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0 pointshsbauauvhabzb20d ago0 comments

Did you/he ever consider redundant allocation for high value content and hash checks for low value assets that are still important?

I imagine the largest volume of game memory consumption is media assets which if corrupted would really matter, and the storage requirement for important content would be reasonably negligible?

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nomel20d ago

I think the most reasonable take would be to just tell the users hardware is borked, they're going to have a bad outside the game too, and point them to one of the many guides around this topic.

I don't think engineering effort should ever be put into handling literal bad hardware. But, the user would probably love you for letting them know how to fix all the crashing they have while they use their broken computer!

To counter that, we're LONG overdue for ECC in all consumer systems.

AlotOfReading20d ago

I put engineering effort into handling bad hardware all the time because safety critical, :)

It significantly overlaps the engineering to gracefully handle non-hardware things like null pointers and forgetting to update one side of a communication interface.

80/20 rule, really. If you're thoughtful about how you build, you can get most of the benefits without doing the expensive stuff.

shakna20d ago

I think I sit in another camp. A lot of my engineering efforts are in working around bad hardware.

Better the user sees some lag due to state rebuild versus a crash.

Most consumers have what they have, and use what they have. Upgrading everything is now rare. If they got screwed, they'll remain screwed for a few years.

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andai20d ago

That's an interesting idea. How might you implement that? Like RAID but on the level of variables? Maybe the one valid use case for getters/setters? :)

hsbauauvhabzbOP20d ago

As another user fairly pointed out, ECC. But a compiler level flag would probably achieve the redundancy, sourcing stuff from disk etc would probably still need to happen twice to ensure that bit flips do not occur, etc.

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