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0 pointslmilcin4y ago0 comments

I work on financial risk calculations during day and embedded control devices after my official work hours.

My controller running moving horizon estimator to simulate thermal system of the espresso machine and Kalman filters to correct model parameters against measurements runs 50 times a second and works fine for days, thank you, using floats on STM32.

I have written huge amount of embedded software over past 20 years and I am yet to do any error analysis with focus on actual floating point inaccuracy. Never saw any reduced performance of any of my devices due to FP inaccuracy. That's because I know what kind of things can cause those artifacts and I just don't do that stupid shit.

What you describe are just no-noes you should not be doing in software.

There exists huge amount of software that works for years at a time, heavy in FP math, and it works completely fine.

If drones were not limited in flight time they would also work fine because what you describe is just stupid errors and not a necessity when using FP math.

Game simulations don't use FP mostly because it is expensive. Fixed point is still faster and you can approximate results of most calculations or use look up tables to get the result that is just fine.

Some games (notably Quake 1 on the source code which I worked after it became available) do require that the simulation results between client and server are in lockstep but this is in no way necessity. Requiring lockstep between client and server causes lag.

What newer games do, they allow client and server run simulations independently even when they don't agree exactly, and then reconcile the results from time to time.

If you ever saw your game partner "stutter" in flight, that was exactly what happened -- the client and the server coming to an agreement on what is actual reality and moving stuff into its right place.

In that light, there is absolutely no problem if after couple of frames the object differs from official position by 1 tenth of a pixel, it is going to get corrected soon.

Go do your "error analysis" if you feel so compelled, but don't be telling people this is necessary or the software isn't going to work. Because that's just stupid. Maybe NASA does this. You don't need to.

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lifthrasiir4y ago

Maybe I should have directly mentioned that "some guard against FP errors" includes a generic guard against errors. If your system processes messy data then you probably want some guards anyway and FP errors are just one (relatively small) class of errors. In fact I would be more worried if embedded devices don't have such guards than if they do faulty FP calculations.

There are also many classes of softwares where FP inaccuracy is simply no problem---such as 3D rendering where the worst FP error is probably z-fighting. Not every application of FP requires "correct" calculation.

> What newer games do, they allow client and server run simulations independently even when they don't agree exactly, and then reconcile the results from time to time.

That's not what "newer" games do, it's what games that can withstand the trade-off do. In particular if the outcome of a particular action is crucial to players you can't reconcile that (projectiles are canonical examples); once the player observed the outcome it's done. Reconcilation thus typically happens in the animation level, so that it can hide the delay until the outcome is observed. This does not actually require the simulation---an simple interpolation is frequent AFAIK---so your point is irrelevant.

There are several genres of games where the lockstep simulation remains pretty much the only way, and thus FP is discouraged. Not because FP is expensive, which had been false for quite a long time anyway (no game developer uses the "fast" inverse square root algorithm any more).

Dylan168074y ago

Floating point works just fine for lockstep simulation!

What you need to avoid using is special functions that can vary based on your CPU model. Once you do that, integer lockstep and floating point lockstep are of similar difficulty.

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