Shadowlessness

I just noticed that EA - a game publisher that is mostly known for popular, unoriginal and mediocre game - was responsible for Spore, Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space in 2008.
I like the idea of the first two and the implementation of the third (although I’ve yet to play any of them in any meaningful volume) and I may have to revise my previously held views about EA.
Since these are not received particularly well by the general populace, if they continue to produce innovative games in 2009, I will respect them!

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!

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.

He didn’t have a traumatizing childhood. He didn’t have a lover who’d left him. He didn’t have children that had died in his arms. He didn’t have a wife withered from a wasting disease. He had not killed anybody. He wasn’t enslaved or mistreated. He hadn’t suffered a great loss to mourn. He hadn’t have a great loss to regret. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t unloved. He wasn’t alone.
But he feels alone. He is sad. He is without cause and without goal. He is alone, because he doesn’t know otherwise.

Everything was ready. The ordinary razor blade was broken in two to provide better grip and control, the tissue papers to dry the blood that would be running shortly, the ash tray to gather the excess blood and soaked tissues, the lit candle for the hot wax that he would use later to fill the holes and stop the bleeding. It was another night and another nightly ritual.
Removing the nail on the big toe is not easy. He had done this many many times over the past 13 years, and his technique had improved substantially from just trying to yank and break off some part of the toe nail to methodically dissecting and twisting it out piece by piece.
Tonight was the projected night for him to remove the remaining bottom half of the nail. He would start by making a vertical incision in the nail with the razor blade. Before razor blades, he had tried several different knives, and while saw knives (knives with jagged edges) worked acceptably, none were comparable to the ease that razor blades sliced nails, like a hot knife through butter. He started with the vertical cut, right down the middle of the toe nail to cut it into two side-by-side pieces. He knew from experience exactly how thick the toenail was, yet he had to be very careful with the depth of the cut. If he made it too shallow, his nail would not be cut in two and it wouldn’t be easy to remove completely. And if he made it too deep, he would cut into the sensitive flesh underneath and the bleeding would obscure his view and get into his way and he would have to postpone the “procedure”. But cutting the visible part of the nail was not enough. Anybody who’s ever worked with nails knows that they run long beneath the flesh at the base of the nail. He knew that he had to cut two to three millimeters of the skin and flesh covering the hidden part of the nail to be able to slice that part. The fact that the base of the nail was softer and less brittle did help, but it also meant that the nail would be attached and interleaved with flesh and harder to remove completely. He needed to cut some flesh as well, although not nearly as much as one pound, but here he was allowed the extraction of blood, vein and sinew along with the flesh.
Although he was experienced, he couldn’t help but nick the toe while doing the vertical cut anyway. He did not care about the blood and he didn’t feel the throbbing pain after so many years and so many rituals, but the blood did get in his way. He dried up the blood with the tissues and went right back to work. He needed to remove the whole nail this time. If he didn’t make the cut all the way down to the stem of the nail, some part of it would remain in the depths of the toe and would grow into the skin and flesh and would fester there. He didn’t care about the festering, but he would be annoyed because he would not have access to the nail for a long time which pissed him off.
After several minutes, he managed to make the vertical incision all the way through to the base and soft part of the nail. He then started carefully lifting the two parts of the nail up and out, like opening a hatch in the ground. From this point on, there was no avoiding the blood-flow. Bits of tissue (the kind that is part of your body) would be stuck too hard to the underneath of the nail and would be ripped off as it came up. He did it fast, using a pincer to grab the now slippery nail and take it out. If you try something like that, don’t pull the nail up (along the Y axis of your body, towards your head. Do it along the X axis (to your right or left.) It requires more force, but the result is a cleaner severance. He did it first with the right section and then the left. The procedure took six or seven minutes from start to finish.
He did not wipe off the blood that was bubbling now. He lay back and extended his feet and let the blood stream down his foot, down from the corner of where his nail used to be. The bleeding tow looked like an empty eye socket, in half a face, weeping blood.

