Cambridge, MA, March 13, 2013—Harmonix Music Systems, Inc., developer of the award-winning Rock Band™ and Dance Central™ video game franchises, has announced that it has acquired a site license for RAD Game Tools’ performance visualization tool, Telemetry. During the term, Harmonix’s license allows the company to use the tool on every game it develops and on every platform.
“Harmonix games have traditionally hit a hard 60 frames per second with the use of our custom timing system,” says Harmonix technical director, Eric Malafeew. “As our code moved onto more threads, we went with Telemetry’s powerful interface and logging system rather than extend our own. You don’t just see total timings, you see every individual timing and when it happens in a frame using powerful level-of-detail zooming. This lets you know what you are missing and how timings relate across threads.”
Telemetry is a complete performance visualization system that helps development teams understand and optimize their game. Instead of focusing on the instruction-level performance characteristics, Telemetry shows how multiple aspects of a game’s performance vary over time, helping teams fix intermittent performance problems such as hitches and spikes.
“The ability to save out profiling sessions allows QA to capture problems for coders to dissect, and we can compare changes over days of development,” adds Malafeew, “The game hookup was easy and had negligible impact, and RAD support has been friendly and professional, as always.”
Telemetry is available immediately on Windows, Mac, Linux (both x86 and ARM), Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and iOS based platforms, with additional platforms to be announced.
