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# Custom Normalizing function not correct

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I may not be a math genius, but shouldn''t this work?
	void _NormalizeTileVert(D3DXVECTOR3 & n, float tX, float SqrtY, float tZ)
{
float mag = float( sqrt( (tX*tX) + SqrtY + (tZ*tZ) ) );
if (mag != 0.0f)
{
mag = 1.0f / mag;
n.x *= mag;
n.y *= mag;
n.z *= mag;
}
}

The SqrtY parameter is the already-squared Y value of the input Vector. Previously I was using D3DXVec3Normalize with the exact same input, and things were just dandy. But since I thought this would be faster, I tested it out. I get a flat-lit terrain, much as if I had calculated all normals pointing directly up. Where am I stupid?

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[edit: Warning! Read with care! May contain crap ]

This will work only if you call it like this
D3DXVECTOR3 vec;_NormalizeTileVert (vec, vec.x, vec.y*vec.y, vec.z);

[edit: so what...?]
You said you thought it would be faster... Are you sure optimizing this would increase performance? It's just that premature optimization is evil and especially when it produces incorrect results!

And what I think is that this won't optimize anything. You could do two things:
1. Pre-calculate y2. But if you can do that, you can also pre-normalize the vector [edit: ok, maybe not]
2. Forgot... it's too late (2.15 am)

If you really want to keep it this way, at least change SqrtY to SqrY or you will soon be feeding the function with sqrt(y)...

[edit: How are you calling the function?]

[edited by - nonpop on April 22, 2004 7:23:44 PM]

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Your code is a bit messy. First of all, the chances of a floating point value precisely equalling zero are roughly negative, so remove that slow, hideous if() statement. Second, use sqrtf() instead of making a double to float cast. Third... why are you calling the function with 4 parameters? You can accept a D3DXVECTOR3 and return a D3DXVECTOR3, or work with a reference to a D3DXVECTOR3, or pointers, or whatever you want. Passing separated coordinates is poor design.

Fifth, if you are that worried about performance, declare the function as inline. Six, your naming conventions need to be revised, because you will get confused by them later; as nonpop suggested, use SqrY or YSqred or something instead of SqrtY. Also, you are not normalizing a vertex, so your function''s name should be NormalizeTileVertexNormal or NormalizeVector or something like that. Clarity goes a long way towards making your code easy to work with, improve, and debug.

Unless you are normalizing trillions of vectors per frame, precomputing y^2 is probably a waste of time. In the majority of cases a precalculation that removes one multiplication is a waste; storing the value of y^2 can lead to cache thrashing and other lovely performance issues.

I would strongly recommend you profile your code if you have not already done so, and look very carefully at what is taking up your CPU clocks. If you are spending so much time normalizing vectors, you probably need to reconsider how your engine is designed. You''ll probably find that, performance-wise, you won''t be able to outdo the efficiency of D3DXVec3Normalize unless you are extremely handy with assembler and hand-tuned code optimization.

All that said, here''s a suggestion for how to revise your function; again let me recommend that you profile your code and make sure that using your own normalization function is really going to earn you something worthwhile:

inline void _NormalizeVector(D3DXVECTOR3 & vector){	float mag = 1.0f / sqrtf( vector.x*vector.x + vector.y*vector.y + vector.z*vector.z );	vector.x *= mag;	vector.y *= mag;	vector.z *= mag;}

Of course if you need to preserve the original value of the vector (for some strange reason) then it is easy enough to tweak this to return a distinct variable instead of modifying the original.

The only problem I can see in your code (other than potentially poor programming practices) is that n.x may not be equal to tX, n.y*n.y not equal to SqrtY, and so on.

PiQ Software - Tiny KeyCounter - Freon 2/7 Raytracing Accelerator

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Apologies for the stupidity of the question. I dont know what I was thinking with that code. The answer was not the math, it was me not paying attention to my operators somehow. Sorry again for wasting your time. The more I look at that the more I wonder what I thought I was doing. Please just forget you ever read this.