I’ve recently discovered this site. I’ve watched several of the talks there (all impressive, I must say) but this one has moved me the most. Ben Zander talks about passion of classical music, in a way that will change even the most musically challenged of us (namely yours truly, who can’t distinguish two notes even if they are as much as two octaves apart )
Of course, music is the biggest missing part from my life (trailed by mathematics) and I can’t say I understand music now, but… but I certainly felt something inside me. It was great.
Also, don’t forget to see the other great talks and presentations at TED.com.

The hunger has returned to Mr. Brooks’ brain.
…
It never really left.

With these lines starts a great movie: Mr. Brooks. It’s a black thriller (I believe) that entertained me a lot. While it has a fluid story and intelligent plot which are strong points for any movie, the relationship between Earl (played by Kevin Costner) and Marshal (played by William Hurt) was the astonishing feature that makes me like this film very much.

I generally don’t like Costner’s acting and I don’t like his roles (no, not even Dunbar in “Dances with Wolves“, while I did like the movie and his direction,) but this film does away with all that. His performance as Earl Brooks is nothing short of spectacular. William Hurt is great as always, and in a role somewhat reminiscent of his character in “A History of Violence” (but only somewhat.)

If your stomach is disturbed by a handful of people shot in the head, shovel kills, blood splattered on walls or scissors in necks, then you should probably sit this one out. But don’t get me wrong; this is not a film full of mindless and pointless violence. The violence is intertwined with the plot. There can be no PG-13 version of Mr. Brooks!

Donnie Darko is a very good movie. If nothing else, it’s moving and personal for me.
Some of those impressions is summed up in the ending soundtrack, just before the titles, called Mad World. It’s a cover, but the original does not even compare to this.
The music is slow, just a solo piano, and the lyrics don’t tell a story. The song just paints a picture, different aspects of the same picture from different viewpoints.
By the way, this same version of the song (by Gary Jules) was used in a Gears of War teaser (called “Mad World”. Do’h!)

If you happen to watch this movie, you’ll know why rabbits are the most terrifying animals! They are basically white (or gray) fluffy alligators! (Of course, no one needs any more proof after Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but that’s a whole other story.)

If you watch LOST and like it (as I do,) you know that the flight they were in and crashed was Oceanic flight 815.
I was watching a movie, “Executive Decision” which is a typical terrorists-hijack-airplane film (and not a very good one.) The plane they hijack in that movie is Oceanic flight 343! So I got curious. A quick search on Google turned up oceanic-air.com!
Right on the front page it says that the airline has gone bankrupt and is closed. This was quite a shock for me! The I noticed that it says that they went bankrupt following the incidents following the accident of flight 815! And also I noticed that their logo looks familiar. To sum it up, the website is a humorous publicity act to promote LOST.
It turns out that, according to this page, the Oceanic airline is the canonical airline-in-trouble used in the film business!

The night before last I was crashing at some friends’ dorm room and someone suggested playing Counter-Strike (wasn’t me! I don’t like that game and I’m not even good at it.) We all had laptops and wireless networking was at hand (so may call it a WLAN party!) and we got started.
Just a quick note. Don’t do games on wireless LANs, or not with so many people, or at least buy a good switch/access point (we hadn’t.) The lag was awful. The game was fun though.
There were 9 of us and we shot and killed each other till 5-6 in the morning, and if it wasn’t for the easiness of those terrorists (eat that!) it would have lasted longer. It was the highest number of people I’ve played anything on a LAN against, and I can conclude two things:

• Counter-Strike is easy and does not deserve its reputation and status. I had played CS for a total of less than an hour before the other night, and yet I was the numerically best player of my team (we were CT, so you do understand that it was harder to win, and there were two players with higher kill counts on the terrorists team.) Quake III Arena still rules!
• I’m going to try and organize such get-togethers more often if I can. There’s no hope for it here in Mashhad. We would be constrained about place and people and equipment. I may have to move to Tehran after all!

