Friday I spent most of the day trying to build a 3D cube’s face with smooth edges. It’s interesting to play with geometry. The idea is to program a shape and eventually cache the end result (polygons and vertices) to later reuse them for instancing.
…umm basically I spend most of the day trying to get around the fact that for the next version of Tetris (that I’m forced to do), if I want to improve the “art” I will most likely have to do it by myself ! ..making a cube, that’s not too much fun. But then again, it seems that I’m constantly assigned to projects (= Tetrises) where my skills as a 3D programmer are piped directly into the drain.
I think I can now consider myself decent as a network programmer for games. Perhaps I should focus on that. However I like my games to look nice, I know I can make even a Tetris look quite nice, but not if I have to do that by myself.
I dunno.. this sucks. Recently a friend of mine switched jobs here in Japan. He got a big raise and an possibly less working hours. ..but he’s not in the game business. He works with foreign companies. For him speaking English is more than sufficient, and his working environment is definitely better than the Japanese one.
Being a foreign game programmer in Japan is not easy at all. With some effort, in a couple of years I could be speaking Japanese decent enough to not pose any communication barriers, but.. man.. I want to do cool games now ! Patience has to be one of my major my virtues, but there ought to be a limit to that.
I cant stand this anymore, I want work in an environment where I can express my potential and have a chance to improve.
For the records, I was previously working on a relatively interesting project, but I’ve been again placed on yet another “puzzle game”.
Knowing myself, I’ll probably one day just quit out of desperation to find myself having to hurry and get a new job… probably ending up again out of the game business.
Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary at 7:56 PM EDT
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First things first. It seems that I have a girlfriend now ! wowwww !!!
It’s weird, it’s rare. It took a good dose of luck but also something has to be related to the fact that I’ve been more selective on who I hang out with.
There once was a time when by the time I thought that a girl might have been interesting, she was already being banged by one or more of my friends !! It’s a wild wild world out there ..but it’s also filled with dumb girls !! Girls that fall in the arms of whomever grabs them first and cry about being mistreated. If you act like a piece of meat, don’t be too surprised if a butcher walks in !
What I really like in a girl is when she likes me for my personality. A person that can appreciate my sense of humor, not a boring stuck-up, but also not a plain airhead.
Still, it takes time to get used to a person. I’m very good at spotting defects and making a big deal of them in my head.. I suppose that that’s what keeps me fairly asocial: I don’t feel at ease with people I don’t know well enough and that gives them a negative signal.
Talking about relationships, I’ve built a pretty good idea on certain aspects of how Japanese girls view relationships.
Apparently, cheating isn’t a big of a deal ! I see people having fun with “optional” partners all the time here in Tokyo ! It’s mostly the men that get the fun, but I definitely can tell that women can have their good share of extra-curricular fun… I actually asked around, and it turns out that Japanese women (including young girls), accept the idea that men like to “have fun”. So, one can go out have fun, but ! must make sure that his girlfriend/wife doesn’t find out, and that she isn’t being neglected. A lover has to be strictly a lover, to be met on spare time.
I guess it makes sense. Sooner or later relationships have to mature. Morph from the instability of sexual tension into some sort of family. Family meaning a strong reliable bond designed to be there for the sake of everyone involved.
Still, it’s kind of sad that there is this sort of implicit compromise, I don’t like that. I’ll be a sad day when I screw around and have to make up a bunch of bullshit for my girlfriend. Then it’s not so much about hurting someone.. it’s about hurting your own pride, living with lies, I don’t want to do that !
Well, it’s 2AM fack ! Time to zzzz !!!!
poof
Posted by Davide Pasca as Society, Japan at 2:09 AM EDT
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On my current 3D engine, I’m supporting both Direct3D 9 with HLSL and OpenGL with CG.
With some effort, I managed to get a hold on the CG interface for OpenGL.. cool !
