Shadowlessness

How Much We Spend Waiting for Our Tools?

yzt — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:51:06 +0000

How Do You Reply Emails?

yzt — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:19:38 +0000

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Top-posting is, in short, the practice of putting the reply above the original message in electronic communication. Many of my friends top-post, and I believe most of them are a victim of Google’s otherwise close-to-splendid email application “Gmail”.
This is not a criticism you guys. It’s just a joke at your expense!
For more information, guidance and general wisdom, you can read RFC 1855.

October 28th

yzt — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:10:14 +0000

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:

There are 64 days in a year after October 28th!
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!
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.)
John Locke died on this day. No, not that John Locke, this John Locke! (Sorry, couldn’t resist a “Lost” reference.)
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.
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.

Better Soshiant Videos

yzt — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:52:51 +0000

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.

Awesomeness!

yzt — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:30:17 +0000

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!

Soshiant In-game Videos

yzt — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:48:36 +0000

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!

Eris Says Hi!

yzt — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:10:09 +0000

This is the first post I write from my brand new PSP, which I’ve decided to call “Eris“.
Thanks for this great birthday present goes out to Amir Hossein, Azadeh, Ehsan, Farzam, Golnaz, Parastoo and Siamac (who am I forgeting?)

Soshiant Demo

yzt — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:19:11 +0000

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.

Days of Yore

yzt — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:04:58 +0000

A friend of mine had a nostalgic sentence as her Y!M status message a few days ago:

Raise your drinking glasses; here’s to yesterday.

So, here’s to yesterdays. Cheers.

Quench My Thirst With Gasoline

yzt — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:38:00 +0000

I woke up yesterday, 7AM. It’s now 9PM and I’ve just come home, and I’m gonna eat something, and I’m gonna go to sleep after 38 hours. That’s a personal record. And I’ve been at work, non-stop for 27 hours.
And you know what, I’m just feeling conventionally tired and I may even try and work on my own programs a bit. I never thought I would be at work 27 hours and be this happy (well, as far as I get happy, which is not much.)
And my work was hard, at least for someone with my limited practical knowledge (or theoretical, for that matter.) I implemented the whole shadow system for our game project Soshiant from the ground up, after several failed attempts at using Ogre’s shadowing services and several other attempts to figure out the pieces needed to use Ogre’s facilities from other people’s code (nobody seems to have had the problems that we had!) Anyway, me implementing generic shadow-mapping was like a blind man with Parkinson’s trying to fix a deaf and mute man’s teeth: full of screams, blood and gore. But that’s another story for another time.
My pint here is that I was doing something I liked, and that I’m not badly incompetent at, on a project that engaged me, with people that interest me. Therefore, I cannot wait to get more (after I’m rested well enough of course. I’m a lazy slob after all, and nothing can change that.) What I’m saying is that “Give me fuel, give me fire, give that which I desire.”

Mojo, Diablo and a lot of Foolishness

yzt — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:50:52 +0000

I’ve been living disconnected from the world. I’ve practically stopped answering my phone, and I’ve been ignoring my (online) life for the most part.
This is because we are making a push to prepare our game, Soshiant (sorry, no link) for a demo which is in about two weeks. What we are hoping to accomplish is close to impossible, and we only have our “hunger and foolishness” to drive us. To be honest, everybody else is driven and determined, and I’m just tagging along for the ride.
What keeps us sustained is mugs of Syros’s magical Mojo, and a lot of heavy metal. Oh, and let’s not forget tiny steps of accomplishment every now and again.
Right now, I’m just enjoying working towards something magnificent and beautiful. “Good day to be alive, Sir!”

MOST Annoying Thing Ever

yzt — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:02:36 +0000

I wrote a post a while back and said that my cellphone is the most annoying item I have in my life. Obviously, there was a “currently” implicit in that statement. I don’t anyone can disagree that the most annoying (and loathed) item ever to exist on this planet is the Microsoft Office assistant paperclip. (The reasons of why I’m even using Office in the first place are too sad and depressing to enumerate.)
I saw an amusing cartoon (warning: animated GIF - may cause partial blindness!) the other day which brought back the horrifying memories of the 5-10 seconds it took to disable the devilish creature and make it disappear the first time I opened Word. * shudders *

Reign o’er Me

yzt — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:32:43 +0000

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.

Of Boost and Men

yzt — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:09:00 +0000

Boost is a great collection of libraries. The functionality is so diverse and the quality is so high and the design is so careful that it’s almost part of the standard C++ library (of course, many of Boost’s sub-libraries has already been accepted for inclusion into the next version of C++ standard library with little or no modification, and more are scheduled for discussion.)
People who develop Boost are fantastic software designers and all C++ gurus. I consider myself a seasoned C++ programmer and I can’t honestly say that I can follow their discussions without extensive reference look up and pondering (the times that I know what they are talking about, that is!) This has led to both Boost’s greatest strengths and weaknesses.
Obviously, when you have many great developers and well-defined, open and democratic processes, you’re gonna get good FOSS. It also leads to a perceived elitism and high entry barrier. From the “outside”, it looks like Boosters all want to keep the glory to themselves, and that they would shoot down any library submitted for inclusion by an “outsider.” I’ve not been around the Boost discussion lists long enough and I haven’t been paying a close enough attention to know this for sure, but it seems to me like most people there are volunteers, more interested in quality and advancement for their (and my) beloved language, rather than glory-seeking adventurers after fame and fortune.
Also at first glance, Boost might seem like a bag of cryptic and hard-to-learn libraries, shrouded in mystery and magic. It is not quite like that, but given the fact that C++ is a difficult language (yeah, your hunches in your freshman year were right, if not the reasons behind them) you should expect some complexity is some of its (arguably) most advanced libraries.

If nothing else, use Boost’s thread, filesystem, serialization and async I/O libraries. The thread library is pretty much already a part of standard C++ anyway, so you might as well learn to use it (not that it is hard to use.) Lack of portable file system access has always been a weakness on C and C++. The serialization library is so unintrusive and fantastic, that it will find its way and place in any non-trivial program that we’ll ever write. And asio has so much needed functionality, that I’m just itching to try it out.
And when you are already using one part of Boost, why stop there? Use anything and everything you can. Not blindly, of course, but prefer well-designed, well-developed and well-tested libraries to some small code snippet you find off the web. And when using Boost, delve into it and see how it is implemented. It’s educational and more often that not even enlightening for the likes of me.

Boost 1.36.0 is Out

yzt — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:11:31 +0000

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.

Cellphone Etiquette

yzt — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:06:58 +0000

My cellphone is without doubt the most annoying and intrusive item in my life. It may sound anti-social, rude and unacceptable behavior, but the way I see it, I have the right to refrain from answering my phone whenever I want. For me, it happens a lot that I don’t answer the phone, out of business, guilt, or just not feeling like it. Many people would say that common courtesy mandates that most calls should be answered most of the time, but I’m not one of them.
Of course, this makes me undependable and even borderline untrustworthy, but that’s me. Why should I pretend that I’m someone I’m not?
What’s wrong with email? What can you say on a phone that you can’t say in an email? I know that Blackberries and email-from-cellphone is nowhere near ubiquitous in Iran, but why don’t you text me (SMS me) whatever you want to say? Since when am I so important to warrant 5 or 25 missed calls a day?
I do apologize for my behavior, not because it’s wrong but because it’s unexpected and a little rude.