(I have three posts to make tonight, so here it goes… I hope none steals attention from the rest.)
I was watching the an episode of the TV series House M.D. tonight. It was the final episode of the second season (”No Reason”.) And it was delicious. Fast, uncompromising (I like this word!) and cruel with an intelligent script. I like it a lot.
Now, I’ve come to like Dr. Greg House’s “character”, because he is so messed up in many ways and yet he has his own world of rules and reason. I’m not here to describe his character or the story. I’m just here to say that his character is cool.
And now, I’m opening this thread for myself (and anyone else interested) to list all the cool characters I see in any work of fiction, movies, books, anything. And the only criteria is “coolness”. That means, Darth Vader gets in, but not Obiwan Kenobi from the prequels (Ben Kenobi from the original trilogy was cool.) It means Rincewind wouldn’t be qualified on the list, because, let’s face it, “I run away, therefore I am!” is not a cool philosophy!

Anyway, I start the list with:

• Dr. Gregory House from TV show House M.D..
• Bill Adama from the TV show Battlestar Galactica (the re-imagined series.)
• Mat Cauthon from the Wheel of Time book series.
• Darth Vader from the Star Wars trilogy.

The above is just to start the list going. I can think of at least a dozen more off the top of my head.

Games are interesting, and game programming is even more interesting.