	__forceinline void _NormalizeTileVert(D3DXVECTOR3 & n, const float tX, const float tY, const float tZ)	{		float mag = 1.0f / sqrtf( (tX*tX) + (tY*tY) + (tZ*tZ) );		n.x = tX * mag;		n.y = tY * mag;		n.z = tZ * mag;	}

Just fyi, it was called like this:

	_NormalizeTileVert( pVertex[VBIndex].vecNorm,		HeightMap[z-1][x-1] + HeightMap[z][x-1] + HeightMap[z][x-1] + HeightMap[z+1][x-1]			- HeightMap[z-1][x+1] - HeightMap[z][x+1] - HeightMap[z][x+1] - HeightMap[z+1][x+1],		64.0f,		HeightMap[z-1][x-1] + HeightMap[z-1][x] + HeightMap[z-1][x] + HeightMap[z-1][x+1]			- HeightMap[z+1][x-1] - HeightMap[z+1][x] - HeightMap[z+1][x] - HeightMap[z+1][x+1] );

The previous method was the same except using D3DXVec3Normalize(). As you can see, the reason that the parameters are not passed into the function as a Vector, is that they are not in vector form to begin with. My actual function was inlined, and was passed const values. I didnt use sqrtf because I didnt find it in my documentation (MSVC++ 6.0). It does however compile, so I'm using it now.

>>the chances of a floating point value precisely equalling zero are roughly negative

But its still possible. I suppose I could add some incredibly small fraction to the sqrtf result to ensure nothing horrible ever happens.

Thanks again and apologies all round.

[edited by - Corroded on April 22, 2004 8:55:27 PM]

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No apologies necessary; we all have to learn this stuff somehow. I daresay I''ve made a lot more (and worse) mistakes than that. The important thing is that you are willing to learn from it and move on I don''t consider my time wasted at all. If it were a waste of time I would have simply gone and done something else instead; as far as I''m concerned the more programmers the world has the happier we will all be.

I see now why you aren''t passing a vector into the function; in that case the way you have it set up is fine. However, I would recommend you tread carefully around __forceinline. In general the compiler knows a lot more than you do about how the assembly code is laid out, so it can make better decisions about when to do inlining. Before you make the jump to __forceinline, be sure you very carefully and thoroughly profile your code, and set up a comprehensive test case to make sure the effects of __forceinline are beneficial. There''s nothing wrong with using it - just be sure you are using it for a good reason. If a less dangerous tool will do the job, use it instead. After all, very few people would consider it wise to use a shotgun to open their front door when a key does the job much more elegantly

One final comment on the if() statement: a conditional inside a piece of code that is called a lot will hurt performance. You may run into cache mispredictions or other nasty things that end up chewing away a lot of CPU time. It is unlikely that you will get cache mispredictions in a test that simple, but the principle holds: don''t use conditionals more than you absolutely have to. First of all, mag will never be zero, because the y coordinate is 64. If you use the normalization code in other places, you cannot assume this; but in the context of the code you listed above, you know for a fact that mag will never be 0. Secondly, even if it is 0, the effects will be minimal. You may get incorrect lighting or a very minor performance drop, but it will happen only in incredibly rare situations. Weigh the costs and benefits: you will lose performance with the conditional, period. At the very least it is an extra instruction which can contribute to cache problems. At the worst you will cause cache misses which are very, very harmful for your speed. On the other hand, removing the conditional will give you temporary and virtually unnoticable problems in extremely rare situations. This kind of cost/benefit analysis is crucial to doing good code optimization, so start early

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Thanks for your time and the tips. I''ll take this into consideration.

I use __forceinline at the moment as I dont have an optimizing compiler (academic version) and it does a crappy job at figuring out what to do. I suppose its a bad habit to get into though as I wont be using this compiler forever. I am careful not to force inline anything over a few lines or which is called in many places.

I''ve only recently discovered the very real danger of cache misses, branch misprediction, etc involved in conditional statements and many other innocuous "appearing" code. I''ve been trying to redo my support code but its been a deep wade.

Any and all code improvement tips are always welcome. I do this kind of thing to learn so all criticism is of the constructive kind IMO

Good day!

