I watched this video on TED from John Wooden, the famous basketball coach, today, highly inspirational. The talk is just great. The main topic revolves around the definitions of success and he describes how he believes in success being defined inside every individuals scope and related to how hard someone tries compared to their potential and the difference between winning and success. He describes how the journeys are more important than the destinations.
John Wooden is currently 98 years old, wow.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Fantasy to Come
Fantasy Football is a new project which we've started. It will be a Fantasy Football game for the Iranian Football League. Design has just started and the expected due date is in 3 months before the new season starts.
Get ready if you're a Football fan since loads of fun is about to come.
Main development is being carried out by our highly skilled technical guru, Babak Arj. Code base using .net 3.5, DB is SQL Server 2008 and LINQ for DB interactions.
Get ready if you're a Football fan since loads of fun is about to come.
Main development is being carried out by our highly skilled technical guru, Babak Arj. Code base using .net 3.5, DB is SQL Server 2008 and LINQ for DB interactions.
Seminar Done
The Business Intelligence Seminar went well. Our good friend, Iman Eftekhari opened up the seminar with an introduction to BI, Dr.Abdollah Zadeh from Amir Kabir University expanded the definitions for BI and the program was followed by other professionals talking about problems that can arise in BI implementation projects and an introduction to MS Sharepoint as a front end portal for managing BI Solutions. Iman finished with some demos on Microsoft products for Business Intelligence.
There were a few things we wished could have been handled better but considering the fact that this was our first Seminar experience, it was ok.
We are looking forward to expand the consulting and implementation fields here at Fanafzar to include BI in the near future.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
The Future
We went over an interesting presentation from GDC09 regarding parallel coding strategies for game AI which covered a few basic strategies for making the main component interactions parallel to embrace the multi core and many core architectures. These include double buffering, messaging, asynchronous requests and Job scheduling. This is one major area which we'll need to focus on for the very near future of our development. The Zorvan engine is not threaded properly right now(except for resource loading and the potential to run in a different thread for the physics simulation loop) but one of the most important design goals for MAGE is a mutli threaded kernel.
An interesting software engineering concept which I came across to during the presentation that has good use for multi threaded Job scheduling systems is "Futures" and "Promises". These definitions have been thought about for a while now but they are finding practical uses these days with the heightened significance for parallel code. Languages which have supported this feature include Joule and E.
yzt pointed me out to the Boost implementation for the idea.
As always, the engineers rolling the boost library (probably aliens from outer space), are providing c++ implementations for any statement in the form of:" .... but c++ does not support this feature ! ", with Boost it can!
An interesting software engineering concept which I came across to during the presentation that has good use for multi threaded Job scheduling systems is "Futures" and "Promises". These definitions have been thought about for a while now but they are finding practical uses these days with the heightened significance for parallel code. Languages which have supported this feature include Joule and E.
yzt pointed me out to the Boost implementation for the idea.
As always, the engineers rolling the boost library (probably aliens from outer space), are providing c++ implementations for any statement in the form of:" .... but c++ does not support this feature ! ", with Boost it can!
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Frame Runners
I've had a chance to interview a couple guys recently for the open position we have for a 3D Animator. We've been looking for someone to help us mainly in the cut-scene animations. During all the interview sessions, I was shocked with the same question from the animators, they asked me:"What level of quality are you looking for in the animations?" ... hmm... good question... what level am I looking for?? Well... lets put it this way ... I WANT your whole SOUL and BODY transformed into moving characters ... I WANT to see your BLOOD drained totally to create ANIMATIONS that BLOW any living thing into outer SPACE... I WANT YOU to do something so high in quality you will never ever be able to re-create in your whole LIFE... I want all the MAGIC and META Physics in the world to help you CREATE un-believably COOL animations ... I want those DAMN animations to LIVE eternally after you fade ... that's how I want them to be, yes that's the kind of quality we are looking for my dear.
Of course I didn't quite answer them this way, there aren't much talented skills around unfortunately so the words have to be chosen rather carefully, but thinking about the questions, I have come up with some guesses. The animation business around is quite ill unfortunately and the basic mechanism works this way, National TV needs some programs, the Government Agencies in charge with lots of money define projects for smaller companies, since good quality is usually the last focus in these layers and there has to be a measure for project pricing and contracts, the deals are made based on the minutes of produced animations so the smaller studios sign contracts to make x minutes of animations for the price of y per minute. Then its production time, as fast as possible, animators are hired and are paid based on the minutes, or frames, they can produce. The race begins, managers walk all day with their sticks and measure the frames animated at the end of the day by each animator and the grin on their face is proportionate to the size of the output files. The above question completely makes sense in this scenario and the usual answer is probably something to keep the prestige a little but deep down the money chasing manager knows he wants the highest production speed with the lowest quality which will be acceptable by the usually mis-positioned major clients which again will accept the final product based on what they see on their stop watches. Everybody seems to be happy, junk in, junk out, no value generated, ill formed industry, just watch TV to find out.