Then I noticed that Microsoft is starting to push Direct3D 10. D3D 10 seems to make some effort to deal with state changes in an efficient way, and generally to keep up to date with the evolution of 3D hardware, while also removing a lot of ambiguities with the infamous “caps” and forcing hardware manufacturer to include a base set of capabilities on any hardware that wants to be certified as D3D 10 compatible.
cool cool.. what’s uncool is that OpenGL is starting to look very old ! I was once a great supporter of OpenGL, back when D3D was a real pain to use. D3D used to be almost as painful to use as DirectShow (be DS damned in hell !), but eventually grew to become actually more clean than OpenGL.
OpenGL is continuously developed by a committee, which takes ages to implement anything. Implementing a decent off-screen rendering interface took ages. There so so much bureaucracy.. bha ! Its main problem is that it’s stuck with a design thought for a client-server system, where a client terminal makes API calls to a server that renders. We are talking ancient times, stuff that suited SGI hardware (which BTW just recently filed chapter 11.. sad !). OpenGL functions don’t deal with structures, which are sometimes very useful, and don’t have return values, which makes error checking rather painful.
So I’ve been thinking on ditching OpenGL ! (imagine, me doing that !). The only valid argument for using OpenGL is if I want to write portable code for MacOS X and Linux and PS3. But.. that’s pretty much a bunch of horseshit ! The “portable API” is a joke when dealing with advanced 3D graphics. Plus, who cares about MacOS X and Linux ? It’s a geeky excuse. As for PS3.. who knows what sort of extensions does its OpenGL use ? Writing an engine on top of D3D and OpenGL is inevitably going to have to penalize one side of the porting while taking a lot of time to keep the development in synch: not worth it.
ummmmm.. I wrote a lot and it’s late. I actually meant to leave the second part of the update for something completely different. But that will have to go on the next bat-update on this same bat-site !
Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming, 3D Graphics at 2:08 AM EDT
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Here comes a long overdue update !
Last week my mother was here in Tokyo for a vacation. Three days were national holiday, I got two more off and spent the whole week to spend with her.
This string of holidays is called Golden Week here in Japan. It’s a yearly recurrence that most Japanese use to take a trip to somewhere. My mother didn’t know that, but somehow managed to improvise with good timing. Actually it’s quite possible that the running travel ticket costs led her to pick those dates. Coming when most of the traffic is going out and leaving when most of the traffic is coming back in, must have an influence on availability and price.
My mom’s plan was to came to relax.. thus there wasn’t any particular intent to overtake any major touristic action. It was her third time, so she was relatively independent. Still, I did spend quite a bit of time with her, following her shopping sprees. An all-around exhausting experience !
Shopping for cute stuff is, first of all, quite boring, it also requires a lot of walking and standing. To make matters worse, fashion shops are filled with hot chicks ! Either working there or just shopping.
There is about a billion hot girls (at least from behind 8) in the Shibuya area alone. Mini-skirts are as popoular as ever, but this year over-knee stockings are also hip.. which adds ever more fuel to the fire ! (BTW, my mother took those pictures.. it would have been too weird if I did.. 8)
It’s not very sensible to tell those things straight out, but I’d be an hypocrite if I didn’t. Every time I see a couple of foreigners visiting Tokyo, I pity them a little bit.. because it’s obvious that the man is like a kid in a candy store (although my mother made me notice that there actually is some interesting “material” for women as well). It’s true that there is a relatively high quantity of complicated mouths and orthopedic challenged people, but as generations go by, there are more and more nice legs and fine mouths. Also, teeth can be fixed and some orthopedic defects can result appealing (inward bent knees are cute to many).
The morale of all this is that there is a lot of fish in the sea.. so to speak. In Tokyo it’s easier to notice because those fish put more effort in dressing up, and also seem to be more free to swim around half-naked without the fear of being eaten alive. It comes to think that this evening I had lots of sashimi (raw fish) with rice for dinner.. raw fish is raw fish.. but it’s different when it’s fresh, clean and nicely cut ..woo !!!
Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary, Japan at 12:53 AM EDT
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