GC rather than interpretation performance).
Games on PS2 were C or C++ with some VU code (asm or some specialized hll) for most parts, often Lua(due to low memory usage) or similar scripting added for minor parts with bindings to native C/C++ functions.
"Normal" self-modifying code went out of favour a few years earlier in the early-mid 90s, and was perhaps more useful on CPU's like the 6502s or X86's that had few registers so adjusting constants directly into inner-loops was useful (The PS2 MIPS cpu has plenty of registers, so no need for that).
However by the mid/late 90s CPU's like the PPro already added penalties for self-modifying code so it was already frowned on, also PS2 era games already often ran with PC-versions side-by-side so you didn't want more than needed platform dependencies.
Most PS2 performance tuning we did was around resources/memory, VU and helped by DMA-chains.
Self modifying code might've been used for copy-protection but that's another issue.