Boot camp

The exhibition has been postponed for about a week, which is an excellent news for us.

We've started a boot camp already to see how much we can have done in this week and the first night of this camp was highly valuable, another spark from the team with lots of nice things done. The main scene was assembled together and rendered using 1600x1400 resolution for the first time on full screen which was quite exciting. Polishing and making sure every part fits together very well and ensuring solid game play is probably the highest risk we are facing right now and the plan is to play test as soon as possible, although there is still lots to do. The ocean is cold, dark and there is storm all around but the group is still hanging on and patience, focus, passion and again patience is what can lead us to dry land.

Off we go...

Comeback !

Metallica has comeback! Their new album is much stronger and heavier than the last few albums, rebounding from the downfall which started by the release of the Black album.

It is very fun to see experienced dudes come back strong... inspiring, although uber bands such as Slayer never decreased altitude but this comeback is appreciated ...

Hail Poseidon

Every time I stand in front of the sea or the ocean, I get a special feeling. A feeling of freedom, a feeling of weightless-ness, a feeling that reminds you that you are nothing and breaks all the grudge. A feeling of being possessed by the ultimate power of the sea, witnessing chaotic harmony blending into the beautifully choreographed motion of the waves over the unique music they make.

If I lived in the old ages, I would have for sure worshiped the sea instead of anything else. Assuming the fact that I didn't live in some distant desert somewhere.

This year, I had the chance to take Mohyar with me to the sea front. He ignored the thing initially, then tried to have a glance, the high intensity light in the horizon bothered him having him look away a few times and then he finally looked at it and clicked ...he clicked ... gazed into the kingdom of Poseidon mesmerized ... dazed and confused just like his father holding him ...

Take me to the other side

Looking at the recent best sellers in the box office we can observe an interesting fact. The fact that most of these titans have been either comic book hero re-creations or animations. The obvious question here would be, why?

Lets try to evaluate some predicates in order to see if we can get anywhere about this question.

1 - Recent technology has enabled producers to create such movies and animation.

Well... true... but just because they can make them now doesn't specify why they have to be best sellers. There should be much more.

2 - People have good memories from the comic books and would love to see them live on the silver screen. Nostalgia effect.

Hmm... well true... but not for everyone ... the everyone who make these movies become hits... and there are many contradicting examples too, take for instance "Kung Foo panda" or "Ratatouille" ...

3 - There are lots of action in these movies and people like action movies.

Again ... there are many action movies out there... Batman, Iron-Man and Hulk are the winners. Should be something more.

4 - The target audience for these movies are the young and they go to the movies a lot.

Only the young people alone can not halp the Dark Knight break the world records.

5 - There is something deep inside us humans that makes us love to jump into the fantasy worlds and witness the un-known and hard to imagine experiences, disconnect us for a while from the boring and repetitive world around us, show us that anything can be possible. The important keywords that can be connected to this fact are: freedom, power, randomness, hope and overcoming fear.

This one I like and delving into it can yield to beautiful facts about us humans and life.
Freedom and power are symbols that have roots in the same type of reality, randomness as opposed to full determinism is required for dynamic systems to have a chance to enhance their situations when faced with trouble, hope can have meanings when there can exist randomness that would create freedom leading to power and overcoming the fear is necessary in order to have hopes and jump into the random sea and show courage to try different things which would make you free and ultimately add to your power, add to your power because you increased your available options out of the total option state space.

Such movies, putting our "I am an intellectual and hate such movies" attitude aside, are valuable I believe ...

Thousand years...

We've all lived in a "room a thousand years wide" in these past few days. The level of work done has been tremendous, love, excitement, passion, pride, commitment, ambition and brotherhood can be smelled in the air... "Real" things ... things that should be ...  less than 3 weeks left to the showdown... how much more work left? Lots and lots and lots... off we go ....

Chrome Time

I'm having fun with Chrome, the new google browser. Among the reasons for this fun are the fact that it is very light weight and minimalistic. For some reason I always get attracted to minimalism, being simple but with power. Powerful Simplicity. Fast small foot-print code is fun, easy short solutions to mathematical problems are beautiful, minimalistic furniture is awesome, cheetah is my favorite animal, strong people with little overhead are great, sports with little gears needed are the best! Flying is the ultimate dream!

Other reasons for having fun with chrome are the tabs being separate processes instead of all living in the same process and being multi-threaded, enabling all of the tabs to remain open after one crashes, which makes the 50+ tabs I usually have open in the hopes of reading their content some day remain there for a bit more time until I consciously decide that I'm never going to read them and make me feel a bit  ... umm.. well... this one might not be so good after all :).

The comics done by Scott Mcloud are great too. Don't forget to read his books about comics if you have the slightes interest in this media.

Adoosh

Welcome my old pal, Adoosh, to the blogging atmosphere. We always had lots to talk about with a few friends of mine around and now that everybody is so distant, physically, these blog rings can re-ignite some of the heat. At least the discussions can be crystalized this time ...

The curse is over!

Khodroweb is up again! After being in-active for a few years, the site is back up again.
The initial idea was implemented 6 years ago but since the situation of online payments wasn't very popular with the people at that time, we had to provide a semi-manual method for running the website where "Tele-marketing" was used for finding new advertisers and an agent would physically go to their place, take the pictures and information and the payment and come back to the main office so that their car ad was inserted into the website database. This model was obviously not the ideal model for such a business and we were carrying on with it until the time that online payments where used easily by the mass so that people could upload their car ad and pay online without any need for physical interactions. This fact didn't become popular among the poeple as we had expected and so we had no chance but to suspend the activities of the website for a while. We've been trying to bring the service back online for quite a while but different issues (the Curse) prevented it to happen. The whole code base was re-written twice in .net and two times in php and never saw the light.

Although this new version of the site is not still what we expect from this system and we have lots of plans for it, marketing and technical, but it is just a small step forward and hope to see our ideas transformed into Khodroweb features very soon.

Final Countdown

"We're leaving together,
But still its farewell
And maybe we'll come back,
To earth, who can tell?
I guess there is no one to blame
We're leaving ground
Will things ever be the same again?

Its the final countdown...

Were heading for venus and still we stand tall
Cause maybe they've seen us and welcome us all
With so many light years to go and things to be found
I'm sure that we'll all miss her so."

Well this is the state of our team so far, with only 1 month remaining to the exhibition, it is the final countdown. Still lots to do but the level of effort shown by everybody on the team has been exceptional so far.

Our 3D modeler is building 3D models with his blood, sculpting each and every 3D model with all his heart and passion. Our animator giving life to all the selected characters for this demo and making sure the whole dynamic motions are what we expect for this stage, our senior programmer and technical front-man blowing his magic over the game engine and enabling the impossible, focusing on visual sorcery , our junior programmer living every moment trying to enhance whatever he can, starting from the world editor all the way to any feature in engine or required by advanced graphics, our concept designer creating all that needs to be created from the collective team passion and our Flash/Web programmer crystalizing all his love into interactive elements..... hmm...I am really blessed to be able to witness all the passion rising from this team and I do not know who nature will unfold our future or yet even the next second but this experience so far has been super natural and worth every second to live for...

A new PC, "Ninja" has been added to the arsenal in order to speed up
some parts and enable proper world creation and testing using our world
editor, "Iranvij".

Still so many light years to go but we believe we can achieve speeds faster than light ... alas remember that the "Force" was with us! :)

Progress

... other than a monitor exploding and a hard disk crashing and the "D" key of a keyboard jumping out... the work towards the exhibition is going well so far...