The new Hell

We recently thought it was a good time to upgrade the tools and library code that we use. So we went on and upgraded to VS 2010, used the latest version of OGRE 1.8 (un-stable), upgraded almost all other dependent libraries like PhysX, NxOgre, OgreVideo, Theora, ogg, vorbis, ...etc. Recompiled all the ones that had the source code available using VS 2010, quickly fixed the errors related to porting and put all where they belonged and tried to run the game with the old levels we had. Guess what, nothing worked!

Serious crashes and hangs everywhere.

Hmm... it might be related to the new OGRE we thought, maybe because of the way we have changed the use of Threading? Maybe an incompatibility with the new OpenAL? Can it be related to VS 2010? So we started.... we started to try out all different permutations possible with the libraries, ... the new code with the old OGRE, the old code with the new OGRE, the new code with VS 2008, OGRE 1.7, ... OGRE 1.6 ... and any other imaginable configuration, hoping to find the exact module causing the new issues. After almost a week, nothing was found! Strange stuff happened with every change.

Now we are back to the old code base that runs perfect on VS 2008 with all the rusty libraries that are rock solid. Will follow the upgrading of the libraries sometime in the future but this time one by one with proper test suites to run after each change.

Lesson learned: Do not upgrade everything possible over NIGHT!

Human Magic

The magic inside... different methodologies and processes and regulations all try to streamline a development process and reduce the risks hidden throughout the journey which includes creativity and engineering.... However, there lies a magic ingredient which can boost everything or kill all attempts, bring life to all or take all that lives... bring on success or absolute failure ... this magnificent or lethal ingredient is nothing but the human side of things ... the stuff that happens when two collaborate or take sides... this is what can make a team leap a hundred years or crumble all that has been made in a hundred years ... oh how valuable ... oh how the magic lives ... how we still rely on this magic ... how we all need to be magi ....

Ancient Warriors in the Digital World

We often called our few and highly talented and motivated developers at our office Samurais. This was a subconscious feeling and an appropriate word for defining the developers who have helped us during the last 8 years that we have established our company. It still feels the best word for describing these guys.

The Samurai were retainers for their masters and aligned their actions in life to be able to support the master in the best way. The masters for our developer samurais have always been the projects. A Samurai would commit seppuku upon losing the master and this is the mindset of a Samurai developer upon failing the project.

There are many attitudes, specifically the mental ones, that can be analyzed and discussed for comparing the legendary warriors with the modern incarnations but I will go for one I recently came across.

I was talking with a few friends recently about how I feel the special developer (coder, designer, artist) here is the one who when has an eye taken, a hand chained, attendance time limited and generally constrained, will do the best possible work and do it with zero complains and with the highest quality possible. Oh this being something doable by the few special ones, the few Samurais around. It turns out that this is what the word "courage" meant for the Samurais as the Book of the Samurai, "Hagakure" says.

..."Young men should discipline themselves rigorously in intention and courage. This will be accomplished if only courage is fixed in one's heart. If one's sword is broken, he will strike with his hands. If his hands are cut off, he will press the enemy down with his shoulders. If his shoulders are cut away, he will bite through ten or fifteen enemy necks with his teeth. Courage is such a thing."

From the 7th Chapter, Hagakure

Courage is indeed such a thing...

Real Men

Tough times ... really dense ... no chance for under-achieving ... focus necessary ... hard work ... hope ... fighting desperation ... patience ... hanging tight ... patience ... holding together ... believing ... patience ... trying ... ignoring exhaustion ...

All that fuels me in this final path is the real men around me ... oh these are the real warriors ... how rare ... how mighty ... how blessed I must be ...

believing ... patience ...

3D Challenge

We are holding a 3D modelling challenge with the help of CGArt.ir society and several notable others for aspiring and experienced game artists. You can read every thing about it over here.

Let all the artists know about this event.

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...

