TGWOH²

2009-06-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

Getting Real In The Early 90's - The Secret Behind the Rise of ID Software

Recently, I've finished Masters of Doom by David Kushner for the second time now and it's interesting the new insights and relations i've noticed . When i read it for the first time (july/2005) i wasn't even working with software development. Now that i'm kinda on the trenches(working as a developer on a small & agile product development team) i'm in better conditions of analyzing it

Games in general always made me curious in terms of how they were made, but Doom was the Coup de grâce that made me pursue programming for a living. The delicate weaving of computer code , art and fun present on games will always interest me.

Masters of Doom describes in a "novelish" style how the precise weaving of such factors, coupled with REAL team work can create a product able to cause a full paradigm shift in its area. While reading the book you possibly will remember of agile principles and some Getting Real essays

Doom was born out of a womb with brilliant minds working together within an Agile-like environment. It's noticeable what ID did at its halcyon days had a lot of Agile and Getting Real ideas rooted in it :

Small, highly synergic development team:
Their common objective was fairly simple. Developing games through hard work(crunch mode included) and having alot of fun in the process. Carmack focused on technology, Romero bridging between the technology/design and Adrian C., Petersen, Hall + Cloud doing graphical and level design.

Iterative Design:
iD's development cycle seemed to be of iterative nature. In those times where technology limitations where the main barrier for them to implement their visions, Carmack was the guy that would do anything to overcome those limits so the game experience could the the best possible. Through research and implementation, the team would test the framework and experiment design ideas over it, giving room for the design to emerge. When something clicked, they directed all their efforts to it until it was shipped. Doom, the game who changed the gaming world as we knew was born in this way. [1]

Motivated individuals in environment with all support needed:
Jay Wilbur, as manager would do whatever needed to get the team focused 100% on the product. From standard business stuff to cooking barbecues and filling junk food supplies for the developers.

Build it for yourself/It Shoudn't Be a Chore:
Being a team of ultimate gaming lovers, they knew how to create fun properly. John Romero always was a hardcore fan of his own work(check out how addicted to Doom he got). The results were notorious , Doom invented a genre, a lifestyle and made ID guys multimillionaires

Fund Yourself:
Id software was assembled with every employee on a Day job at Softdisk. At night and during the weekends everyone would reunite at the Lake House to work on their stuff. They pretty much funded their work on the early days.When good conditions to work full time appeared(after joining ranks with Apogee's Scott Miller) they so did it.

The book makes clear that as iD success grew exponentially, team union started to fade away. John Romero, the lead game designer(and "product owner") got too involved with marketing-related activities and other distractions. Quake(Doom's successor) had a more complex technology and most members of the team felt disoriented in which direction their designs should go. Constant team interaction problems made Quake's development unroll under a heavy weather[2]. Unity was being lost, Carmack/Romero weren't synced anymore and the divergence of their ideas on how Quake and Id's future should be, only increased.

Quake is iD Software's equivalent of Beatles Let it Be: Great work, highly appraised but it costed the union of a very innovative team. Life would never be the same :

[..] The good mood didn't last. Like Romero at Ion Storm, Carmack was discovering that the glory days of a small team and easy chemistry were gone [...]

Although always an excellence in technological innovation through Carmack's work, Id never managed to explore new genres and achieve new game design innovations again. In my view it turned out to be more of a technology company, always providing bleeding edge engine technology. Surely this direction caused their game designer talents to leave over the years(like American McGee & Sandy Petersen)

What Went Wrong?

Scaling is hard
The transformation process of a b2b(buddy to buddy) company to a world synonym of digital entertainment is not easy. I see this happening everywhere, family businesses included. If the entire team is not working together to keep unity solid, the consequences are often bad.

Communication & Feedback
The book explores alot the individual feelings of ID Crew in different times and the impression left is that a communication gap was always present between the team members. Their issues often accumulated in a boilerplate and discussed in tense meetings(one of those got Romero officially fired).

Fame , Fun and Fortune can be harmful distractions
According to the book Romero kinda lost his focus when Doom exploded. Deathmatching competitions , media appearances and related stuff kinda separated him from the work at Id. Although this "Marketing" position was important, the Quake development kickstart was important too. Carmack was left mostly alone during the Quake engine development stage. His trust in Romero greatly reduced during at this period

Everybody together
Again, the moment when Team Members get distant and start working too much time on their own islands, communication isn't exercised and creative potential isn't leveraged properly. The empty spaces tends only to grow

Conclusion:
When trying to innovate and create something really remarkable, an agile-way-of-work and good team composition proves to be a powerful ally to achieve groundbreaking results. It is important to keep the "agile core" strong when the whole structure starts to grow.

"In the information age, the barriers just aren't there. The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to get off and go develop some grand new thing you don't need millions of dollars of captalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We Waded across rivers" - John Carmack

References:

Masters of Doom (2004) - How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture
[1] See Chapters 9 - 10
[2] Pg 272 This is not the id of the past, he thought, the id of "let's make a great game together and have fun" This is the id of "shut up and work"

2009-05-31T11:04:00.000-07:00

Classic Gaming Shelf : Phantasy Star II

Back in the early 90's, the last-gen video game console i asked my parents to have was the Super Nintendo. Although i consider myself a SNES fanboy, it 's undeniable that Sega done some awesome work with Genesis. Now with Wii's Virtual console, i'm taking the time to play the classics i always was curious about but never managed to play back at the time of their respective releases.

My previous system was a Master System II and one of the best games i've ever played in life was Phantasy Star. My history with PS is a funny one for another post, but now i'll comment my impressions on its successor.
The game mechanics are very similar to PS1. The most noticeable differences are 3rd person perspective in battles (you actually see the characers striking the enemies) and the lack of first person dungeon navigation(this style could have been explored more).

The gameplay starts out fine at first, but gets boring over time because of playability issues:

Lots of random battles, moving between cities is a test for patience since the pace speed of the characters in the world map is way too slow with battles popping out of every couple of steps.

Dungeons are big, hard to navigate and memorize (the spaces are hard to distinguish). For a regular player its virtually impossible to explore them without a map, and even with the map it's hard to locate yourself in it. It explains a lot why the cartridge had a "110-page hint book included"(as written on the cover).

I'm saying this because i've gone through ~4 dungeons till now (just finished the Bio Systems Lab) and each dungeon (in average) can steal you around a couple of hours easily(not counting the ultra-boring powering up needed to cross them without being annihilated).

IMHO, Phantasy Star 1 had a more balanced gameplay. Of course, it had its load of ultra complex dungeons (like Baya Malay/Medusa Towers) and leveling up moments, but at acceptable doses. It seems that Sega in PS2, instead of enhancing the fine balance of these ingredients, decided to overdose them.

But apart the game mechanics issues , i see it as a landmarker game in the time it was released (1989-1990). The universe surrounding the Algol system is amazingly interesting and full of untold secrets.
I surely bet that PS2 was an everlasting gobstopper for a kid with a full summer vacation to play games.