• No one understands it, in a traditional context. You can tell your family that you are writing navigation software for spy satellites, but not games. If you have moving graphics on your screen, then you are playing games and wasting your time. Note that it’s even a level harder than just playing games which you can (in theory) explain as just passing time (which is quite unsuccessful in practice,) but actually trying to create a game is the most foolish thing anyone can do. Why can’t one stick to more reputable jobs like robbing graves or more successful ones like becoming an alchemist?
• It’s exciting. Not only you get to create something, but you get to play it too, and other people get to play it. It’s the most complex and advanced form of performing arts: theater, cinema, puppet shows. And it’s interactive, like a stand-up comedy act, but with cooler characters. The most comparable medium is cinema, but computer games put emphasis on technology mostly, while in cinema it’s supposed to be on art.
• It’s the most misunderstood of the media. No one but a semi-serious gamer understands the lure and pull of games, absolutely no one. It’s not a sport. It’s not education (it’s not, trust me!) It’s not even just for fun, most of the times. It’s not a professional job. It’s not serious. It’s nothing. It’s too complicated most of the time for an outsider (and sometimes for an insider!) to pick up gaming so everyone who’s not played video games as pre-teens or young teenagers is pretty much already out of the loop. There are so many bad games that even if one wants to understand what’s what in games, (s)he may get a totally wrong image.
• There’s money in it, but not where everybody can see it. I don’t have any numbers now, but I think it was in 2005 or 2006 that the world game industry became bigger than the world movie industry, in terms of financial investments and revenues. The growth of the game industry have always been faster than the movie industry so the distance will become even more drastic over the next years. But people see rock stars and movie stars who live the high life, but no one notices a bunch of game designers, programmers and game-company managers with lots of money.
• A lot of people want to make games. Every half-decent programmer writes a game at one point or another in her life. Every programmer thinks about writing games. Every 3D artist thinks about it. Every programming company owner thinks about it. Every university student wants to do it.
• A lot of people fail to make games. We’ve all heard stories of defeat and failures and deadlines that were never met and bankrupt companies or just a group of fiends who tried to make games. If we are lucky enough, we don’t get to experience that first hand.
• Games require many different people to work with each other in harmony. Managers, graphists, environment designers, writers, 3D modelers, animators, 2D painters, level designers, game designers, mechanical engineers, programmers of many different creeds, directors, actors, sound engineers, producers, and many more have to work together on a project that almost none of them understand fully to make it through. It’s like a movie production, a modern movie with lots of special effects, but with a lot more programmers and a lot less actors. This is a bad thing. Remind me to talk about actors and programmers more later!
• Games need many different branches of programming to work. A simple database driven program requires database programming, and UI programming, and software engineering. Games require software engineering on steroids (you have to deal with all the artifacts and workflows and dataflows for the rest of the team (artists, designers, etc.) too, to say the least!) database, network, UI, real-time graphics, simulation, math, AI, computing theory, geometry, low-level system programming, sound, concurrent programming on many levels, etc. etc! Almost everything a programmer can think about programming of is either already used in games or will be. Very few programmers can master all this. In fact, very few programmers can master one of these fields.
• Add to the above the fact that games need to do all of this really fast! Frame-rate and user experience is everything. You can’t afford to get lousy and put some routine in your game engine without understanding its trade-offs and performance and resource usage patterns. In an office application, no one will notice if the performance of your application drops down 50%. But everyone will notice if their game is running at 10 fps instead of 20, or at least they will get headaches if they don’t notice otherwise. High-throughput (bytes per second, frames per second, triangles per frame, texels per frame, instructions per second, cache misses per memory accesses, etc.) and low latency are the keywords. There’s always something per something else that needs to be maximized or minimized or even kept even over time. It’s a hard business. Trust me.
• All the factors above make games hard, really hard. And they also make them challenging.
• Academics hate games. They look at them as the useless byproduct of juvenile stupidity. You can’t catch a respectable university professor working on games. Even academic papers that are directly related to games (rendering, network, complexity management, etc.) are all written under an excuse, for another field (image processing, physical simulation, load-balancing servers, etc.) This trend is changing however. It’s becoming better for game programmers in the academic sector.
• Idiot politicians (or generic idiots) want to use games for education! This is one of the more ridiculous notions a gamer encounters in her life. Who plays games for education? Absolutely no one. Pay attention to my lips people: NO ONE PLAYS GAMES TO BE EDUCATED. If you aim to make educational games, you will make crap that no one will play except yourself, and you will kill your own brain cells in the process. Even the most controversial games have educational messages, but no one plays games to get educated. Why is it so hard for people to really, deeply understand that entertaining people is worthy on its own. And that if you want to educate people, first there must be someone listening to or looking at you in order for you to educate them.
• There’s no game industry in Iran. We don’t have the supporting sub-industries like motion capture or FMV creation shops, the professional game publishers and the like. We don’t teach game programming in our engineering schools, and we don’t teach game art or game writing in our art and literature schools. We don’t have game companies to train newcomers into professionals for the next generation. And most importantly, we don’t have the legal foundation to support corporate media and software industry, and games are a sub-class of both.
• Games have the worst possible kind of user-base. They are in every age. They have every imaginable level of computer skill (but they are mostly total lusers.) They have absolutely no training, and there can be none. No one reads game manuals and no one expects to have to. You can’t hold training seminars and classes for games. Users have every kind of hardware imaginable. If you refuse to run on their machine, they won’t upgrade their machine for your software, they will just by another game (unless you are “id Software” or “Epic Games” or “Crytek”.) They will push every button in every possible place during the lifetime of your game. They won’t have any patience with your software. They won’t read the message boxes on screen before clicking on “OK”. They will become frustrated and lose interest after the second glitch.
• Competition is pretty fierce in among game titles. Games not only have to compete with other games, they also have to compete with other forms of entertainment. Also, other software only have to compete with their own kind. Word processors compete with word processors and disk defragmenters with disk defragmenters. But games compete with all other games almost regardless of their genres. Even platform is sometimes irrelevant to competition.
• Games always live on the bleeding edge of technology. They have to. Many of the advancements in technology are driven by entertainment money and games are the prevalent form of entertainment. Games have to be on the edge because other games are, and they can’t afford to look “out-dated”. Also, there are always new ideas the designers or programmers or artists want to try that absolutely requires that state-of-the-are CPU or GPU or whatnot.

Those are some the reasons that make game programming interesting.