Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Today is Tomorrow

pheww.... the past week was a blast ... the focus of the team was on bringing Soshiant closer to our ambitious goals... we were able to pour in as much time as we can with a few ultra all nighters (sometimes all-day and nighters in fact) ...and the results have been satisfactory ... although some diabolic risks showed that they have in fact the ability to de-rail us for a while but the overall effort and focus of the magnigifient crew on board the Soshiant-Game ship recovered and fought back. Everybody tried their best and has shown super support up to this point. We were able to register parts of the demo for the exhibition today which meant meeting a big milestone for us. Of course still much needs to be done and the time remaining is two weeks.... when you aim for the horizon and set sails, no matter how far you go, still much more needs to be travelled!

Among the major striking waves towards us so far have been, Hard Disk crash, not any hard disk, the major resources data base server hard disk which hosts the main AlienBrain repository, decrease in performance for a few days before the crash, decrease of performance for our modeler which needed to load the memory hungry level into 3D max.

A very low level memory bug which was caused by constructing 3D mesh geometry in OGRE for a cloth representation coming out of the PhysX engine. A random bug which surfaced at the worst times and the most guiding hint the debugger showed us was a problem in one of the main windows assembly files related to memory copy!

Un-expected behavior in the libraries and un-synchronized code and induced complexity because of developer code base sharing were among the others. Not to mention blue screen crashes on the main development PC due to installing the new NVPerfHud studio from Nvidia.

Thrusting features pushing the team have been Mojos made by Syros, loud heavy metal and the team passion as usual.

Among the major achievements this week have been the ability to test and compose the level elements and see the mechanics by using the integrated editor/engine tool (Iranvij) that we have. Trying out visual studio remote debugging showed to be very useful and fun too.

Crunch mode and the intense level of work brings you to a new state, a new state of the mind and senses, every normal day after that seems like the world in slow motion. I feel that meeting the extremes and living on the edges can provide higher quality for the rest of the moments and enhance the overall consciousness. The time which you really live! You will reach this state early in the morning when the sun presents itself once more and someone around you says:"Today is Tomorrow" ... On the social side, you get to know the people around you much better in crunch mode, and man, I've been lucky .... these guys around are warriors.

We would like to thank the following brands and products for supporting our crunch mode: Lavazza Coffee, Crunchips, Jever - Fun (... you can only find out why under the label says fun when you drink it at 4 am on the cold ground tile while nothing is working and everything is crashing !), Istak, Maz Maz, RoastBeef and CheeseBurgers(from Ghermez!!),Tabasco, Spinach-Chicken Pizza (72), Tobbaco in Rizla papers, Fruit Yoghurt (Kaleh), the things that go into Syros Mojo (... actual products omitted due to license restrictions!), Hype, Abbas agha's Haleem, and Sir Jack Daniel's.

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