Lost in the triangles moved! find it here: aras-p.info/blog

We repainted our living room and did one wall in wallpaper (real actual ones, not for the desktop). This is fun but takes a couple of days to get done, half of that time spent moving stuff outside the room and moving it back afterwards.

One thing I learned is that painting with semi-glossy paint is very different from painting with matte one. Semi-glossy is very sensitive to paint strokes, pressure and a lot of other things, and if you're not extremely careful you'll get a wall that looks like with a varying gloss or specular power. Of course, varying specular exponent would be cool in a shader demo of 2001, but it's not a cool thing to have on your room wall. And it's not 2001 anymore either!

After that we just went for a week to Crete. Here's an assortment of small random pictures. Now back to work!

Ok, as mcpunky asked to say something in more detail, I have no choice but to log a day of my work. Bear with me.

10:30 - I come to work. Peter is already here and wants to show me the shader-related project he's working on. It is becoming really cool by now, we discuss the projects, shaders, lighting, BRDFs and all the other stuff that graphics programmers always talk about.

10:55 - I turn on my work machines, read mail, check our forums, bugtracker and sales statistics :) Update code/website from Subversion. Review website changes of yesterday.

11:35 - Checkout new bugs reported to me. This day we have three of them. Some shaders don't display correctly for one user on his laptop; checking it, replied asking for log files now. Webplayer crashed on win2000. Checkout the crash dump, it's in Mono initialization; flag the bug for later review on actual win2000. One more: windows build loses the very first keystroke. Launch Visual Studio, build debug player. By 12:10 I have this bug found, fixed and checked (was an error in handling lost DirectInput devices). Commit into svn, merge into Unity 1.5.1 branch as well.

12:15 - Launch build of 1.5.1 branch on my PC, meanwhile I'll install more RAM on the windows build machine (it clearly needs it). Fifteen minutes later the release build is done and I have the RAM installed. Start debug build, do some small stuff on the laptop.

12:40 - Nicholas comes to discuss our strategy for handling per-vertex lighting with custom shaders of Peter's project. Fixed function T&L and custom shaders that don't care about vertices or pixels just don't merge well together. Maybe we'll have to reimplement the fixed-function vertex pipeline equivalent in vertex shader(s). Might be hard to get right, especially on some lower hardware.

13:05 - Lunchtime! At this time of year it's almost mandatory to eat outside. So nice. After lunch I watch a demo deities by mfx for some inspiration. Ah, I so want to do that.

13:45 - Joe comes in, shows some cool stuff one customer is working on. We discuss some glow filter issues.

14:00 - Philosophical talk about our unit/functional testing strategy. We do quite some functional tests now, and a tiny amount of unit tests. I'd like to try some unit tests on shader parser (which I'll have to refactor someday soon, and without unit tests I'm scared). Agreed that unittests are probably a good thing if you strike the right balance (now THAT was a surprise, huh?). Will try.

14:30 - Checkout a whitepaper from ATI about fixed function emulation in HLSL, playing with their shader. Instruction counts are scary! Talk with Nich about glow improvements, he has some good tips.

15:15 - Put a GeForce into my PC - will try to figure out why in some cases graphics looks too dark on them.

15:25 - Again comes Nicholas, more talk about this shader thingy, regular additive pixel passes vs. ambient passes vs. vertex lighting and how the actual end user should not care about these details. We found a nice solution it seems; this way shader authoring seems intuitive (or at least much more intuitive than the other alternatives we considered).

15:50 - Back to darkness-on-geforces issue. On the way I found out that motion blur filter no longer works on a PC! Reverting to older versions from svn to find out where I did introduce it. Ok, that was a stupid typo by me from several days ago, fixed.

16:35 - David opens a shoe box - and surprise surprise - there's a cake and cookies inside! Good stuff. Me loves anything that's sweet.

16:45 - The darkness-on-geforces is only the motion blur filter going wrong. That's good. Debugging with glIntercept, something's wrong with blur accumulation texture.

17:10 - D'oh! The motion blur had a pretty crappy implementation; was trying to render into the texture while using itself as the input. Obviously the results can be undefined, which just happened on geforces. Rewriting the filter to do it properly. Testing it, integrating into standard assets.

17:45 - Discuss our (i.e. company) roadmap and which parts of it can be announced publicly :) Then the talk went downhill about memory management, fragmentation, per frame allocations, porting Mono to some exotic architectures, whether porting runtime to Direct3D or kind-of-OpenGL-but-not-quite would be easier (my take is that porting to D3D would be easier) etc. Did something else which I don't quite remember because we couldn't have talked for an hour, right?

18:50 - Making some tweaks to the glow filter to look nicer in some cases. Done except the Radeon9000 path. I guess that's enough for today, now again check our forums, email and will go home.

19:30 - I actually leave home, it's some 20 minutes away on a bike. The plan is to eat lots of grapes and watch a movie tonight. What turned out is that I read some papers and then did the plan.

Overtall, it has been a day with quite much talks. Not exactly the day where you feel "hey, I've done a lot of stuff today", but not bad either. Will be ok for blog purposes I guess.

It's been like 6 months of me working on Unity. So far so good. We've done a big new release recently, so after some pre-release insanity we're a bit more relaxed. I guess not for very long though, we have more stuff planned than we can handle :)

It sure feels nice to work on an actual software product. I think it's probably the first time in my carreer that I know people are using my work and I do care about that. Having worked on projects before, it's very different - a project just comes and goes, and once it's finished you never think about it again. And most of the time you don't care about "the clients" that much either. Working on a product is much more rewarding (especially if the users seem to like it).

Another interesting here is that we are a very small software shop. So everyone has to be a one-man-army (the others certainly are, not sure about myself). Design, program, fix bugs, decide on features, do support, write docs and even do html tweaks for the website. Of course, it could be Jack of all trades, master of none (*), but somehow I feel that we are managing pretty well. And I like to be involved in various aspects of making a product.

(*) though wikipedia says that the full saying is Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one - which looks like a positive thing to me.

A completely different theme: when programming, it's always good to massage the code you're working with a bit. Remove unneccessary #includes. Write a comment on tricky code block. Fix warnings. Do small refactorings. Remove unused code paths. It does not take much time and helps to keep the codebase clean. Removing unused code is especially good - for some reason I love removing code. Could do that all day long; probably I'm some kind of anti-programmer :)