sorcy7

and fail at drawing one another..

Susikalti

Okay! I've moved and now I'm living in Vilnius.

Yesterday I was mainly settling in my ( or should I say 'our'?) new two room flat. I'll be living with two other guys. One is a recent graduate from an unknown Swedish economics university and he is doing consultations or whatever for a Lithuanian firm. The other one ( Paulius) is yet another economist guy! Just that he is in his second year of studying economics in VU. And as for the flat - great. Has a huge fridge, microwave, oven, etc. and of course wireless LAN ( and internet). My room is quite big, there is enough space for both - me and Toby ( the swede guy).

The evening was quite interesting. Me, Paulius and Toby were having a hot discussion about what makes a good team, how can you feel from the beginning that everything will go at least kind of OK, how remote relationships can be misleading, how hard remote work is, etc. and, of course, what the hell Toby, genius economist from Sweden, is doing in Lithuania?!

As for today, I woke up pretty dizzy seeing as yesterday was a bit crazy as for a towny guy like me and knowing that I almost haven't slept tonight at all. Despite that I cooked some meatballs as for breakfast and then went to the city. Paid the money for my new student ID card, went to MIF ( faculty in my universtiy) and checked what is my group number. It seems that it is group No.1. That means I wont have classes longer than till 4 pm which is cool, also, the cooler part, is that Justinas Vilimas and Julius Seporaitis are in the same group as me. Geez, I'll be surrounded by geniuses but I guess that will only motivate me to work harder.

Also, I estimated that it takes me ~47 minutes to get to my faculty from home. Which is OK, knowing that it was raining like hell today and plus I had to stop and take circus(?) tickets for Paulius. I was expecting a worse situation.

When I came home, I made lunch and got an offer from Blacknemo to meet somewhere in Vilnius and just have a chat about games, the industry, etc. But I declined and offered to make a meeting on Sunday because at this moment I have a monstrous headache and feeling way too sleepy.

That is all!

Happy Birthday goes to Andreas Johansson the soon-to-become noble goth ninja game designer/programmer! Yay!

First "yay!" because of five things: Chad and Laura are leaving for Hawawii (:D), ReJ worked with a team on demo and won Assembly'06, imbusy alone finished 9th at Assembly'06, Maverick started working as as a game programmer at Ivolgamus and my site is up again! *Hurray for all!*

Now for the rest of things that have happened.

Was working on gm2 quite seriously this week. Now there is no such thing as grass field, instead we have movement field with a number of layers. So this means that we can have hills, hills on hills, bridges and lots of other entertaining stuff. I think we are done with the new movement system as well, but yeah there is one bug somewhere that Andreas managed to find ( what is wrong with me, why is my code always buggy?! I'm not a programmer! No no, I AM, I AM).

As for the art side - not the best situation. I think our 3D artist isn't interested in the game anymore and doesn't believe in it. That is sad. So yeah, we have quite a lot of static models, but we badly need animations and because of this we can't make decisions on a couple of movement situations. Anyone feels like rigging characters and doing animations? We hire, pay no salary!

2D art side is brighter. A designer from cgtalk.lt has volunteered to aid us. So now gm2 has a new sexy logo, eye-catching GUI and now the designer is working on the HUD. I don't think the first HUD that he showed was good. I mean, it looked very nice, truly profesional, but GM2 is trying to be a stupid cartoonish game like Worms3D, Croc2 um The Legend Of Zelda ( graphics part) and the HUD looked as if it was made for a realistic strategy game or something. So I gave him some minor notes and said that anyway he is doing a great job. I hope the next version of the HUD is going to be more cartoonish.

What else, um, I think Within Temptation is my favourite group atm. It is a symphonic metal group. At least wiki says so. They are truly light, the lyrics are bright, mainly about fight between good and evil, the vocalist is a woman, so they are kind of like Nightwish, but I think a lot better. Nightwish is too much of Elves, woods, dunno, and I prefer Angel stuf :D Yeah, lol.



Also, was playing quite a lot lately. Mainly Final Fantasy 7 on a PS emulator and Psychonauts. FF7 - no comment. Psychonauts is something totally extraordinary. The art is kind of a mix of the art you can see in Tim Burton's movies, the movie "The City of the lost children" and American McGee's Alice. So yeah I enjoy the views A LOT.

If to speak about the gameplay, the game is like a mix of million genres. For example - even though McGee's Alice kind of reminds Psychonauts (looking from a certain point of view) Alice is just follow the story, run and kill bad guys OR figure out puzzles. And psychonauts is - follow the story, solve puzzles, buy/find things, do quests, kill bad guys, help guys, run from a giant mutated lungfish, do racing, etc. So yeah, it features the richest art and gameplay I've ever experienced ( no wonder the game is 3.5GBs on my HDD). My favourite item in the game are these "mind doors". You can run to any interactible character and throw those "mind doors" on their head. The doors open and you like enter their mind. This brings you to a totally different environment and you can play in the world of that character. Every character usually has a psychological problem and while exploring his world you can sort his problem and save him from nightmares, whatever. The cool thing is that if you want you can enter the minds of different characters and have fun, get some items, points, etc. but if you don't want to - just follow your mission. And the awesome thing about this feature is that every mind world looks totaly different, has different gameplay rules. For example, in the mind of a lungfish, you are a giant in an urban city of a lungfishes - you climb skyscrappers, squash lil lungfishies, lungfish navy tries to kill you - they think you're Godzilla or something.