My curiosity concerning what happened after Lassic's fall was the main motivator for getting this game on Virtual console, but i don't think i'll have the time and patience to finish it now. I wonder if these gameplay issues were improved on the Sega Ages remake. I wanna play it once i learn some japanese :)

Ps : I think i'm getting old

2009-05-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

Uncle Bob just wanna have fun!

Uncle Bob Martin's keynote @ RailsConf'09 is definitely a very remarkable one. What keynote to expect from a General Yamamoto-class of software developer with great communication skills? At least some good advices and food for thought.

The title was "What killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby", but don't hang too much on it as much some people did. The majority of the keynote was focused on exposing how decent test suites and TDD adoption generates a positive-clean-code-feedback.
Few points of the presentation pissed Smalltalkers for obvious reasons. Usually "Z language is dead" statements immediately pisses the Z-language hackers. Before spitting flames try to take a deep breath and see the thing on a different perspective(and with a bit of humor, of course).

It's fairly known that "No existing language will die in a long time". An interpretation for "Killed" in the context of programming languages can be: "a language that had lost its lift-off momentum to occupy the front row of IT industry technologies". I believe that Smalltalk and Common Lisp are two examples of it.

Sincerely , i didn't read any tone of "Smalltalk was killed because of the lack of testing" on the presentation as some people did. What i understood is that testing provides you the control mechanism to properly harness the power of languages like Ruby and Smalltalk. On such languages with high degree of expressive freedom it becomes "too easy to make a mess". In other words: you can fly high if you don't have proper discipline.

Fabio Kung published an interesting analogy that came to me a while ago when reading a chapter of The Ruby Programming Language. "With great power comes great responsibility" said Uncle Ben and so did Uncle Bob.

[...] Professionalism is honor, Professionalism is being honest with yourself and Disciplined in the way you work [...]

Bob just nailed it. These are the main attitudes i have been working hard to improve right now. A couple of years ago, when i started to code a solution, my mind entered in a turmoil state trying to unroll the entire thing at once, much like a hungry beast attacking its prey. The final result was that i often got lost in the ideas entering an analysis-paralysis state. Today, i have far better control of the beast(sometimes it leaves the cage.. lol). I'm lucky enough to pair program with great people that gives me feedback when that happens.

I see TDD as a software development equivalent to Ritalin. A way of achieving discipline and delivering quality software with one shot. It's no silver bullet, but surely helps a lot.

Take Bob's words seriously , but not too much. Allow the guy to be a little ironic and humorous sometimes (e.g when he was speaking on Academic Smalltalk adoption).

Uncle Bob just wanna have fun and watch his nephews writing clean code :)

2009-01-12T16:15:00.000-08:00

Listener's Review: Chinese Democracy by Guns n' Roses

This is a humble attempt of mine of trying to review a record that had alot of buzz on the media since it's first announcement almost a decade ago.
I always liked GNR, not being the hardcore type of fan(i've met quite a few in some hard rock parties here in Sao Paulo) but someone that have been listening to their stuff for a while(since 1992).

Before going into the musical details, i would like to recommend you to open your mind a little bit and forget GNR's as you know for a while including any "Use Your Illusion 3" expectations.

To give you a big picture i'll press play and comment in some of the tracks:

[Chinese Democracy]
After building a "chinese streets scenario" , some big drum pounds the record actually starts with a door blowing guitar riff flavored with a modern tone. It's like a musical welcome to the new world of GNR.

[Shackler's Revenge]
After the door slamming it's time to show the new musical territorries Axl's been drown into the last decade. This excellent song features a Sledgehammer guitar riff counterparted by synths that paves the way for Axl's classic bad mother#$*!*% framework.
A sick guitar solo, featuring noise and a sequence of
blistering arpeggios capable of making metal fans drool.

[Better]
Let's pour a little of sugar , but not enough to screw the freaky mood. The intro feats an interesting guitar riff (which plays the chorus melody) and electronic drums. Very dualistic song, modulating melancholy and rage all over.
Worth noticing the emotional climax with a 1st class sweet solo near the end.

[Street of Dreams]
Mooore sugar! The first song in the album that remembers you that the you're listening to GNR. At this time you can notice that Axl's low notes range has increased.

[If the World]
Modern.. Spanish style guitars poured around the song, electronic drums, synth riffs and strings builds an interesting flirt of classic guns with Alternative Metal.
Ass-kickin mood and great guitar solo.

[There was a Time]
The Alternative Metal ride continues. The chorus melody is kinda disturbing.

[Catcher in the Rye]
This song have a nostalgic 90's rock feel that may remind you a time when GNR was on the fridge and Black Crowes was on the MTV.

[Scraped]
After an intro full of axl-isms , a groovy heavy riff oriented song comes. Not one of the best, but worth hearing.

[Riad n' the Bedouins]
Ever wondered what would happen if Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song and You Could be Mine were crossed over?

[Sorry]
Along with "Better" it kinda externalizes (in my view) Axl's emotional rollercoaster over these years. Served on a modern 6/8 british blues dish.

IRS and Madagascar are very good songs but not big surprises, considering the internet leaks and live performances over the years. Didn't liked "This I Love" and "Prostitute" much, they sounded spiceless to me.

My general conclusion is that the record's "sound and mood" foundation is very non-linear. It makes sense since Chinese Democracy took almost 10 years to get done and it's impossible for an artist's work not to reflect this. Loads of talented producers and musicians put their hands on it making the overall work very rich.

However, it means that this is not an easy listening for most people due to the context switches, but i bet that after a while you'll totally immersed on Chinese Democracy's sound atmosphere . 2 or 3 fillers in a 14-song album is a nice ratio and makes the entire album a great acquisition.

Liked the electronic mash ups and freaky guitar tones. Axl was very brave when he decided to incorporate alternative metal elements. They're blended
flawlessly without saturating the songs.

Overall Note: 9

2008-11-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

Reflections Roundup Series nº 1:

The C++ Winter, Game Development Environments and Programming Languages

Meta: Reflection Roundup series are ramblings in one or multiple related subjects where i try to expose my point of view (YMMV of course, so comment!)

Before starting this post, remember that the language i'm talking about is C++(not ANSI C or Objective-C).

My relationship with C++ can be described as a 3-instance date that ended with me putting it up in the refrigerator. What always drove my attraction to C++ is the fact that it's intensively used in the game development world.... being the gamedev wannabe that i am, i said "I must learn it at any cost!" and started reading and gathering information in order to understand the language's mechanisms and their rationale.

When i got committed to a game project a few months ago(that blew up unfortunately) , I've gone through Scott Meyer's Effective C++ [1] to acquire a deeper understanding of the language, its pitfalls and ambiguities.
What I've realized after reading half of the book is that you gotta practice defensive programming all the time. In some situations i bet there are more than 5 ways to add undefined behavior to your program in a single expression. That's a tough thing... because the complexity of the language easily surpass the complexity of the problem being solved and i'm sure that this have a serious impact in productivity.
Spice it up with a large source tree,complex builds, and multi-platform code[2] , roast it intensively with the multicore crisis and you can realize that it's not a very nice place to be...