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quote:
Original post by ApochPiQ
Your code is a bit messy. First of all, the chances of a floating point value precisely equalling zero are roughly negative, so remove that slow, hideous if() statement.

Hideous and slow? More like very appropriate and having no discernible effect on speed. Removing it is just asking for a divide by zero and some screwy bugs that are hard to track down.

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A few points:

1.) Don''t use an underscore at the beginning of your function names - the C++ standard says:
quote:

17.4.3.1.2 Global names

1 Certain sets of names and function signatures are always reserved to the implementation:

— Each name that contains a double underscore (__) or begins with an underscore followed by an uppercase letter (2.11) is reserved to the implementation for any use.

— Each name that begins with an underscore is reserved to the implementation for use as a name in the global namespace.

2.) If you have the academic version of Visual Studio you can get the optimizing compiler for free - MS just released it recently. There''s been quite a bit of discussion about it on these forums and if you look around you should be able to find instructions on installing it to replace your current compiler.

3.) A low level math function like normalize is not the place for error checking. Callers of normalize should take responsibility for passing in valid data (i.e. no vectors with a magnitude of 0) - that way you don''t impose a performance penalty on code that doesn''t need the check. If you want to avoid the hard to track down bugs Dobbs warns about then put in an assert - that way you''ll get notified in debug builds of a bug in the calling code but won''t suffer a performance penalty in release builds. The important point is that passing a vector with 0 magnitude to a normalize function is a bug in the calling code (since there is no defined answer), not something that the normalize function itself should check for. There is no way for the normalize function to know what is an appropriate way to handle such invalid input.

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quote:
Original post by Dobbs
Hideous and slow? More like very appropriate and having no discernible effect on speed. Removing it is just asking for a divide by zero and some screwy bugs that are hard to track down.

quote:
Original post by ApochPiQ
One final comment on the if() statement: a conditional inside a piece of code that is called a lot will hurt performance. You may run into cache mispredictions or other nasty things that end up chewing away a lot of CPU time. It is unlikely that you will get cache mispredictions in a test that simple, but the principle holds: don''t use conditionals more than you absolutely have to. First of all, mag will never be zero, because the y coordinate is 64. If you use the normalization code in other places, you cannot assume this; but in the context of the code you listed above, you know for a fact that mag will never be 0. Secondly, even if it is 0, the effects will be minimal. You may get incorrect lighting or a very minor performance drop, but it will happen only in incredibly rare situations. Weigh the costs and benefits: you will lose performance with the conditional, period. At the very least it is an extra instruction which can contribute to cache problems. At the worst you will cause cache misses which are very, very harmful for your speed. On the other hand, removing the conditional will give you temporary and virtually unnoticable problems in extremely rare situations. This kind of cost/benefit analysis is crucial to doing good code optimization, so start early

I think that should be fairly self-explanatory.

PiQ Software - Tiny KeyCounter - Freon 2/7 Raytracing Accelerator

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>>1.) Don't use an underscore at the beginning of your function names - the C++ standard says:

Yes. Its a possibly bad habit I've formed from I-dont-know-where. I use the underscore to indicate a private function of a class. In this way it will never coincide with anything in the global namespace, and it sorts all my private data in the VC intellisense class-completion box so I dont have to actually think.

>>2.) If you have the academic version of Visual Studio you can get the optimizing compiler for free - MS just released it recently. There's been quite a bit of discussion about it on these forums and if you look around you should be able to find instructions on installing it to replace your current compiler.

I went and downloaded that. I did a search and did indeed find many discussions on optimizing compilers, but very little on the this being recently released and how to integrate it. I'm almost 100% sure I can integrate it into the VC IDE and use it as my default compiler. I was unable to find information on how to do this, and after poking around with the VC options I'm still just as clueless. Do you happen to have a link to a thread/page that might give me a place to start?

>>I think that should be fairly self-explanatory.

It most certainly was; to me anyhow.

You gentlemen have been most helpful.

[edited by - Corroded on April 22, 2004 12:31:26 AM]

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