Now this is not the concept here at Fanafzar dear Frame Runners, we've been on a journey for more than two years now on a boat carried on the waves of love and dedication of every one of the guys, it will remain this way or we'll just let it sink ourselves so please save your questions for the time wasting, useless, cheating jobs with the Frame Runner Seeking managers.
Of course I didn't quite answer them this way, there aren't much talented skills around unfortunately so the words have to be chosen rather carefully, but thinking about the questions, I have come up with some guesses. The animation business around is quite ill unfortunately and the basic mechanism works this way, National TV needs some programs, the Government Agencies in charge with lots of money define projects for smaller companies, since good quality is usually the last focus in these layers and there has to be a measure for project pricing and contracts, the deals are made based on the minutes of produced animations so the smaller studios sign contracts to make x minutes of animations for the price of y per minute. Then its production time, as fast as possible, animators are hired and are paid based on the minutes, or frames, they can produce. The race begins, managers walk all day with their sticks and measure the frames animated at the end of the day by each animator and the grin on their face is proportionate to the size of the output files. The above question completely makes sense in this scenario and the usual answer is probably something to keep the prestige a little but deep down the money chasing manager knows he wants the highest production speed with the lowest quality which will be acceptable by the usually mis-positioned major clients which again will accept the final product based on what they see on their stop watches. Everybody seems to be happy, junk in, junk out, no value generated, ill formed industry, just watch TV to find out.
Now this is not the concept here at Fanafzar dear Frame Runners, we've been on a journey for more than two years now on a boat carried on the waves of love and dedication of every one of the guys, it will remain this way or we'll just let it sink ourselves so please save your questions for the time wasting, useless, cheating jobs with the Frame Runner Seeking managers.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Plane
Bungie Studio has a nice presentation about production for Halo 3 names, "Building Your Airplane While Flying: production and Bungie".
The title very much suits our current situation in the development process for Garshasp also. We are working on features daily which are necessary for the production phase which we are at right away. Of course this is not an ideal situation for a smooth production stage but hey, I guess when there is loads of uncertainty, building the plane while on the air would be the best you can do, if you want to fly anyway.
The title very much suits our current situation in the development process for Garshasp also. We are working on features daily which are necessary for the production phase which we are at right away. Of course this is not an ideal situation for a smooth production stage but hey, I guess when there is loads of uncertainty, building the plane while on the air would be the best you can do, if you want to fly anyway.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Business Intelligence
BISolutions which is a Fanafzar partner is holding a Seminar on Business Intelligence. More information can be found here:
http://bisolutions.ir/%D8%B3%D9%85%DB%8C%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A7/tabid/59/Default.aspx
http://bisolutions.ir/%D8%B3%D9%85%DB%8C%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%87%D8%A7/tabid/59/Default.aspx
Friday, April 10, 2009
Rolling on
These are exciting days for our Garshasp project. On one end after more than two years, we feel a bit more comfortable with the whole development process and the work pipelines which should exist between different members of the disciplines such as art, design and coding. On the other end the level of art assets developed have risen and on the technical end, interesting features are being added to the game engine, Zorvan and the level editor, Iranvij.
All that would be necessary for this team right now is to be able to continue this progress for a few more months. This progress which includes learning new stuff daily for everyone and whole hearted dedication to hard work and focus with the aim of reaching high quality standards which exist on the triple peaks of passion, talent and professional attitude.
All that would be necessary for this team right now is to be able to continue this progress for a few more months. This progress which includes learning new stuff daily for everyone and whole hearted dedication to hard work and focus with the aim of reaching high quality standards which exist on the triple peaks of passion, talent and professional attitude.
On fire for fire
Firing a football team coach has only one good use, "food for the media", that's it. Its really strange, or maybe not strange at all, that it happens so often lately. A coach for the national team, having so little time to prepare the team, not having most of the players who play abroad most of the time which mostly happen to be ignorant regarding coaches decisions whenever they are present anyway, can't do any magic and changing these coaches with high frequency won't fix anything, well again, except for satisfying the tiny little systems known as the sports media.
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