PVS Studio - Third party tool resolves unreal engine code issues

[FrogNuker]

Could this help neuter many of the bugs in Spring Engine ?

Whilst VS based, it seems a powerful tool in identifying bugs.
I recently came across this article on Slashdot:

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15 ... ty-company

"Unreal Engine is the famous game engine that was used to implement such games as Unreal Tournament, BioShock Infinite, Mass Effect and many more. On March 19, 2014 Unreal Engine 4 was made publicly available from a GitHub repository. It was a big event for the game development industry. One of the companies that took an interest in this was PVS-Studio, who created a static C/C++ code analyzer. They analyzed the Unreal Engine source code and reported to Epic Games's development team about the problems they found. Epic suggested a partnership with PVS-Studio to fix those bugs, and their challenge was accepted. Now, PVS-Studio shares their experience in fixing code issues and merging corrected code with new updates in a major project that shares its source code."


How the PVS-Studio Team Improved Unreal Engine's Code
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/how-p ... gines-code



Cheers,

FrogNuker

[Super Mario]

Whats wrong with using Cppcheck? PVS-studio cost money to use without limitations.

[Silentwings]

That article is pure advertising.

In fact some version of their tools was already tested on Springs code, since some previous advertisers were ingenious enough to do it themselves and post the output - viewtopic.php?f=11&t=32782&p=563536. Iirc most of the results were false positives but there were a few genuine ones, usually "trivial" things like "you just created a variable and destroyed it but there is still a pointer etc etc".

[PicassoCT]

well- one must admit they are hard working and open source friendly. That's a rare combination allready. And im sorry, but as carmack pointed out - setting up open source static analysis is quite time consuming.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1288 ... alysis.php

The Trouble is we dont have the money - or the time and ressources to run a campaign to collect it for this.

[FrogNuker]

I'm not sure he said that. I read the whole article and it's clear he is in large favour of using static analysis.

"I will say plainly it is irresponsible to not use it."

"The takeaway action should be: If your version of Visual Studio has /analyze available, turn it on and give it a try. If I had to pick one tool, I would choose the Microsoft option. Everyone else working in Visual Studio, at least give the PVS-Studio demo a try. If you are developing commercial software, buying static analysis tools is money well spent."

He did question what level of error reporting was optimal. Suggesting that perhaps stylistic errors were not worth chasing as they were not errors as such.

Food for thought.