Once again straight into it, after the small diversion of dropping Sasha off at daycare. Started tracing through stuff and came across a cube map. I’ve then basically spent the whole of the day trying to render stuff to it and then generate mips from itself. It doesn’t want to play ball it’s very annoying.

The dogs ate my cucumber, they must have taken it off the worktop. I now have even less salad.

Went for a quick run, had a shower and then still got nowhere with cube maps. Annoying.

Do have all the parts to fix my helicopter now though. Also got another little helicopter that’s fun to fly as it’s actually stable.

Today started a bit later than I planned, but soon got stuck in. Carried on from where I left off. My first issue was actually caused my a rogue video player. After I disabled that then everything started falling into place.

Late afternoon I started a data build and went out for a run. Did a home check in the evening for a dog, then did a bit more work. Think I’ll try and have an early night tonight and do some helicopter reading. I must spend some time during the day tomorrow to go on the simulator, leaving it until last thing at night is too tiring. Need to get the flying hours in.

Couldn’t really get into work first thing, not until at least two cups of coffee. I added shader debugging until my brain switched on. Weather was a bit crap. Ended up walking the dogs in light rain. Came back and did more work. Now I was having an issue with constant buffers when bound to both vertex and pixel shaders.

I went to combat and spent most of it working out how I could solve the problem. Then came home and found out that that wasn’t the issue anyway. Spent many hours then trying to work out what’s wrong with it. After sitting down now I think I’m looking in the wrong place. It’s all a bit complicated. I’ll crack on with it tomorrow, I’m sure I’ll work it out.

So today was heart attack free and really a hell of a lot of work to do. No breaks. Started fairly early, shopping arrived, put away then just ploughed on. Went to Pump early evening. Was scheduled to do a home check, but they decided against it.

Came back, only had about 20 mins left of the shift, so two hours later…it’s just one of those things in game development, you just need to try ‘one more thing’ and see what it does, doesn’t matter about iteration time. You think, okay, just try this, and that leads on to just try that etc. It’s a pain, but it’s the way it works. Another hell of a busy week next week I’m sure.

Anyway, I really am now done for the week. Need to phone mother, better get wine and an ambulance on stand-by.

As for yesterday I can’t remember. I think I went for a run, did a twelve hour shift and fell asleep.

This morning I started work far too early, the fingers were going before the brain was engaged, but stuff had to be done. Now I can cope with most things and not get too stressed. Today I had a dev kit that was bricked and needed reflashing and no less than nine people on hip-chat. Conversations ranged from why a singleton constructor shouldn’t access itself, to why a data format was in 32 and not 64 bit. Plus being queried about changes to unsigned int limits. Which are all different across platforms just for fun. I can cope stressful situations without too much of an issue, confrontation, anxiety and depression. I can even cope quite well when Captain James says, “Right, now I’m going to roll back the throttle and go for an auto-rotation. You have control.”. Now that last sentence is a bit confusing, does he mean, “You are perfectly in control of the air-craft.”, or, “You now have the cyclic, collective, pedals and need to scan air-speed, altitude, rate of climb, rotor RPM as well as looking for somewhere to land, and my hand is on the throttle so I can bail out if it all starts to go tits-up.” Somehow I think it’s the latter.

Now the two things that cause my stress level to overflow and my body finally says enough is enough and tries to have a mini heart attack. The first is trying to book any kind of travel on-line. It always fucks up. When I was trying to book a hotel and flight to Japan, Jamie had to take over as it was all going tits up, I was bright red and about to pass out. Booking a flight on one web site and a hotel on another at the same time just doesn’t work, ever. And then if you try and do visa’s as well…The other thing that causes me to have a heart attack is tech support calls from my mother. I know she means well and is just trying to get her laptop to print the inside of her bloody cards, but I’m at the other end of a phone, trying to communicate with a dead dev-kit, nine people and debug a bloody file I/O problem at the same time. I installed OpenOffice somewhere, you only have a trial version of MS Office, it doesn’t support power point anyway. My stress levels are rising, I’m getting frustrated, she’s getting frustrated, I really can’t help. I think if I ever had a job in telephone support I would last about the first phone-call. The person at the other end would still be in the same boat they started with and I’d be dead.

Anyway, I finished off my nine conversations, found my bug and resurrected my dev-kit. I then walked the dogs quickly and finally I was returning back to normal. I went for a run at about 6PM then carried on working. So today apart from a 30 minute run and a quick dog walk I’ve done a 14 hour shift, yesterday was about 13 hours and tomorrow I’ll imagine will be the same.

People think working from home in game-dev is all bed of roses drinking coffee and playing games. That really is far from the reality. Even in the non-crunch times, it’s very long hours and very complicated work which requires a huge amount of concentration. Yes, it’s fun, I get paid a lot of money, I get to fly helicopters but you do actually have to work for it. I think I’ve seen Jamie when I got up and I’ve just seen him again now he’s going to bed. I’m now sat downstairs on the couch with the dog, soon I’ll be off to bed and get the joy of doing it all tomorrow.

So today was about to start early then the shopping turned up, still got it out the way.

Oh, to finish the Turkey story off, on the Saturday I think I had breakfast, ate yet another pizza for lunch and drank far too much beer. In the evening we went to the Italian again and I had yet more sea-bass. We had a nice chat to a couple, then sat at a bar and listened to a band then another bar. It’s all a bit of a blur really, I drank so much that week I’m still feeling bloated now. I put on about seven pounds in weight, most of it I’m sure is liquid.

So worked all the way up to a late lunch when I picked the dogs up. Sasha was mega excited to see me, Dillon on the other hand wanted to stay behind and play with his new mates. He seems to have grown, mind you they got through 6Kg of food in ten days, which is a hell of a lot. They travelled home fine and got settled right back in.

I did some more work then went on to Combat, I could feel my stomach jump up and down. It was still great fun though. Came back and did a bit more work, then practised some more hovering.

No watching the Singapore GP, think I’ll have an early night tonight and do some helicopter reading. Tomorrow will be an ordinary day, except for the bit where I fly the helicopter.

So as I was saying (badly reading by the last post), Turkey once again met all expectations. I’ll write a bit more about our last day tomorrow, although it wasn’t particularly special. We did have a fun chat with a couple in the evening though.

Flew home today. Took a while but over all very uneventful. Which I guess is nice. Unpacked everything, got the washing on, done the accounts.

Bath (wine free I think), pizza and bed. Back to work tomorrow. Fun week ahead.

Okay so this morning I hardly met any kind of expectation. Jamie wanked my off at about 11am. We got up eventually about 12 ish. I spent the morning or was it the afternoon reading the second part of the hunger games. To tell you the truth it’s taken me the best part of ten minutes to type this. I’m going to bed.