Shadowlessness

I had heard of the new Bioware RPG Dragon Age: Origins but I guess I had forgotten about it. Today, I stumbled upon a couple of reviews and some videos and now I’m in love with the game! It appears to be very long (which probably means a few months of gameplay for me; yay!), difficult, deep and true to classic Bioware-RPGs. Almost everyone calls it a great successor to the Baldur’s Gate duo. And I enjoy Bioware games, from Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights to Mass Effect (yes, even KOTOR games!) My only worry is the departure from almost strict D&D ruleset of BG and NWN.
In any case, I’m downloading the whole 8GBs right now, unless somebody knows whether stores over here have got the game?

In other news, I finally got my hands on the God of War Collection trailer. For those rare GoW-challenged people among my audience, the Collection is a remastered version of the first two God of War games for the PS3 (they where released for the PS2 originally.) It seems that, as they had promised, SONY has not changed anything in the games, and just packed some higher resolution textures and (maybe) animations, which is a wise move. The first two GoWs deserve to be preserve at the masterpiece of gameplay they are. This will be release this month.
Obviously, the above means I have to get my own PS3. As soon as I figure out a robust solution to get both video and audio out of the PS3 and into my 1080p-capable but HDMI-incapable monitor and my speakers, I’m taking the trip to the Toopkhuneh(!) square and getting me a 120GiB PS3 Slim.

In yet other news, late last month (a day before my own birthday in fact) the twelfth book in the amazing and fantastic fantasy series The Wheel of Time has been released. It was supposed to be in November too IIRC, which makes the release a nice surprise. I’m already a fourth into the book and I’m liking it! May Robert Jordan rest in pieces… oops!… rest in peace.
I have one thing to say to anyone who likes high fantasy at all: GO READ THE BOOKS. The whole 12000-13000 pages of pure immersion and greatness. Doesn’t matter what other people say. I have read enough fantasy series to know which one is great! Go read it. Read the first book if you feel you don’t have the time. Do yourself a favor.

How many people (who doesn’t matter very much!) do I have to kill to get one of these babies?! And how many more must I slay to get a 3G network in Iran so the wireless facilities work too?! You know what, scratch that. As long as the built-in DRM misfeatures are not too draconian and/or can be circumvented, I don’t care about the wireless connectivity. I could always USB my PDFs over.
I just told a friend the other day that how much I wished for a pile of good books and a lot of time to read them. The books I do have, more than enough, it is the time I find myself constrained about. A Kindle would give me the ability to read everywhere.
Most of the fiction I “read” these days is in the form of audiobook. And you can’t listen to audiobooks while going around on public transportation or walking on the streets or just stretching in your home in the mornings (that would be normal people’s afternoons.) Because people absolutely can’t leave you alone for 10 minutes, and audiobooks are not a snap to pause and resume. Besides, I can’t listen to technical books, even if there where such things.
And I can’t read books on my computers, because there are much more immediately fun ways to use a computer screen and attempting to multitask between writing code and reading an ebook is just not workable!

Anyway, I think a perfect solution for me is Kindle DX (because it has PDF support) as long as the DRM is not too constricting. I guess I’d have to dust off my old ninja outfit. We are raiding Amazon warehouses tonight!

If you have been thinking that I’ve been too busy with work and that has been the reason that I haven’t been able to write anything, you’ve been wrong!
I’ve been holding a few moments of silence in respect to the 10th anniversary of the release of The Matrix, after which none of our lives where the same.

“Welcome… to the desert of the real!”

Amiross has posted a few lists of stuff that every programmer/engineer should read or know about. In the list of papers, I had only read one before (to my shame and dishonor!) which incidentally is an old favorite of mine, or more like a holy writ: Ken Thompson‘s Reflections on Trusting Trust. Apparently, this speech is considered a classic work about computer security (the guy is seriously concerned about computer security in 1983, and guess what, 20 years later it became a day-to-day worry for everybody!) but that’s not what captivates me about this.
When I read it back in the day and when I read it now, I see a programmer. I real programmer. I see the heart, the soul and the attitude of a great hacker, a programmer and A Wise Man.
People don’t see programming as an art. Hell, even us programmers don’t treat it as an art and a lifestyle. “But there was a time” and there were people who realized that programming is more than merely a hobby or a job; it’s a life.
And what do we do? The best of us are either doing boring (but seemingly ground-breaking) stuff in boring research labs day and night, or writing ugly, bloated, “designed” and “architectured” code in badly-lit rooms day and night.
What are we? We used to be real Jedis and real Ninjas and now we are just commercialized Hollywood versions. What happened to us? “Where did we go yesterday?”

Death… is in my blood.
Fate has brought me here.
I hope for nothing.
I fear nothing.

If you haven’t already seen the new God of War III trailer, cut off your pinkie and go watch it immediately (here’s the lower-resolution version if you are bandwidth-bound.) This is a great trailer, one that makes you lose sleep or want to kill your friend and steal his PS3. (FYI, this is an in-engine, real-time-rendered, albeit scripted footage.)

God of War is a great game, perhaps the best game ever (OK, all-time top three.) If you have never played it, you have missed a lot in your life, believe you me! It’s like you’ve never watched the Matrix or Fight Club or The God Father. It somehow completes one’s life experience. I’m not saying you have to like it or them, but you got to experience them at least. (What? You don’t like them? Get the hell out of here.)

Paul Graham has written an interesting piece on academic credentials and their value in predicting a person’s performance, vs. her actual performance. He touches on many interesting points, some very familiar for me and us; some less familiar and more intriguing. It’s a must read for almost anyone and anywhere!