I can't imagine how these guys manage to be productive... and i would really love to spend one day watching the spartan work of a Sr. Programmer of the game industry, so i could bring my opinion closer to reality.
I'm not the best to speak on its problems... there are people that faced them on a daily basis for some time and can clearly discuss on the subject [3]

Some remarkable guys built something different a while ago. Naughty Dog, the softhouse behind famous Playstation 1 and 2 titles like Crash Bandicoot and Jak And Dexter managed to develop their own environment for game development. It consisted of a lisp DSL that allowed fluent rendering description procedures(probably allowing SIMD assembly inline as well) and game entities management. All of this in the top of a REPL that Emacs clients would connect to send code upgrades on the fly!
This genius environment [4] , structured by Andy Gavin (an MIT-brewed-lisp Jedi) had its flaws as well. Even sounding like the wet dream of most game developers it didn't solved all the problems. With an environment like this ND was swimming against the current, becaus most of the vendor tools were aimed for the C++ market. They had to maintain lots on in-house code, and most of the core stuff was centered in Andy. The result was : When Andy left, there was no further interest to keep improving the technology, so, everything was dropped off in favor of C++[5]. Another potential case of Philip Greenspun's 10th programming rule.

Even not being the "happily ever after story" it's a proud example where fearless research and exploration of different technologies can led small companies to Beat the Averages and deliver high quality products. Few people tends to pick change instead of cold comfort.

Tim Sweeney, the architect behind Epic's Unreal technology already expressed his ideas of a programming language that would be ideal for games and suggested some good stuff that would be of high value for game developers and other kinds of multimedia/real time apps. Some programming idioms in the presentation may remind you of Haskell (list comprehensions) Erlang and the newborn Clojure (concurrency features like Software Transactional Memory and Actor-based concurrency). The use-or-not-use garbage collection may remind you of Digital Mars D, where you can choose between garbage-collection and manual memory management.
Speaking on D, Andrei Alexandrescu exposed recently the new functional mechanisms to be implemented in D. For those who don't know him , he's the author of a famous C++ template voodoo book[6] and he's currently assisting on the design of D. He surely know what pissed him off in C++, and what would he do to improve it.
C++0x is intending to employ functional constructs as well, but the question is how many 8 years will take for compilers to catch up with the new standard.

It's notable that developing a AAA game is risky business all the way, and the best way to reduce risk is through the use and development of tools that assist in controlling complexity, allowing the developers energy to be better employed in problem solving and design innovations instead of "which side of my declaration the * should go this time?"

Multi-platform game development urgently needs a language/platform to make this happen. I think its past time to appear a massive turnaround in the area (much like Java and Ruby on Rails as internet apps development platform at their respective boooms) The funniest thing is that even games being the type of application responsible for edging technological improvement in the area of PCs and specialized appliances, very little innovation is exposed in terms of programming languages and runtime environments for development and deployment of games... My vision may be distorted , but it looks that stuff is pretty much done the way it was like 15 years ago , but in larger scale.

C++ is still on the run, and there are loads of people using it. It's kind of a "Double-Edged Gunblade of the programming languages where you can cut your neck and shoot youself in the foot in just one move.
It's a complex and potentially great tool in the hands of a programmer that features a full C++ runtime embedded in his brain.

Me? I prefer to keep ANSI-C, Objective-C, Ruby and Lisp in my weapon box , and you?

References:

[1] Meyers, Scott(2005) Effective C++, 55 specific ways to improve your programs and designs

[2] A pal from Australia that works in the game industry once told me that their C++ game codebase was tweaked to compile/run in more than 3 platforms... imagine the entanglement of #ifdefs and other preprocessor code bending to make it happen

[3] The C++ FQA is a good digest of most common CPP pitfalls. For a more more "first-person-narrative-style " this guy exposes his pain , and how he gave up on C++ and decided to code in a Object Oriented C Idiom.

[4] Gamasutra has one of the few articles around describing how the DSL and the development environment was

[5] A while ago Naughty Dog announced their return to Lisp in their game development platform, using their experience from GOAL to improve their environments. Way to GOAL! :D

[6] Alexandrescu, Andrei(2001) - Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns applied

2008-03-19T16:58:00.000-07:00

Super Mario World Soundtrack Revisited!

Today, on my daily reddit navigation , i've found something absolutely über cool. A guy rearranged and re-recorded the entire Super Mario World (Super Nintendo) soundtrack. It is a master class on Video Game music arrangement. Click here for official hosted site

Just push play and take the time to feel nostalgic. Lots of people(me included) got this game with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System package in the early 90s(composed of SMW Cartridge/Booklet, Two Controllers, RCA and RF cables and Power Supply)

SMW is a true classic, being Nintendo's kickstart on its victorious 16-bit generation. I still remember hooking the SNES on my TV and having my first baby steps on the console and Dinosaur Island simultaneously. It just blew my mind in every aspect back then because i never played any mario game before (my 8-bit console was a Sega Master System).

Remembering: If you own a Nintendo Wii, you can download it from Virtual Console.

2008-03-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

It Seems Sun is intending to port Java to the iPhone!

This is gonna be interesting! I don't know if Apple have legal constraints for the
development of a Virtual Machine for the iPhone, considering that IMHO a VM isn't a application at all

Here are some comments concerning the article :

"Will there be an iPhone emulator for NetBeans, too? This is really great news, it means I can bring my entire portfolio of mobile content to the iPhone without having to dust off my crufty 1994 Objective-C manuals. Go JAVA"!

It reinforces my theory that Java programmers don't dig Objective-C. Obj-C kicks ass! Go OBJ-C!!!

"What a crock. Safari runs interpreted code. And you can argue that any half-decent game with AI logic and loadable levels runs interpreted code. Sounds like Apple just reserves the right to be jerks to products that undercut their distribution control, because you can bet that Java apps that can be downloaded over the net connection won't be sold through the App Store."

Everyone knows that Apple tends to have the SaaS approach when developing some of their products... they want to get a piece of the cake in therms of software. Control is needed when we are dealing with cell-phone content.
I don't see the fact concerning the "VM prohibition" as a threat for developing scripted game code. If you don't use a bloated scripting language it is totally possible. I think we can embed a Lua interpreter to any C-based program without big efforts..

2008-03-06T19:23:00.000-08:00

iPhone Software Roadmap Keynote Review

Yesterday, Apple announced the roadmap for iPhone software development , and it's video is already available and really worth watching. When iPhone was initially released last year i (plus a big bunch of tech junkies around the world) got kinda disappointed when development was constrained to Web-based apps only. We were expecting a Mac OS-like Cocoa API and the Objective-C programming language/runtime to harness all of iPhone features.
Well, our prayers were listened by the Cupertino guys and here we are , with a full-blown native application development platform and business model to distribute iPhone apps.
Cooler than all the iPhone-corporative-value-talk were the game development demos from EA and Sega. EA's demo was a mobile version of Will Wright's Spore!

