Last week I was in the office for 67 hours. I thought about going in Sunday as well as Saturday just to get it above the 70 hour milestone just so I could say ‘hey, I’ve worked a 70 hour week before!‘, but for some reason when I woke up on Sunday, I just didn’t feel like it. Go figure.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the horror stories about having to work absurd hours during crunch time for game industry professionals, and generally, I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid this for most of my short career thus far, but it seems that my luck was not to last. I’ve been crunching for a while, and it will continue to ramp up for about a month or so. Then about the beginning of April I’m going to take a big fat vacation. Despite the workload, I’ve been able to deal with the mountain of paperwork and phonecalls it takes to purchase a house. Don’t get all excited though, it’s the one I already live in. To top it all off, my uncle just moved to Raleigh, so I’ll have some more family around. So in summary, I’m busy. However, I will try to post something worth looking at anyway. First up, my dad got me a lavish housewarming gift that after I’m done crunch-timing, I think many can enjoy. I am referring to my new sectional sofa. I’m happy. For the second item, I feel that I should first issue a disclaimer. I was thinking of posting a screenshot of the tool I’ve been working on at work. But then I thought that I might get in trouble for it, especially saying as the entire interface has already changed since I took the screenshot, and will again before the thing is done. I don’t want to ruffle anyone’s feathers, so I cropped it down. So keep in mind that this doesn’t represent anything about what the tool will end up looking like … screenshot of mysterious tool. The only interesting things to point out here are that you can play with all the light parameters, and the material system that the scene is rendered with. The art here is not much to look at (becuase it was made by yours truly), but what is neat about it is the fact that each wall is only two triangles, and the 3d effect you get from looking at the tiles at an angle is done by a technique called parallax mapping which uses a texture to fake perspective. Additionally you have some per-pixel specular highlights that are offset by a normal map, which is another technique used to fake the 3d-ness of the walls. I’d say that the illusion worked out pretty well in this screen. Well, that’s all the update I have time for. It’s now very late, and I have to go to bed so I can get up at 7 and crunch all day. For my parting gift, I give you web sudoku.