Screenshots from My Dev Team

I remember I used to say that I started development on a new game. Attached are some screenshots on the current progress of the project which is going along rather on schedule. We are working on making maps of Hell, and below are some of the screenshots of the game.


The picture above shows a first person viewpoint of the a certain scene in the game showing the hot lava and copper pots were sinners are boiled in.


Just a scenic viewpoint and the character rendered in 3rd person. As noted my game has actually 6 types of custom cameras in addition to the 2 systems that are already included. As you know, I like to tinker with things :P



In this picture I was just showing some strange color particles, nothing much more than that.

Oh well that sums up part of what has been a very busy last forthnight.

Jamming Session

During the last week one of my old friend Saj popped over from England for a visit and we just had a short jamming session. If you looked at the photo, you can notice its a pretty strange session :P

Winning the Virtual World Cup

One of my favorite sports is Football. However playing football in the real world is pretty hard considering many factors like finding at least 11 football players in our team, finding an opponent to play against, finding a football field, and figuring how to get everyone there. Due to all those issues, we found that playing virtual football as a team is certainly a easier thing to do. A few days ago, our football team assembled at my home, and we played Winning Eleven which is our favorite football game on the PS2.

In Winning Elevenwe usually compete in the World Cup(International Cup) and all of us would be playing in the same team. As being in the same football team, most of us have good knowledge on positioning issues. In this time around, we decided to create our players in Saudi Arabia and create arab sounding variations of our nicks. The last time we played this game, we were in Japan, and we made some seriously strange variations of our names. One example was like my little bro who was called Dan, and his character was called Danimaru.

After a number of matches we won the tournament and looking back at it I have to admit that stuff is something only homies would be proud of :P


The picture above is our team just strutting around before the award ceremony.


The captain of the team, Dan Shirani waiting to lift the trophy.


Lifting the trophy.


Starting the celebration. My character is just left of the captain. My largest contribution in the team was in the finals were after falling behind my 1 goal and 1 assist we managed to win the tournament :)


Who let the monkeys out?


Going for a lap of honor...


before partying throughout the night :P

Recommended Site: AweZoom - Flash and Music

During my younger years when I was composing music, I happen to like to listen to lesser known musicians from all around the world. One of the music scene that I was intrigued by was this MOD format. For those who don't know, the MOD format is the Amiga format for music. Amiga is one of the world's most popular computers during its days, and is known for its high quality audio and video production software. One of the formats used in music was called the MOD format or module format. What the MOD format was in essence was that in the MOD file, it contains samples of the music and also how it is played similar to the MIDI file. What the MOD file was famous for was the ability to provide high quality music (by using the in file sample) at a small size. It provides higher quality music than the MIDI format (as the sample in the file is usually higher quality than the synthesized sound of the MIDI soundcard), and is a fraction of the size of an actual sampled recording. As the MOD format being a fringe format, the format was never popularized in the PC users, and later with soundcards such as the SoundBlaster Live! having programmable wave tables (SoundFonts), the MOD file were of less relevance.

Many earlier online and computer musicians used this format, and I've managed to hear many great songs from many different artists who have been sharing their work through the Internet through this format. One of the artist that I remembered his music well was a DJ (or trackers) named Awesome (or Awezoom), in which I had the pleasure to happen to find one of his gems - For a New World, which is one of my favorite musical pieces up to this day.

Anyway, a few days ago, I decided to take a look around to see if any of these trackers I've listened to earlier had any web presence. During my searches, I found the website of the tracker Awesome at http://www.awezoom.com/. Do take some time to visit his site, it is pretty interesting :)

A Tribute to the Thai Postal System

I just wanted to dedicate this blog about how great our Thai Postal System is. During the last few years, I have usually ordered books that cannot be bought in Thailand. During the last few years and with over a dozen orders, I wanted to point out that the postal service between countries isn't as bad as many people suspect or usually assume it to be.

Let me begin by talking about some of the bad points. I had a few bad experiences with Amazon.com by using the default free shipping. The first case that I had a problem was about a broken CD along with one of the textbook I bought. In this case, since the book was a soft-cover, it was broken during the shipping as the box that was delivered had inadequate padding. In this case, I could easily reclaim the CD. On another bad case I had, the box just simply collapsed during the shipping, and practically destroyed the whole binding of another hardcover book. In this case, I asked for another copy, but since they ran out of copies in stock, Amazon actually gave us the book for free - which was an example of great customer service! My comments for people using Amazon.com is to go for the better shipping service. Though it is more expensive, I do want to point that it is certainly worth the time, trouble, and grief, though I comment that their customer service is good for an online service :)

Anyway, about other services, I don't really have to much to comment except for the last book I bought. The last book I bought, I extremely careless during the part I had to fill the mailing address that I actually forgot to fill in a few very important fields. Let me illustrate.

Suppose my home address(notice the addy is imaginary) was:
512 Clover Street Soi 51

I was so careless I dropped out the house number and the addy turned out to be
Clover Street Soi 51

By the time I managed to contact the customer service, they already had shipped the item. At that time I knew that I was probably about a few thousand baht poorer, but somehow beyond my wildest expectations, the Thai Postal dude managed to actually deliver the book directly to my door address. Now that is why I must dedicate this post to the Thai Postal System. Though many people had bad impressions about them, I do want to point that I could never been happier :)


What I figured was the default Amazon.com shipping isn't really that good due to packaging reasons. I found that Amazon.com usually tries to package books in the same box, and since some of them may be different sizes, some of the boxes

Strange Scenes

This snapshot was taken at my home. Strange isn't it?