With the Mac OS X based kernel, OpenGL ES, OpenAL , Cocoa Touch, Accelerometer, XCode IDE, Remote Debugging and Profiling, developing software for iPhone seems at least attractive. Can it beat J2ME and Symbian native apps in the future? If Apple does in practice everything it was said yesterday we will have some interesting competition in a near future.

Strengths
- The iPhone is a single phone device. You don't have to worry with the implications and code-bending to make it run in multiple phone devices like in J2ME and Symbian.
- Application provisioning done by Apple (which have great experience of selling content with iTunes) instead of Phone Companies, which opens up the distribution range
- Code is natively compiled and written with industry proven Objective-C (alive and kicking since NeXT times)

Weaknesses
- It's a brand new platform. Time is needed for it to achieve maturity
- Objective-C is a very expressive and powerful object oriented language, but i don't know if that big mass of "Die-hard Java lovers" will have the guts to embrace it (Not offending Java programmers, i pay my bills with it. But i've seen around lots of java dudes around that hardly sympathize with the words "Smalltalk Messaging" and "C")

Opportunities
- Application profit distribution goes 70%(developers) and 30%(apple), i doubt of any Brazilian Phone Company that can do better.
- If the iPhone reaches a iPod-like popularity in the Mobile Phone world, the amount of users developers can reach is huge.
- Good range of applications that can be developed (personal, high quality 3d games , media , business)

Threats
- Unfortunately, with this kind of development platform, malware efforts tends to increase

I officially announce: After this keynote the iPhone is on my gadgets crush list :)

2008-01-31T17:55:00.000-08:00

Rails Envy!

I remember about expressing curiosity on Ruby in a post at this blog. It looks an interesting dynamic language which attracted me more than Python (IMHO Ruby's constructs are sexier , maybe because of it's Lisp/Smalltalk influences).

I was finishing college when i heard about Ruby for the first time. It was during that first boom of Ruby on Rails web development framework. It really interested me back then, feeling "cleaner" than the technology stack i was working with at the time (Java 5 + Struts + Hibernate) with all that Convention over Configuration talk, Active Record pattern for DB operations etc. In the end i never managed to perform experiments with Ruby.

Yesterday i found some ass kickin' videos made by some Ruby fanboys from RailsEnvy.com and i really appreciated their way of spreading the word on RoR : With parodies of those famous Mac vs Pc. It's really worth checkin' out!

RoR vs Java

RoR vs Php

RoR vs .Net

It's cool the way that the Ruby community is still boiling with activity even after that big hype. It's essential for the language/platform to become long-lived.

2007-09-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

Linus Torvalds Bullying C++

ROFL! Some guy really managed to piss Linus off yesterday when questioning why Git(a version control system) isn't written in C++ instead of C.
On his nervous reply he took some good time to externalize all of his anger on C++ mechanisms. Here are some highlight moments:

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it"

"[...] C++ leads to really really bad design choices. You invariably start using the "nice" library features of the language like STL and Boost and other total and utter crap, that may "help" you program, but causes:

- Infinite amounts of pain when they don't work (and anybody who tells me that STL and especially Boost are stable and portable is just so full of BS that it's not even funny)

- Inefficient abstracted programming models where two years down the road you notice that some abstraction wasn't very efficient, but now all your code depends on all the nice object models around it, and you cannot fix it without rewriting your app. [...]

I can't see the reason to use object models in version control systems, where we're dealing with low level stuff like byte streams, timestamps and algorithms to retrieve/store those streams.
In this situation you are not modeling something from our world into the computer world (which O.O helps alot), but computer-functional behavior and procedures. For this kind of task C is a fine tool, in the hands of a good programmer of course (with the use good practices and coding carefully to avoid buffer overflows and other memory violation flaws)

That are situations where C++ 's abstractions are helpful , but you still got to be a very skilled architect/programmer to build extensible and maintainable object-oriented software without screwing things up.

2007-08-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

Enourmous Playstation 3 Cluster Server for Online Game!

Early this month some pictures and a brief description of an amazing cluster made of ~50 Playstation 3 consoles was posted in Sony Computer Entertainment America's blog.
This server was specially mounted up for a BattleField-like game named Warhawk.

Combining the firepower of those clustered Cell Processors with some good parallelism programming techniques you can squeeze the hell out of those little pixies! When thinking about it i remembered some late discussions about "parallelism-oriented-programming" in the brave new multi core world we're living today.

A co-worker put this article at our Enterprise Wiki, where Ralph Johnson (member of the mighty object-oriented pirate ship named Gang of Four) states that Erlang (a functional language with powerful parallelism features designed by Ericsson) can become the Java of the multi-core world. Remembering that multi-core architectures are already popular in both consumer and enterprise markets.

How about an Erlang Virtual Machine for the PS3, so we could use the power of Erlang to take full advantage over Playstation 3's 7 SPEs in a elegant way? Better: without the usual grunt C++ work and use of special API's to abstract multi-core tasks/memory management. Functional languages have a great asset for the multi-core world considering that "Concurrent life becomes easier when you do away with global mutable state"

The use of Languages that supports parallelism natively can become a powerful tool to assist the development of ass-kicking distributed systems like the international game server of Warhawk, for example.

I strongly recommend people to keep the eye open for these two technologies: Parallelism and Functional Programming.

There's a nice tendency for these two subjects pop out together
from now on.

2007-08-10T19:11:00.000-07:00

Stephen King Reflections about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

[Continuing the Harry-Potter-Post-Combo! ]

After getting pissed with some lousy DH reviews like the one from New York Times for instance, finally i've had the pleasure to read a lucid one (DON'T CLICK IT IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS!) with a deep analysis of the entire Harry Potter Universe written by Stephen King for Entertainment Weekly.
He argues about all that out-of-scope criticism done by "big-old-literature-conservative-heads" who insists that in order to deserve its fame, J.K Rowling's writing style should have been more complex-crafted linguistically, just like their dinossauric(but great) idols.

Mr. King respectfully kicked a#% on EVERY point of view, here's a taste :

"The kids are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story (important) and do it without talking down (more important) or resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they'll kill the damn thing"

That just remembered me of that old blokes who states that "Rock'n'Roll died when The Beatles split up".

It's great to have such a review standing up for Harry Potter's richness. Better: directly from the "mouth" of a great writer like Stephen King. This kind of argument is essential to convince some "Potter-Reluctant-People" to at least have a go in one book.

2007-07-21T17:01:00.001-07:00

Impressions of a Brazilian Muggle on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Prologue - My first encounter with Harry Potter

2006's 2nd half of November, a very stressing period that i will remember with joy for the rest of my days(even being a stressful time, I've had loads of fun). The final sprint of my graduation paper was on. After spending days in zombie mode due to a stressful condition (symptoms included constant sickness + blood pressure drop-downs and insomnia) my partner and myself delivered our final paper. After the "software development menagerie" i wanted to clear my mind entirely. The question was "How?"
The funniest thing is that the answer was right at the side of me, at a desk filled with books that mum was organizing. A red pocket book, British printing with a big title : "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" reminded of my frustrated attempt to read a fiction book in pure/raw English 2 and 1/2 years before.