Oh and, in the game you're this lil kid called "Rasputin". You run away from your home and you join this camp of young Psychonauts and want to become one of the best psychonauts in the world in one or two days ( because your parents are about to take you home). The first 4 hours are mainly tutorials, basically quite boring levels where you gain your basic PSY powers (like shooting, telekinesis, etc.) and learn the controls. And um, later something evil happens in the camp - someone steals the brain of the rest of young psychonauts. So your mission is to save the camp, retrieve the brain and, like, use the chance to become a noble psychonaut. And that is where extreme fun begins!

So yeah, Tim Schafner, the designer of game, is my new hero! Hurray!

Okay, so I've been accepted to study at Vilnius University. Gonna be a student of Software Engineering ( or "Software systems" as they call it there).


I already know where I'm going to stay in Vilnius. I'll be renting a flat which has two rooms together with other two guys. One is my friend from my town and the other one is a swede economist. Should be fun. So tomorrow I'm going to Vilnius to "review" my flat and to bring the required documents to VU.



Andreas is gone to Stockholm to meet his online friend h3who. They've been chatting online for 5 years or something ( just like me and Chad). So really happy for him and can't wait for his picture report! And Chad and Laura had their wedding a few days ago! Looks like everyone is experiencing smaller or bigger changes in their lives.

Luv ya all.

The new Muse album comming out in July! Can't wait!

Argh! So hot outside. I'm sitting here and sweating. I'm only sitting... duh. Must concentrate on my work and get gm2 out of the abyss it is currently in.

As Alan would say, I "dropped" ~100$ on books during my stay in the glorious California. But! It is starting to pay off. I've read quite a big portion of OpenGL Shading Language 2nd edition and I am really enjoying it. It is probably one of those few books which I really enjoy and don't fall asleep after 15 pages.

So in the evening of yesterday, I finally wrote my own shader in OpenGL Shader Designer. Before that I was learning physics, but couldn't concentrate at all because I was just waiting until I'll be able to put my hands on my very first shader. I planned to learn physics until 9pm but changed that to 8pm and got sticked to my laptop until 1am without a break. It is like a totally new experience. My hands were shivering, yes shivering, and I think I haven't been as excited as yesterday since the day when I first touched c++.

The thing about modeling is that it is just "clicking the buttons" to produce nice looking things. I enjoy making things that look nice (sexy) and polish them forever. But I also enjoy when I produce things in a relatively smart way. I said relatively, because I am not a very practical and smart person. Programming is smart, but, for example, some ordinary data base code is just smart, it is not sexy. Yes, clean and well designed code is nice and all. But, for example, the player who is playing your game won't know that you've done sexy code design and that your code is clean. But if you're the shader programmer... Take this situation. The player runs the game and the graphics are simply astonishing. After seeing all those nice effects the player goes like "Whoa, the shaders look awesome!" then he also notices that the performance is also good and then he goes like "Whoa, these guys must be really smart. Everything looks so nice and runs so smoothly!". So this makes you a person who produces smart and sexy stuff. Or am I wrong?

Oh and the results. Just emulated the ordinary lighting models, wrote portion of a toon shader. Maybe I'll post some sexy screenshots soon.

On Tuesday I decided to rewrite the *.dae to *.msh converter because it was only capable of handling a few exportation variants. I mean, Collada's dae files are very generic, you can't really figure out or predict how data is going to be stored and where the exact data you need is going to reside. Just change the way you model and the content changes at once. So, of course, my own dae parser made with tinyXML didn't help here. Consequently, I ran into Collada DOM. In the evening of Tuesday I finished the Collada DOM manual and on Wednesday had my National English Exam! I thought it was pretty easy. Finally, on Thursday I completed the design of the new converter and was almost done implementing it. So today I solved all the left over bugs from Thursday and also added a working optimizer as a bonus. Now the dae2msh converter seems to work really well as it converts and optimizes without any problem all of the models that our artist has done so far. Sometimes collada's xml parser reports an odd error, but it doesn't affect the conversion process and it is dae file's fault!

I'm slowly getting back to my normal life which means that I'm doing more and more programming every day. I haven't touched anything seriously since December 2005. I guess I really needed a break. Recently I was spending a lot of time on analysing the Elf3D framework, messing with 3DSMax's SDK and Tiny XML, and yesterday I've almost completed a converter from Collada's XML *.dae document to Elf3D's MSH format. I was almost done with my appointment but ran into a problem where I had to choose whether I'm changing the structure of the MSH format or not. So I really wanted to discuss it with my team, but friday is global party time in Lithuania : ) Anyway, I <3 my team. And the artist is like a converter: Give Sketch -> Will do model.

Double monitors ( totally killing my lungs (nothing compared to Chad's or Brandon's though))!:


The bad news is that I'll probably have to quit or slow down my daily programming once again because as most of you know I'll have to retake probably all of my exams because the department of education leaked all the exams to the public before they were taken. So I'll have to do random revisions once again.

Biggest luck to Keksas with his lyceum exam!