Paul Graham is an old-time hacker, now turned venture-capitalist. Most of his writing, including this one, is about the life of startups and the markets in which they thrive. But if you think of it from the education perspective, you (or even I) may reach interesting solutions to the “credentials madness” that is the trend here and now.
As a failed outcome of a deeply and typically flawed education system myself, I may not be the best person to criticize it. Although the flaws in our education system is well-known to me and others, so much so that some may argue that we have stopped trying to find real problems and have confined our views to clichés, I haven’t given much thought to the practical solutions. If nothing else, that would be an interesting thought experiment.

There’s hardly anything sexier than a multicore CPU that I actually know how to program! Better yet, make that a “manycore” CPU.
Dual-core CPUs were cool, and quad-cores even cooler. But they were hardly enough to enable writing real fine-grained parallel programs. Recently Intel released “Core i7″ architecture CPUs, with four cores minimum and they all support HyperThreading, which is at best a hack and not a particularly beautiful one, but it gets the count of available hardware threads to 8, which I’m willing to settle for! (Note that semi-8-core CPUs have been available for some time, but not on desktops, and not in practical price ranges.)
When I think of all the execution units, the 64-bit wide registers, the cache hierarchy… Oooh!

That’s my birthday, if you where wondering.
(Just a quick fact: this year, due to incompatibility of Gregorian and Persian leap years, and the relative inaccuracy of the former, my birthday was October 27th.
As a friend mentioned, my 28th birthday was not on the 28th of the month. In fact, as she again noted, the first time my age turned perfect after I knew what it was, I lost my perfect birth day of the month.)
Anyway, last year I found out that my birthday is the same with Bill Gates. This year, I was cursing my bad luck when I stumbled upon the fact that I share this birthday with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Sharing anything with the guy is anything but an honor by default!
Here are some fun facts about my birthday:

1. There are 64 days in a year after October 28th!
2. I have the exact same age (±24 hours) with the Czech football player Milan Baroš. I’ve known this for several years now, but I don’t know how. My best guess is IMDB!
3. John Romero is born on this day. Since we are in the same business (behold the shameless arrogance!) I must include him here. I firmly believe that “id Software” would still be making great games (as opposed to great engines only) if he were still with them. (Incidentally, this is one of the few posters that I’d be willing to hang in my room instead of James Hetfield’s Jolly Roger pose poster.)
4. John Locke died on this day. No, not that John Locke, this John Locke! (Sorry, couldn’t resist a “Lost” reference.)
5. A guy named Landon Curt Noll has this birthday too. I knew him from the IOCCC (he is called chongo over there.) (Warning: if you think you know C, and are not ready for a rude wake up, don’t go there! Here‘s the Wikipedia page for a milder kick) but apparently he is quite a diverse person!
   Also, we used the FNV hash function (co-authored by him) in the “Silent2″ project (maybe 10 people in the entire world know what that is!) without me realizing who he was. Alas, I had to abandon that project, which I regret to this day, since the concept and opportunity were both very unique.
6. A whole bunch of other stuff have happened on this day, some of the most famous of which can be viewed on or accessed through the Wikipedia page.

Here are two higher-resolution in-game videos from Soshiant: one (~90MiB) and two (~86MiB).
Here’s another video (~71MiB) showing some characters from concept, through modeling, to animations.

Note that our engine is not even in alpha. There are many bugs present, most of with are level design bugs due to our rush for the exhibition (camera placements and transitions, characters occasionally going through walls, Soshiant’s hand not being aligned with the ledges he is hanging from, etc.) But there are some engine bugs too, like the character’s hair getting stuck in a wall or ground, or the character jumping from one position to another, or the shadows poping here and there. All you see is subject to improvement, change or both.
Also, these videos are compressed with the irreplaceable Xvid codec. The third video, which is the only one with sound, features one of our original sound-tracks, composed and played by our multi-talented concept artist Soheil Danesh.
I would be very happy to hear your feed back on any and every aspect of these videos.

Amir Hosein made a post to the OGRE showcase forums about Soshiant. The response is overwhelmingly positive. I’m hoping that our love, care and enthusiasm can fuel our effort for just another year or two, and I believe we will make it, and we’ll make it big time!

Refer to these two (one and two) blog posts by our fearless team leader “Amir Hosein“.
If you are lucky enough not to be pestered by a ridiculously ineffective, yet irritatingly irritating Internet filter, you will have a peek at some of our gameplay.
You should note that this is not even alpha software. We are a long way away from a feature-complete demo, and even longer away from a game. Please bear with us!

The Soshiant website just went live. (UPDATE: Here’s the English homepage.)
And again, we are pulling an all-nighter to ready everything for the exhibition that opens tomorrow. This will be the first time that the public sees our baby, and you could imagine how excited we are.
However, there’s still a long road to go for Soshiant to become anything resembling a playable game. What we currently have is basically nothing more than a techdemo of some of the stuff that we could do, with time and of course, money.

Anyways, the exhibition is held at Tehran Mosalla. It starts tomorrow (October 22nd, Aban 1st) and goes on for 10 days. I’m told that the visiting hours are from 9AM to 9PM. If you are interested in posters, collector cards, T-shirts and some in-game and technology videos, concept art and our game, please give us a visit. We will be at “Fan-afzar Sharif” booth.

Shame on me! Boost 1.36.0 got released and I didn’t even know it was coming this soon. It’s been several weeks that I haven’t read the mailing list. Think of all the C++ goodness I’ve lost!
I’ll get it off the SVN (if my ISP let’s me; damned idiots) and build it in a few hours, and I’ll try to upload it.