Distractedly i started reading it, with a slight feeling that the book was kind of "childish" in its first moments. That observation faded totally when i noticed that i was at chapter four. The following day the reading got more intense and after 8 chapters i was in love with every element of the book. It was the kind of magic and blissful abstraction that my mind needed.
In five weeks from that day, i bought and passionately read every Harry Potter book i could get my hands on, just like millions of people around the globe.

After "The White Tomb"
With the Eyes filled of water, stunned by a rush of intense sadness and with thousands of questions in the mind, i closed the paperback of "Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince" somewhere in March/2007 feeling the luckiest guy in the world for falling in love with J.K Rowling's Universe literally at the final year of the series. But still had to wait for four months till the Deathly Hallows release. In order to calm down, just tried to imagine how the early readers were feeling after a wait of two years....

Review - pt. 1

Friday, 20/07/2007 19:50(U.K time: 23:50) With a mixture of anxiety and fear, i headed to one of São Paulo's largest bookstores. Well, i couldn't reach the bookstore in time to see the opening of DH's boxes, but 35 minutes late. The place was packed with people, and at least 50% of them were holding fresh and thick Deathly Hallows copies. I've never saw something like this in my entire life! People couldn't resist to have a go in the book even in the cashiers! Cosplayed fans were holding empty book boxes like trophies, some of them were teasing each other opening random pages and trying to come up with bombastic events. I really wanted to socialize with them and discover which Brazilian Harry Potter clans they belonged. But the idea of listening to unwanted spoilers terrified me, so i grabbed my copy as fast as i could, bolted to one cashier line and went home kinda like Charlie Bucket when he found the Golden Ticket.

Before any "review word" i would like to state something : This book is supposed to eliminate any comments like "Harry Potter is kiddy literature". If some people complained that Half Blood Prince was the darkest book in the series. Seems now that it lost its throne. Compared to Deathly Hallows, HBP is as light as Philosopher's Stone's early chapters... lol

I surely bet that even Stephen King got goosebumps while reading this one.

This book is pure action, if you expect the traditional warm-up at the beginning like most books you'll be stupefied. Worst, the "relaxation" periods between the events are tiny, so when you are barely recovering from one blast, another hits your face. It feels like facing 30 Death Eaters alone. It's tense, intense and the most "unstoppable-reading" book in the series... hours pop out like minutes. Scary...

And here i am now... 2 days later, with half of the book read. Feeling tired and wired just like Harry. I'm starting to suspect that the book itself is a Horcrux :)

Review - pt. 2

(7 days later...)

Well.. here i am now, and it's been thirty minutes that i closed the hardcover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with the feeling of landing back on earth after a long trip.
I want to reassure that this book is not for the faint hearted. The second half of the book is still marked by emotional thunderstorms and a handful of new deaths. What a carnage! Couldn't bear to avoid my hands trembling in most of those moments, geez , i was so nervous!

It's in the second half of the book where most of the secrets that we've been dying to know are revealed. It gets clearer that Mrs. Rowling wants to settle the score for good.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the most GLORIOUS requiem given for a saga ever! If you got emotional at the end of "LOTR- The Return of The King" get ready to cry your eyes out.

If you still haven't read the book , what are you waiting for?? Go for it and read it with passion cause it's a gift from Jo for all the fans.

Now we only have to wait for the 7th movie!! I'm voting in Peter Jackson for director! He's a natural when it comes to transform literate fantasy into movies. It would be a great way to finish the Harry Potter saga for once(how about 3 hours of running time?? Hell yeah!)

Seven shards of pure magic. Magic capable of making your mind fly high toward the infinite roofs of imagination where time and space ceases to exist...

2007-04-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

Dark Future of the Video Game Consoles Realm?

Last week John Romero was interviewed by the Adrenaline Vault , and when asked about the Console-War he commented the fact that Video Game Consoles have a very obscure future. The possible convergence of a new GPU/CPU integrated multi-core architecture in a near future represents a threat for the actual PC-Like console model (like PS3 and XBox 360).

This tech-tendency is getting stronger since AMD aquired ATI for U$ 5.4 bi and the constant rumors of a Intel-Nvidia merger as well.

John highlighted that the PC possibly will rule the hardcore gamers realm in the next generations. Because of the cheaper, more powerful hardware + lower development costs +recent MMORPG fever + stronger anti-piracy methods around. In this scenario , consoles will remain as the standard appliance for easy entertainment of casual gamers.

This is a valid possibility, considering that the consoles main strength are longer platform liveness and uniformity of hardware specifications needed to run game titles. For example : You don't have to worry about the amount of RAM of your Playstation in order to run it's Street Fighter Alpha 2 release.
On the computer things get complicated, in most times you gotta check things like "DirectX-9 Compatible Videocard with Vertex Shader Support" before buying a game. Standard users will ask "What the %@%# is Vertex Shader support?"

When thinking about all these stuff i remembered the Nintendo Wii's strongest Points : Cool and Intuitive Gaming , without jerking hardware firepower.
One of these days a guy stated in a Orkut community that Nintendo screwed up again with the Wii. My reply was :

I don't think Nintendo screwed up this time... Back at Nintendo64-era, the decision of
using cartridges as storage medium was a gruesome mistake and Nintendo deserved its defeat
for the Sony PlayStation.

Although, this time Nintendo is being alot smarter with the Wii, exploring elements like simplicity, gameplay innovation and human-machine interaction. Maybe i'm wrong but my first impression about this first round of the 7-gen console war is that
Sony and Microsoft are too worried to boost their machines so the Source Engine can run
with dazzling FPS rates in high-resolutions.

Why would Nintendo try to compete with the techno-masturbators of this generation?
They lost enough money with the N64/GameCube fiascos... the solution to recover their remarkable position is to reach other user groups. The ones that don't care if they are playing a game with the hottest graphical engine around or if the Cell processor has 7 cores.

Maybe Wii can reach a very remarkable position in a near future.. Its mission is critical: Recover Nintendo's platform credibility lost over the last 10 years.(Their kickin-ass game franchises like Mario, Zelda et al remained as the only strong point to aquire a Nintendo system in the last 2 generations)
Remember : NES's hardware was very similar to the Atari 2600 (with some mods, of course) and it was enough to revive the game market after the 1983's fall. What makes a console is the creativity and quality of its games.

