Gang at Polytechnic

The dev dudes will be at Amir Kabir University (Polytechnic) on 3rd of Esfand. The session will be geared towards the development process of Garshasp inclined towards the technical aspects.

More info can be found here:

http://cgart.ir/events/gamedeveloping/index.htm

24m

Aldous Huxley:

"Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water, and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time."

The roots

I find myself at the office with only two guys quite often these days. One is Syros and the other Peyman. The same two which helped us start our ambitious project more than 3 years ago. We've come a long way from that time and experienced many many things and a lot of change has occurred, however their determination, attitude, passion and professionalism is exactly today like it was three years ago, they have never let down anything related to this work even once. This project would have never been close to its current status without them. It sure feels wonderful to be working next to these guys...

Within

.... and a friend says : "... we've got many enemies out there ..." and all I can think of is this great statement:
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." W. Durant

Real coder's arena

One thing we, a few guys on our tech team, wish we could experience is console development. Being able to make software for one specific hardware platform is quite exciting. The root of this excitement comes from many different factors. All the hardware specification is fixed and known beforehand, unlike PC development where every machine is different, knowing the hardware is fixed, you can try and create the best code possible to run on that machine, you can always compare this with what others are doing and any enhancement in software means something because everybody is running on the same ground. The memory is fixed, and very limited too, and a new dimension of memory consciousness while coding needs to be added to the development process and the art of the coder should come up with elegant memory solutions to support the whole product.
You would need to know the hardware very well in order to utilize it best and the border line between software and hardware really tends to become non existent. The depth of the abstraction layers while doing software engineering is much more in this case, all the way de-abstracting to the hardware itself.
The machine stays the same for a few years, the games enhance, the only way this could happen is by writing better and more efficient code and better using the hardware, unlike the usual trend in PC application development which is to write less efficient bloated code every year and rely on the enhancements in hardware performance.
Modern consoles are all multi-processor machines and they are a great platform for parallel software development which is quite complex and exciting. The best system in this area is the Cell processor on the PS3 with the 8 processing cores.
All of the above is quite a lot of work and needs tremendous amount of work but the whole idea of console development seems to be a fair and well defined game and challenge. Playing in a game where the rules are changed randomly isn't quite fun.
Hope to engage in the real coder's arena one day soon.

Down on the up side

Garshasp project, the current version, is close to an end, however, I feel very much like its just the beginning and I have a lot of excitement for a lot of basic issues in our work. It all seems to be the beginning one more time, I feel the symmetry in the air. Its our polish time and I read a very nice statement about polish today, "Polish is when you turn something functional into an Art form!".
Our biggest hurdle ahead is losing our super star and Ninja coder (Military Services) but just remembering how he worked for any of our team members in itself can be quite productive for each one of them. We hope the experience of some Military discipline can even further excel this Ninja.
Focus, like always, is the most important thing we need right now.

Magazine Cover

Garshasp was featured in BaziRayaneh this month. BaziRayaneh is the most significant magazine about computer games in Iran and it has been the first time that an Iranian game will be featured on the cover of this magazine which makes us feel quite proud.

The Garshasp dev team has worked superb recently and such recognitions are well deserved for each one of them. The magazine DVD includes interviews with the guys which are quite fun.

We just got back from Game Connection Lyon and the event was fantastic, we managed to meet many great people in the industry and there was many things for us to learn in the process.

Oh by the way the magazine contains the same illustration as its poster.