RAD Telemetry 1.0j shipped!

Telemetry 1.0j is out the door! The big news, of course, is that there is alpha support for PS3 (PPU only) right now. If you're a PS3 developer please check it out and hammer on it, we need some data and use cases from the field.

Here are some of the major changes:

• PS3 support (PPU only)



• direct va_list support in all the vararg APIs. This was heavily requested and now it's in there!



• race conditions/crashes in the run-time when the server went away unexpectedly should be reduced



• added tmEndTryLockEx (just like tmEndTryLock but with explicit file/line)



• new APIs! tmEnterThread and tmLeaveThread which allow you to specify the thread for the zone. This was crucial for 'logical thread' support (e.g. fibers, cooperative threads, etc.)



• new APIs #2! tmBeginTimeSpanAt and tmEndTimeSpanAt allow you to specify the timestamps for timespan events, so you can time an external event and insert it retroactively



• 360/Windows: significant performance boost in the context switch thread ("telemetry:ctxs")



• TMOF_DEFAULT turns off context switches by default on Windows -- the overhead was just too high for users that didn't need it

The Visualizer got some love too:

• Filter session lists by name and computer! This was requested quite a bit for customers had thousands of sessions to sift through.



• Massive memory usage reduction for messages



• Plot and memory events generate virtual messages in the message window (with a different color, and you can even now filter out all user messages if you want)



• A bug with lock rendering was causing massive slow downs in certain special cases, fixed!



• Localhost option has been removed since it was confusing and not very useful



• Text entry fields should be normal now



• Plots no longer render over the slider in the mini-timeline view



• Clicking and dragging on a context switch span should still drag/scroll



• Minimized timespan track would disappear



• Paused frames are no rendered with a different color in the timeline view



• Highlighting a context switch or lock event span highlights the appropriate subsection of a zone in the zone view



• Timestamps are now inserted into the log entries when you use "Copy/Save To File"

And the server had some minor changes:

• Bugfix: callstack processing wasn't processing last entry all the time



• Change: -localhost option removed since it wasn't useful and confused people most of the time



• Crash dump generator added, along with -minidump option to disable full memory crash dumps

Arena/heap memory APIs

Telemetry currently has a simple API to let you mark memory allocations and frees (tmAlloc and tmFree respectively). You can specify a hierarchical path-like structure to categorize the type of allocations, e.g.: tmAlloc( cx, ptr, size, "/meshes/vehicles/supertank" ); A commonly requested feature is the ability to handle different heaps/allocators/arenas such as:

• arenas that are freed in one shot (so you don't have to call tmFree on all the suballocations)


• handle or index based allocators with a base and range, resulting in overlapping 'address spaces'


• small allocators for strings, particles, and small temporaries

And there are many other examples I'm sure, which is why I'm posting here -- what are your needs in terms of expressive memory allocation tracking? Drop me a line (or post here) at telemetry@radgametools.com since I'd like to tackle this right after the PS3/PPU release!