I'm not bullying PS3 or Xbox 360(believe me, i want a Ps3..lol) I just want to point that you don't need the ultimate hardware to provide nice digital entertainment

In Synthesys : Consoles may lost room in the hardcore gamers guild. But in my opinion, the PC games need some improvement in the "design quality" factor to be as fun as the games released for the Consoles. So, in order for this "prediction" become concrete we need more killer PC games around.
For example : I have a hot PC at the moment and all i want to play right now are Playstation 2 and Wii titles... lol

2007-04-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

Recent Bachelor's Projections

It's been a while since my last post... back at that time, i was working my ass off to develop my graduation paper, understand the J2ME API's and provide a simple but interesting mobile gaming framework. Thanks to the good lord everything went great, and now i'm enjoying a period free of academic duties.

Well, i really loved being in college : A great experience... it opened my mind for thousands of things and made me think better. Now that the fixed compromise of being 7:00am at a college class no longer exists, i can allocate my time on personal projects and learning interesting technologies/stuff.

First of all, i need to check if Game Programming/Development is really a area that i want to master. I liked alot the small contact i've had, but i intend to move on bigger and more elaborated stuff. The main problem about GameDev is the fact that it's too hard to do it alone. For example, without some graphical arts done it's creepy hard to code/test the entities behavior and to shape the gaming world. So, in order to master Game Programming, you need to be in complete synergy with artists and a team. This dependency level is complicated as building a band's lineup. To be more concise, it @#!% things up....
I'm inside a game remake project that is stuck at the basic design stage. I have a simple architecture in mind, but the afraid of facing C++ code without the Scott Meyers book is buggin me off...lol . Just need to stop being a chicken and set a Ogre3D development environment in my PC, period. Using jMonkeyEngine can be a great pick too!

In parallel with that i'll be attending some Computer Science Math classes (my math skills are too sloppy) and a basic Blender modelling course between April and June. I'm having a hard time to learn these stuff on my own...

I intend to boost my Algorithm Analisys background as well with the great OpenCourseWare program supported by MIT. Obs : i'm growing insanely curious about four languages(in ascending order) : Smalltalk, Lisp, Ruby and Python . It's so cool to check around and see this myriad of programming paradigms! I'm pretending to reflect on these very soon :)

Maybe i'm not that far from a "college environment" anyway... lol

2006-08-31T13:29:00.000-07:00

John Carmack takes on the Next-Generation Video Game Consoles.

A few days ago , i had the pleasure to watch this video from YouTube. I never seen Mr. Carmack speaking in public before. He seems to be a nice and straight to the point geeky guy =P. A true monster from the computer and Video Games history.

When asked about the next-generation game console war(XBox 360 X PS3). He said that both platforms will kick ass , each on its own manner.

Microsoft's strategy actually is to maximize the number of developers for it's new platform and to boost the strength of the XBox as a gaming platform.
With a powerful set of tools, DirectX based API to access hardware features, simple hardware architecture(Simmetric CPU's, PC-like), the recently announced XNA studio (for Indie Developers) etc.

On the other side , Sony isn't interested in maximizing the fame of the Playstation... there's no need to do it for obvious reasons. It's been 10 years that Sony is standing at the top of the world and they will do anything to keep their kingdom safe in the next generation. So , they built a killer (and expensive) machine , with a complex and sophisticated CPU architecture (Cell), Blu-ray Disc Drive , HDMI video output, Bluetooth support.... and the list goes...

Carmack said that the PS3 have more 'theoretical power' than XBox, and emphatized that the development of games for the PS3 will be a tough task due to the uncommon CPU architecture.

But i don't know... i really liked the set of tools for development on the PS3... a nice fraction of the tools are based on open-standards like OpenGL, COLLADA and OpenVG. There are also some cool vendor-spacific middleware stuff like Havok Physics and the highly scalable Kynapse AI Middleware(from Kynogon, AI middleware supplier of E.A , Atari and even the British Aerospace Division =P).
There are rumors that even the GNU tools are being implemented! A gcc compiler for PS3 would be lovely XD!

Well , if Carmack said it's tough it really should be... Let's consider , he made the first FPS engine for the PC with killer and fast paced action. Better: it used to run perfectly on the 386 with a few megabytes of RAM.

I'm really curious to know which platform will reign on the next generation. The history of video games has proved before that a powerful hardware isn't enough for a well succeded gaming platform.Sony really wants to push the gaming to the next level. It's a matter of time for us to know if Sony is pushing too hard or not..

2006-08-28T17:11:00.000-07:00

Hands on!

Lately i've been drowning into gameDev pool. The Design stage has just started, and i'm taking notes of almost every insight i got(i need to detail more components, so , i need to get some inspiration playing the game that i'm taking as a model).
We decided not to use the M3G API , and use the basic J2ME lcdui package to handle the core 2D graphics stuff. The class diagram is taking shape....

In parallel , i'm taking the time and having some contact with an excellent 3D Modelling Tool : Maya (which was recently bought by Autodesk for our happiness or sadness...)
Damn , it's so full of resources the you can easily get lost on it. Well , i'm taking some baby steps on it and having the first contact with the tool.
Along with Maya , i'm boosting up m C++ Skills. I never developed something real with it.
To get back into the C++ mood after one year with Java running on my veins, i'm reading Effective C++ from Scott Meyers (it's a great resource for whom had some decent contact with the language..)
It provides some great tips on the essentials of the language , explaining the rationale behind it. Now i'm checking the memory management chapter and i realized what make so much people run from C++ just like vampires from the Holy Cross... Geez , memory handling in C++ can become a very complicated issue... There are lots of mecanisms to do that like: overloading the new and delete operators, implementing constructors and destructors in a balanced manner, handling pointers like a surgeon etc.... In Java everything is so peaceful with the garbage collector thing.
But we must remember, decently written C++ is far more fast and deadly than Java and period.
For us who deal with heavy processing like real time rendering systems , audio and video programming , etc. The need for fast native code makes C++ one of the main tools available.
So get your templates ready and watch out for memory leaks!!

2006-07-17T19:11:00.000-07:00

Okay! Another semester finished , and all is left is 5 months in order to get my Bachelor's Degree and say a temporary goodbye to the academic environment.
But there's still alot of stuff to do before that. From now on , i will use this blog to register every step possible from my GameDev learning curve.

Actually , i'm involved in two projects :

-> A Genre-Oriented game engine for mobile devices using J2ME + Mobile 3D Graphics API (JSR-184).

-> A secret project(by now) of a freeware 2D MMORPG game based in one of Y2K's hottest game/anime fevers.

So , i'm just cracking my fingers and getting ready to spend some insane months making games. I think i would be kind of a fortunate guy if i could pay my bills doing this (maybe music too... lol).

2005-12-19T04:37:00.000-08:00

End-of-the-Year-Musical-Analisys-pt-1

Let me take the time and elect the 3 best releases from 2005 :

Queens of the Stone Age -> Lullabies to Paralyze
Hoo boy , these guys always seduced me with their vintage tasted and gutsy hard rock , but this one really impressed me. An album filled with creepy histories, that strange mood that i like so much and some great riffs that will provide you a slight flashback of Tony Iommi's early days. It Rocks Hard!!

