GDC 2024 Session Viewer

Continuous Integration (CI) is a common practice in modern software organizations. It plays an especially important role for AAA game development, where thousands of build jobs are submitted daily. However, the size and complexity of video games tend to inflate build size and duration, leading to a slower CI and longer feedback time. To provide faster CI feedback, studies have explored optimization techniques that can skip steps, and sometimes the entirety, of build jobs. This talk presents an overview of these techniques and highlights their costs and benefits. Then, it introduces RavenBuild, a novel ML-based technique tailored for video games. Contrarily to existing approaches, RavenBuild predicts build outcomes for both code and data submissions, providing full coverage for a game development CI. RavenBuild skips passing builds and therefore reduces the CI cost, up to 43%, while ensuring that failing builds are properly anticipated.

Takeaway

Attendees will learn about solutions that can be adopted to reduce CI cost and increase the overall development velocity. As the talk provides a thorough presentation of the features and methods behind these solutions, attendees should be able to replicate these solutions in their settings.

Intended Audience

- Game developers
- Architects
- Platform engineers/SRE
- Project managers
- Data scientists