This is the final part of the Vessel Porting Trilogy. The previous parts can be found here 

• Vessel Post Mortem: Part 1
  
• Vessel Post Mortem: Part 2

After the Christmas break (where I was forced into yet another family vacation) I dove straight back into the code, hoping to get the final issue fixed and the game submitted as soon as possible. There was still time to submit and if I passed Sony’s submission process first time then we could still have the game on the PSN store by the end of January. I fixed the remaining problem with the start up error reporting and added in a little more error checking just to be sure. I was pretty paranoid about the submission process as I didn’t want to delay the game anymore by failing - I carefully checked everything twice, crossed my fingers and hit the ‘submit’ button to Sony America (SCEA) on January 9.

In the last episode, our intrepid heroes had discovered that rather than having almost finished the PlayStation 3 port of Vessel, they were barely half way there. Read on to find out what happens next…

With the realisation that both the game and render threads needed to run a 60fps, we had to reassess where we focussed our optimisation efforts. The game thread was doing a lot of different jobs - Lua scripting, playing audio, AI, animating sprites - all sorts of things. There was a lot to understand there, and on top of that, both the physics and render threads still needed more work. But performance wasn't the only concern - there was TRC compliance, game play bugs, new bugs introduced by our changes and, as we eventually discovered, the need for a PC build (more on that later).

I started looking at Vessel in January 2013 - initially just in my evenings. In my ‘spare’ time. I was looking at it because John and Martin (the founders of Strange Loop Games and the creators of Vessel) had asked me to consider porting it to PS3.  We knew each other  from our time together at Pandemic Studios in Brisbane where I had worked closely with Martin in the Engine team while John worked as an AI programmer. I was keen to do the port but I wanted to be as sure as possible that I knew how much work was involved in it before committing.

Overbyte and Strange Loop Games are proud to announce that the PlayStation 3 version of Vessel is due for release on 11 March in the US regions and 12 March for the European and Australasian regions. The official announcement can be found on the PlayStation Blog. 

So, for US$9.99 (or the equivalent in your local dollarcoins) you get over 10 hours of puzzley platforming goodness with a fluid system built just for you, lovingly ported to the PlayStation 3 by your caring friends at Overbyte.

Vessel for PlayStation 3 has finally been submitted to Sony for approval so I have a little more time to write up some of the optimisation challenges we had to overcome during its porting process. Well, OK, I don’t really have any more time but I’ll try to write a bit more about it before wet bit rot sets in and I forget everything.

This is article is based on the presentation I did at GCAP 2013. You can find the slides in Keynote and Powerpoint formats here. The slides include extensive presenter notes, so you should be able to understand what I was getting at even though the slides are purposely light on content.

I've spent a significant part of my professional career working with other people’s code. I've worked with code from big studios and small ones, from successful ones to struggling ones, with experienced devs and green. I’ve seen code that is beautiful, code that inspires as well as code that makes no sense, code that stinks, code that is impossible. I've seen code you wouldn't believe. 

The most interesting thing about this port is the optimisation feat ahead of us. Vessel was already (mostly) running on the PS3 at the start, but needed to run much, much faster. So, where does one begin? The first thing you need to do, is profile it - if you don't know where the program is slow (or why) then you can't optimise it. But in order for me to be able to talk about profiling and optimisation, I'll need to delve (briefly) into the profiling tools on the PS3 (If you're an experienced PS3 dev, then your probably familiar with this information - skip ahead, I won't mind). Here's a screen capture of part of the tool I use for PlayStation3 profiling (SN System's excellent Tuner - comfortably the best profiler I've used)

The Overbyte team has been busy beavering away on a number of projects over the last few months, but there is one that I thought might be of interest to a few programmers out there. We recently started work on a PlayStation 3 port of the successful Indie PC title, Vessel, and what we plan to do over the coming weeks is to document the porting process. We'll look at what we started with, what our goals were, what assumptions we made, what mistakes we made along the way and have a look at some really gritty optimisation problems.