I swear it changed direction ...

When I first came to know the sports Baseball, I hated it. Then for a while, it was OK and then I used to love it. The role of Japan in this transition is not negligible, or in fact it might even be significant and major.

The last time I was engaged with the sport was from the days that we went to practice in Tehran's Team with my great friend Ghaaj. Until now that another great friend of mine, Ash, is visiting town and we got busy with a little catch ball practice which opened up the pandora's box and made a lot of memories and emotions flow out!

The movement of the ball is very important in this field. Specifically for the pitch. Different pitching types are used by pitchers which claim the make the ball move in different kinds of trajectories, ranging from straight and fast, to curve and fall, even a ball which can shake while it traverses from the pitchers hands to the catchers glove. Those who have played the sport have all witnessed this bu many have been skeptical about all these and considered these different kind of ball motions and myths or as some imaginations. Well, here is the scientific reasons behind it. The same aerodynamical rules apply for a football, tennis or even basketball.

Lets do some more CB.

By the way, Masumi Kuwata was my big time idol for a long time.I remember he had a perfect (no hit) game with the Yomiuri Giants in his rookie year.

Sylized Rendering

We've had quite a few talks with the developers here regarding photorealistic and non-photorealistic rendering techniques. We were mainly after the non-photorealistic rendering technique features for Soshiant. We had some guesses, some information about cell shading in general and a book about photorealistic rendering but recently we came across this wonderful paper along with the presentation by the folks over at Valve Software regarding the techniques used for Team Fortress 2. There is lots of useful information in the paper. We're not going to use techniques similar to this for Soshiant but they could be invaluable in the near future.

Now the only thing remaining is for us to find Team Fortress somehow.

Shine on the world

There have been quite a few very exciting news from the game development industry lately. Havok physics engine becoming free to use for game developers being the first, thanks to intel. Ageia PhysX accuired by Nvidia and trying to integrate Natural Motions tools for enhanced physics and animation features the second news. The third being Crytek, releasing a full modding SDK with source code and lots of documentation for the CryEngine, I'm not sure how much of the code has been released though.

This trend has existed in the open source world for a few years now but these are actions being taken by giants of the commercial world. Not to forget all the cool tools and technology from Nvidia.

Whether the reason behind all these possibilities for game development is better business models for the vendors, increased power for the vendor by increasing the power of the community, or simply a few developers and managers wishing to see everyone else use their wonderful systems, all these mean excellent opportunities for enhancing the knowledge, skills and techniques of the development team. Somthing unheard of and unseen in the past. It enables a development team to experience years in just a few months or maybe even days. But are we ready for this speed yet? Well... needs more thought .... the new development team today must look and act a lot different from 10 years ago ... and the results can be much different from 10 years ago... all these magical tools and frameworks need a grand mage to use them ... "Becareful what you wish for ... you just might get it !"

PS. by the way, Diablo 3 is ultra cool !

Shedding skin

Five years seems to be a magical number. It seems to be specially important for the systems of society such as companies. A lot of things can happen in five years and it is the minimum duration for major shifts to be visible.

Now Fanafzar is five years old and it seems like we are shedding skin. Going through some changes... from many different aspects... these changes could lead to better or worse days... but they have to happen ... and somehow I think after five years they will just happen... don't forget this magical number ...