Steve Vai -> Real Illusions : Reflections
I'm a suspect to say something about Steve, because i'm a pretty hardcore fan of his work. He keeps delivering the best melodies that a human being can get from it's inner soul. He does what the best musicians in this world can do: Release NEW albums , with different stuff , but still maintaining his personal signature. In other words , changing , but still being the Steve Vai that we love so much

Dream Theater -> Octavarium
No words about this one! Another wonderful album from Dream Theater and defined by me as an another "Transition Album". All DT fans percepted some big changes that were applied to the band's musical direction since some Tracks of "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence".
When Train of Tought was released ,some people (including me) really stranged the heavy and dark property of this record, without the melodic emphasis of older stuff from the band.
For me TOT is a sort of fusion of DT progressive stuff, Metallica with some new metal glimpses.
Octavarium is muuuuch more melodic than TOT , but the heavy factor remains in most of the songs. You can buy it with your eyes closed!!

2005-12-16T06:27:00.000-08:00

Last saturday i was burning in my private hell , but Sunday i ascended from the ashes! Noticed that i got enought credits to kick compilers out of my way and
watched the BEST concert of my life.
Dream Theater has the magical property to transform any concert house on it's own name. There's no measure unit that can describe the wonderful vibe in Credicard Hall that day.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1st Set:

The Glass Prison (Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence)
Just let me Breathe (Falling into Infinity)

The Mirror/ Lie (Awake) -> "Geez, a shotgun round in the chest!!"

The Answer Lies Within (Octavarium)
These Walls (Octavarium)
Never Enough (Octavarium)

In The Name of God (Train of Thought)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
2nd Set :

ENTIRE Scenes from a Memory
Pull Me Tropolis
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The scenes of 2005-12-11 will remain in this memory and will be carried by my spirit through eternity... ;)

2005-10-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

Time Gap

Uff.. finally a break! Of course , another time gap happened here (1 month and a 1/2).
But Lately i've been so fucked up with time that i can't pass by and write stuff here. Some good stuff happened since my last post and i'll try to enumerate them here just for the record..
---------------------------------------------------------
int main(char ** argv , int argc) {

Stack records;

records.push(...)

/* Okay here we go... :P */

}
--------------------------------------------------------
The Output is :

Oct 27 -> Performed the first show with my covers band (recently named Rock Juice) at a cool Irish-styled pub.It was great even being on a bloody Thursday night! It kicked ass and i had lots of fun!

Oct 12 -> Went to the "Live'n'Louder" rock festival and watched wonderful bands like Scorpions and Nightwish! Man , i have no words to describe how damn good it was , except for some P.A problems.

Oct 3 -> Expomusic day!! For those who don't know , this is the latin america's NAMM. Shit , there were soo much people there... hard to walk , hard to visit stands , lots of musical celebrities walking around with a river of fans behind them , etc.. But i loved it! Just because i had the opportunity to talk personally with Tony Franklin which is one of my top favorite bass players! He autographed my The Firm CD and we talked about Blue Murder (geez , i love this band!!!) , Bass Stuff etc. A wonderful person and musician... haha , i never imagined that he was so funny! Thankx to him , i'm obliged to get myself a bass and start to practice it! (hummm Fretless for sure!)

Sept 26 -> Birthday Reunion. Well , my birthday was at September 18th , but i decided to delay the reunion here at my house 'cause all my friends were busy. A few words : Lots of Food and Laughts! OH YEAHH!! Finally i bought my POD xt Live!

Sept 9 -> Whitesnake and Judas Priest concert!!! This day rocked alot!! I never imagined to see in this life Tommy Aldridge performing that kickin ass drum solo heard in albums like Randy Rhoads Tribute and Whitesnake - Live at Monsters of Rock 1990 (bootleg). Reb Beach from Winger was playing one of Whitesnake guitars , but i thought that he had a crappy space to show off... Doug Aldrich played most of the guitar solos , but he ain't that interesting (Looked like a Poser version of Zakk Wylde). Judas show was outstanding!!! Man , those guys are hanging around their 50´s and they didn´t lost that metal spirit!! Damn!! Cool Drummer? Scott Travis is a demon!

That's the synthesis from the hot events that happened in this time gap... I have tons of things to plan and in this next holiday i´ll try to organize this stuff... Its been 1 month that i got my POD and i barely touched it! Man , this really pisses me! Should i remember? I Need more $$$$$ :P

2005-08-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

Weekend Report + Recording Notes (part III of N)

Everything seems back into alignment right now. My body got re-conditioned to the normal daily basis and i'm feeling back in "shape".
Remember that Java gig i was talking about? I decided to take it cause it's a very temptating offer. I ain't going to earn loads of money on this , but it will be a great opportunity to learn J2EE based platforms/applications. The location is also great : Paulista avenue. I love it!
This week i'll perform the procedures to quit my actual job , so i can sign the new contract properly.

Last Saturday , i reunited with Lennon and Moe to discuss our covers band planning. Met Joe and Vikk right after it to eat a tasty fried pizza. We talked alot and had a great time. Last time i saw Joe was at the "Charlie and The Chocolate Factory" day.

Yesterday , i stepped into the studio to record a couple of tracks of an instrument that i never played before : Mandolin.
Geez , what a difficult little thing to play! I've done some melodic lines with it. The song is named "Estrela da Manha" (Morning Star)
I dunno if these tracks will be part of the final mix.. It's a matter of how cool the mandolin lines will sound with the other instruments.

More news are coming..
Hugs 4 all

2005-08-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday i performed a pocket show with my band at a community theatre. Everything worked fine , except for a general event delay which reduced our stage time in 10 minutes... This is the only "bad" thing that happened.
The audience loved the band performance and that's great! We are sounding better show after show , and i'm really happy about it.
Our record is almost done , and there's only few tracks where voice recording is needed... The next challenge is make money for mastering and copying.

Just for the record :

It's being almost three weeks that i don't hang out with all my friends.
I hope i can survive this entire semester... This week was a bit tough.. and i'm not happy about the daily "travel" from College->Work.

2005-08-11T17:30:00.000-07:00

Back on the College Track Again

Well.. everything returned to their normal state. Hardcore classes until 12:30 , running like a motherfucker to catch a bus that crosses the town , dealing with some crosstown traffic at the rush hour , etc.
This semester i got some nice classes , but a few "sleeping management" ones like always.
Object Oriented System Analisys , Information Engeneering II and Introduction to Compilers are the "cool dudes" for now.

This week is being more than introductory! Most teachers are performing a kickin ass start , with projects and stuff... but it seems fine to me.
I just relax by now.... heavy duty stuff is about to come...

Oh.. my ex-Java teacher offered me a trainee job with java programming & design! This looks great cause Java is freakin fun for me! I sent him my "Resume"... If it's a good gig for me , i hope i can get it... otherwise step off!