The invisible fire of projects

Interesting times. It is always nice to know when you can interact and cause certain things to happen, you feel alive and meaningful but only if you have a role in this action that you are going to take. Is it possible to take actions which you do not have a role? Certainly yes and what we are doing most of the time, just reflecting, doing x because of y. Doing x again if we were to take back time and sense y again and again. However, there are times which you have a choice and we talk about selection. The very essence of creativity comes from the deep power of choice. Running into the multiple paths of selection and following one is the core that builds our freedom and this is where we find our meaning, the rest of the times we are just sleep walking with the ghosts.

Such a stage has been reached at this time for Fanafzar Games. Garshasp is coming to an end and a new beginning is on the horizon. We need to select on the next project and plan ahead for our next commitment which will be at least for a 2 year period. Multiple paths lie ahead and I have a feeling that each will have big differences as far as their outcomes. Selecting the platform to develop for, whether sticking to PC or trying ways to enter the Console development is one, planning ahead for the technology and tools we have created so far is two, selecting the game genre and title is three, evaluating different middle-ware technology is four, doing research on some areas to include in the next version of the engine is five, redesigning the development process and methodology is six and finding new talent to work with is choice group number seven.

The above choice groups have options and combining them properly to lay down the path towards our goals is in itself an art form. The big puzzle which needs to be solved with many dead ends and a few paths to higher grounds.

The overall feeling is interesting and the challenge for each choice group is very exciting but there is one which is still quite a mystery for me and that is the last item. We have some ideas about the first six, at least we know ways to try out our ideas and assess and evaluate and decide but regarding the people working on the team or joining the team, there are quite a lot of mysteries. Interestingly enough the issue is not with the technical skills and abilities of these people, it is with their mindsets and attitude. The last thing on earth that anyone trying to assemble a team to work on high tech would ever think of, the last thing I ever thought of when I was trying to form a team to do something which none of them had done before in their areas of expertise and never done by our team or even any team close to us. Something with a lot of technical uncertainties and a process never experienced. People thought it was impossible because we couldn't find the specialists needed, we didn't have technology necessary, we couldn't secure the necessary budget, we lacked the experience and that their would be external pressures to prevent us from finishing a product. No one ever speculated that our biggest problem is going to be from within, inside the simplest behaviors of us human beings, being able to manage the self, being honest, having control, being there and believing. Such issues have been covered very well in books such as "Herding Cats" but in the case of our project, really the best thing that happened was the people and the worst thing that happened was the people again. When people showed to be people by following the internal wave of self management, honesty and believing, they tackled the technical issues and all mission impossibles and did miracles and whenever they lost control of the self and polluted their minds with simple nonesense, all their magic was taken to the point which they could not even deliver the simplest values to the project and became a big burden for the rest of the team to carry on their back with their bleeding bodies. This is the miracle of us human beings, something which has been talked about a little in some books, something never talked about in the Universities, something we had to experience the hard way in our project, something for us to think about every day during the next project and something which makes all the technical risks and unknowns suddenly seem really easy to tackle.

Risk analysis helps project management but the basic elements for risk analysis are the probabilistic variables which model the system and in the case of the above mentioned parameters, no proper mathematical variable or probabilistic distribution can define them and so what we need to rely on in this case is not risk analysis techniques but pure magic.

Post DMF

This year's DMF, Tehran went well. The fair is a real marathon, 10 days from 9am to 9pm but being able to have close contact with the potential players is always nice.

We have lots of feedback forms to study, and lots of application forms for jobs, hope to find a few gems among these.

the Project

My soul has been possessed by the Garshasp development process these days. The project is converging and there are millions of little bits and pieces that need to be fit together. Good final assembly is essential for quality.

Guys on the team are doing a good job rolling the specific areas of their responsibilities, although when you live and breathe a project and a few processes in your mind are always occupied by the events surrounding it, you'll always see the inefficiencies with one eye, but this is something we are trying to learn from everyday and are hoping to let it leverage our team abilities for future projects. Seeing every individual effort is my ecstasy and the opposite takes me down.

