3 ms·

Unity's been free for years, you've fallen for their advertising to upstage Unreal. "Finally offering a free version" Honestly, it's been free for ages. Not

Unity's been free for years, you've fallen for their advertising to upstage Unreal. "Finally offering a free version" Honestly, it's been free for ages. Not only that but Microsoft had XNA which was also a free game engine that they only discontinued last year so you're wrong thinking that html5 was the only option. I don't think you really researched the market much if you thought that. Plus if you are serious about an RTS you should read about AI war, who used Unity. It's interesting as if you want to do multiplayer in an RTS you can't use Unity's collision detection as the float calculations are chipset dependant.

trsohmers 12y ago
What most people don't realize is that the IEEE Floating Point standard (754-2008) actually doesn't standardize when a float should be rounded. Since most CPUs/GPUs are able to do FMAs (Fused Multiply-add)'s that are rounded after the operation, you get a different result than if you were to do a multiplication operation, then round, then add, and then round again. I'm pretty sure Unity would be able to fix this if they had their compiler always handed rounding the same way. Also: If you want to see a sane way to handle floating point, check out the Unum format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format))... higher precision than IEEE, doesn't have rounding errors, and uses fewer bits.
- antiuniverse 12y ago
  Here's an outstanding article that goes into the nuance of actually achieving floating point determinism: http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/floating-point-determinism/ http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/flo... My takeaway: It's hard enough that I'm probably never going to attempt to implement lockstep simulation, and if I was forced to I'd probably do everything in fixed point for my own sanity.
- mmarx 12y ago
  > higher precision than IEEE, doesn't have rounding errors, and uses fewer bits. It certainly won't provide higher precision using less bits (precision is lg(b^(l - 1)), where b is the base and l is the number of mantissa bits). For any given base, there are numbers that have no exact representation in that base (for base 10, consider 1/3 = 0.33333…, for base 2, consider 1/10), so it certainly will have rounding errors. According to [0], the basic idea is to store the number of exponent bits, the number of mantissa bits, and the inexact bit (indicating that underflow has occured) alongside the number itself, automatically promoting/demoting mantissa and exponent as needed, and treating inexact numbers as an interval of width 1 ulp. Thus, the number of used bits depends on the number stored (which might well be less than an IEEE format would use for certain (or even the average) workload, but may very well be more due to the overhead of the tag). [0] http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2013/03/Right-SizingPrecision1.pdf http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2013/03/Right-SizingPreci...
duaneb 12y ago
To be fair, XNA's support was atrocious (non-existent?) off of microsoft platforms.
- eropple 12y ago
  MonoGame is almost entirely compatible with XNA and over the last year or two has really turned into something reliable, at least on MacOS and iOS.
  - WillPostForFood 12y ago
    For some platforms, like iOS and Android, you will need a Xamarin license. So MonoGame isn't always a free option.

trsohmers 12y ago

What most people don't realize is that the IEEE Floating Point standard (754-2008) actually doesn't standardize when a float should be rounded. Since most CPUs/GPUs are able to do FMAs (Fused Multiply-add)'s that are rounded after the operation, you get a different result than if you were to do a multiplication operation, then round, then add, and then round again. I'm pretty sure Unity would be able to fix this if they had their compiler always handed rounding the same way. Also: If you want to see a sane way to handle floating point, check out the Unum format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format))... higher precision than IEEE, doesn't have rounding errors, and uses fewer bits.

antiuniverse 12y ago
Here's an outstanding article that goes into the nuance of actually achieving floating point determinism: http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/floating-point-determinism/ http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/flo... My takeaway: It's hard enough that I'm probably never going to attempt to implement lockstep simulation, and if I was forced to I'd probably do everything in fixed point for my own sanity.
mmarx 12y ago
> higher precision than IEEE, doesn't have rounding errors, and uses fewer bits. It certainly won't provide higher precision using less bits (precision is lg(b^(l - 1)), where b is the base and l is the number of mantissa bits). For any given base, there are numbers that have no exact representation in that base (for base 10, consider 1/3 = 0.33333…, for base 2, consider 1/10), so it certainly will have rounding errors. According to [0], the basic idea is to store the number of exponent bits, the number of mantissa bits, and the inexact bit (indicating that underflow has occured) alongside the number itself, automatically promoting/demoting mantissa and exponent as needed, and treating inexact numbers as an interval of width 1 ulp. Thus, the number of used bits depends on the number stored (which might well be less than an IEEE format would use for certain (or even the average) workload, but may very well be more due to the overhead of the tag). [0] http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2013/03/Right-SizingPrecision1.pdf http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2013/03/Right-SizingPreci...

duaneb 12y ago

To be fair, XNA's support was atrocious (non-existent?) off of microsoft platforms.

eropple 12y ago
MonoGame is almost entirely compatible with XNA and over the last year or two has really turned into something reliable, at least on MacOS and iOS.
- WillPostForFood 12y ago
  For some platforms, like iOS and Android, you will need a Xamarin license. So MonoGame isn't always a free option.