Damn! I'm Enjoying some great Video Game soundtrack right now!!! Nobuo Uematsu kicks Ass³³³³²¹¹¹²²³. He's doing some wonderful stuff with "The Black Mages"...
Right now i'm listening the Theme from Final Fantasy 6's final battle with Kefka!
Just remembered that i need to finish it again!! All i gotta do is build my fighters's skills to kick Kefka again. I'm gonna bomb that SOB with all Ultimas and Meltons i got!!

2005-08-02T14:49:00.000-07:00

6 days left.....

Having a good time in these last days of my college's vacation season..
No big news!!!

Working one the new version of "Conway's Game of Life" simulation. Today , i defined the new classes , structures and templates that make this thing work.

Replaying my Final Fantasy Tactics game. At the moment there's only one sidequest left : The Deep Dungeon.
Man , the hottest weapons are hidden in this place , and when you reach to the end of it (10 levels) you have the opportunity to learn the ultimate summon magic named "Zodiac"

This is a great game!! Suffered a bit in the beggining to understand it, but after you master the main concepts of the game system , you will have lots of fun hours playing it!

2005-07-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday night , i went to the movies to watch the remake of Charlie and Chocolate Factory... My goodness , what was that??? I felt like all my inner ideas for making the first version (1972) better were used by Tim Burton! Johnny Depp plays Wonka in a divine performance!! Much darker with acid-personality. This version is closer to the original book than the old one... Jush Loved it!

Saturday is rehearsal day... and today was no different! The band is sounding much better now with a second guitar played by Moe. He joined us about one month ago and got the spirit pretty quick! The songs are getting great and i can't wait to play the new HOT SONGZ from our future setlist. It will kick the asses of the entire audience.

Got a new DVD in my collection! Queensrÿche's Operation Livecrime!!! What a band!!! It's the very first record from Queensrÿche that i own , and it's for sure , a state-of-art live show.
The Mindcrime album is played entirely with perfection , with Geoff Tate interpretating the story's main caracter with the feeling of a professional actor.
Wow , and i spent only 30 bucks (Brazil's currency..hehehe) on it!

2005-07-27T17:22:00.000-07:00

Today , i played alot with programming.... tried to create a GTK+ application in Windows , but had lots of trouble with those DLL's. Gotta find some sort of package that satisfies all the GTK+ dependencies (like Pango , for example).
I know that doing that in linux would be easier... but i dropped linux for a while after it burned all my patience while i was trying to make that PPPoe client work with my ADSL connection.

Linux is a great operational system , but configuring it can be as delightful as a S&M session.

I liked alot the way that GTK+ is written.... looks like literate programming!
The construction logic goes in a different way compared to Win32

Took some courage and put my hands on that Game Of Life problem too... Changed my mind about coding it using bi-dimensional arrays for two reasons :

Violent "growing" restrictions

Pain-in-the-ass range checking in every access

I've been reading about a implementation to this problem that uses a kind of Hash table.. Just know the basics about this data structure , so i'm trying to pick a combination of C++ STL containers that would fit in this situation.
If Bjarne Stroustrup recommended to avoid "reinventing the wheel" and to use the Standard library facilities , i think i should consider it , but "decode & decompress" the information in his C++ book requires thinking time of O P log(p) (where p is the number of pages that you've read)... hahhha , i'm not a 100% C/C++ dummie creature for god's sake!.
Sometimes it feels like reading the bible in its Aramaic version!

2005-07-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

Restarted my Computer Graphics study... I wanna have the chance to do at least one silly game!
Actually i'm using the AC3D for Modelling and the OpenGl for programming... it's a good match , cause it's hard to program 3d graphics without a "concrete" model.
It's difficult to me to have a 3D abstraction inside my head... so modelling first is a nice way to drown your brain inside the R³ space ....hehe
I'm using the OpenGL Programming Guide (also known as the "Red Book") alongside with the NeHe's OpenGl Tutorial (pretty famous for providing a very efficient way to introduce the API in a very clear way to Average Programmers).

I'm also reading the amazing Masters of Doom by David Kushner , which tell the paths that John Romero and John Carmack walked before and after the iD Software founding.
These two guys are my idols, cause they revolutioned the concept of computer gaming.

It's inspiring to see how everything began...

2005-07-13T18:47:00.000-07:00

College Vacations are always welcome! Mine started 2 and 1/2 weeks ago and i'm loving it!

All i gotta do in my daily basis right now is :
- half-time job (morning)
- watch tv , sleep and play old games in the computer/videogame (afternoon)

When you don't have one of these hot videogames of the moment( PS2 , Xbox) neither a hot GPU like the NVidia Geforce 7800 , the only way to chill out is having fun with the great old-systems emulators avaiable around the net.

By the way , those dudes done a great job writing those programs! You gotta be a professional bit-fiddler to write them! I wish i could be one of these guys :(

Let's take the Zsnes as an example.The core of Zsnes is written in pure i386 assembly (they're porting to C at the moment) and it's scary to imagine the amount of instructions needed for performing the graphics and sound emulation with such perfection.
These two items are only the beggining... There are a lot of other routines needed to make the emulation experience complete : Proper imput handling, network gaming , chip detection, SRAM storage, Psychoacoustic stuff, blah , blah , blah...

All this stuff remembers me that it's been almost a week that i don't even touch my C/C++ sources... Got stuck while trying to write the "Neighbours Counting" algorithm at my Conway's Game of Life simulation in a two-dimensional array...
Just hate to write range checking functions in 2D arrays... but it's needed to avoid that freaking "Memory Violation Fault" or "Memory Segmentation Fault" exceptions...

Nerdy talk isn't it???

2005-07-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

Recording Notes - Part 1 of n

Well , for people that don't know me , i'm the guitar player of Impressao Analógica , a progressive-freak-pop-rock band(damn... i hate labels!) and lately we've been finishing the recording sessions of our first album named "MDB".

Most songs were composed by Lennon and Bia around 1998-2003 while they were working together in a acoustic project prior to the actual band.

I can't wait to see it released because the songs are great!!

Last Sunday i recorded the clean/acoustic guitar parts from "Lilith" and it was all right.
Just 4 hours building interesting chord blocks with Lennon and voilà!
I think i need to study some uncommon chord mounting around the guitar neck... i'm pretty rusted on this!
Oh yeah! Just got paid yesterday and soon i'll burn all my savings in some good guitar stuff...The Line6 POD XT is a strong candidate by now...

That's all for now!

2005-07-11T17:52:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah.. here i go again!

Well , i forgot the amount of times that i started something like this...
I Think i don't got enough patience to keep any kind of log... Usually , after some time , my mind gets empty and i don't have a single damn word to write.
But the idea of keeping a weblog have been bugging my mind again in the last weeks , so....

Whatever.... i'm creating this blog for me and for the people who wants to know the ramdom reflections of a daydream fueled mind like mine(uff!).

In some posts (maybe most... but only time will tell) i'll write in english. I'll give ya two reasons for that :

1-) An opportunity for foreign visitors to understand the stuff i wrote
2-) An opportunity to exercise my english

So don't expect perfectly written posts!! :P

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