Life is the toughest and most fun these days. The mind experiences the extremes of new frontiers. The biggest task as usual is being able to find the balance point between the "good enough" for release and the passion for good quality.

There's been needs for expanding the team and making sure we add crew who can maintain the spirit is another big challenge.

One more push of courage, commitment, passion, determination and love from the development team and we should be doing fine.

Haskellers

Our first Haskell programming session was held this week along with three Fanafzar Ninjas, yzt, fhm and barj. Our goal is to get to know the language and see the world from a different angle. We might not use it eventually for the daily coding tasks but thinking from a Functional Programming aspect should be valuable and help the thinking process in general.

Real World Haskell is a free online book which we follow. Quite a good book.

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.

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.

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.

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

Not this time

Today was the due date for our delivery milestone of the game we are working on and we failed, we failed really huge. We had a lot of plans and at the end could not even deliver ten percent of what we had hoped for. Although a lot of work was done by the whole team, specially the day and night efforts during the last few days, but we just could not put everything together the way they were supposed to be. Another big lesson to learn about our shortcomings for the development process. Although we traversed new paths for this milestone and tried to experience a few things we hadn't before. We'll have to focus more and more. My only plan now is to dissect the experience and find out the avoidable problems. I already feel more strength.

Use that pen

We are in the process of adding new artists to the team. A few have been interviewed already. Great passion to work on this project is the first thing we look for, the next step is to be able to design 3D environments or be a good Animator. The number one problem we have witnessed in the applicants so far has been that the ones who claim can model in 3D, do not have the texture painting techniques which a game artist usually needs. This has been a surprise for us. Its the fusion of the love of 2D traditional art and new 3D technology which breeds the new type of art creature in these days. The exact same is true for animation. All the feelings and life which is needed in 3D animation has roots in traditional 2D works. We are hunting now!

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...

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 ...

Its here !!

Joomex has been launched finally: www.joomex.com
There is a big list of enhancements queued already. This should baseline the CMS/portal requirements here at Fanafzar from now on.
One of the next steps Farshid is thinking about right now is to provide a Flash UI for the portal core.

Sweeter than SugarCube...

Customer Relationships Management (CRM) has been a hot requirement for the e-business application domains quite for some time now and the number of the clients of Fanafzar looking for CRM systems is increasing everyday.

Most of these clients require the back office CRM features which will be used by the employees, most probably on the local intranet, however they have a few scenarios where the customer will directly interact with the system, usually through a self service portal. Examples for this customer interactions would be online help desks that are integrated with the internal enterprise CRM system.

Being a firm which mostly promotes the open source solutions, we had initiated an integration systems research project code named SugarCube. In this solution the Joomla CMS is integrated with the SugarCRM system. All the back office requirements are provided by SugarCRM and the front end poral is based on Joomla. However, the scenarios which require interactions and communications between these two systems will be designed and the communication protocol between the two is web services using SOAP. The fact that sugarCRM has implemented most of its UI in terms of web services in addition to normal web forms has made this integration quite feasible. The SugarCRM server will be based on the company intranet and it will communicate with the Joomla server on the company internet web server.

The next step for this integration project is using a work flow engine to manage the business processes needed and provide the flexibility for modification of these processes for the enterprise. We've studied JBPM, but some proof of concept prototypes would be necessary before any further design decisions. JBPM being a java based engine would need some web service based wrappers around it to be able to talk to other service providing sub systems, which are mostly PHP based.

Code name was SugarCube since the integration was planned for the XoopsCube portal initially. XoopsCube has got a far better architecture and design structure compared to xoops or joomla open source portal but for practicality, Joomla has been selected for the current project.

SugarCube is coming out of research phase an being implemented for an ISP client these days.

Hope we don't drop it in tea !