Quantum-thoughtsBarefoot software engineer in pants!

Wow time really flies when you’re … um, reading books and going to the gym more often?

Ok so I have been doing some programming on Pioneer; fixed up the solutions & projects for VS 2012 & 2013 Preview (I could do VS2010 too but am not touching 2008!) to deal with latest changes, fixed the GLEW changes to get it all building and compiling and then took up the Oculus Rift integration again – that’s a bit hairy that stuff since I’m having to modify a LOT of stuff in Pioneers rendering process.

Anyway the result so far is the following;

• distortion shader working,
• head tracking working,
• rendering two cameras to a framebuffer working.

So all done huh? Nope, not by a long shot.

There’s a lot of other stuff that needs to be done to get a 3D projection + FOV + view offsets for each eye and a few other bits before we actually get a working 3D view and I haven’t worked through all of that yet since I’ve been busy with time consuming other stuff.

Unexpectedly, probably only to me, some of it is just stuff that didn’t used to take much time at all but is now quite time consuming.

Take going to the gym, this is what it used to work out like:

• Leave work & walk to gym (11 mins)
• Get changed (3-ish mins)
• Exercise (30 mins)
• Shower and get dressed (10-ish mins)
• Hurry back to work stopping at Tescos (15 mins)

I think that in truth that used to usually take about 1 hour and 15 minutes, sometimes longer if we’d been doing leg work and I couldn’t walk as fast on the way back. Now however I’m coming in from Beeston which entails an extra train journey, and because I don’t choose when the trains run I have to catch them based on which one gets me there _before_ my session with my personal trainer. This means that I’m getting in quite a bit earlier, but that I’m travelling for much longer and due to the scheduling granularity of the trains… well, I left the house at 11:30am and got home today at 15:00pm just to do a 30 minute session. I could have gotten home earlier today, but decided that since I’d be missing one train anyway I got a haircut (I’m male, so if it takes more than 10 minutes to cut my hair then something is wrong). So I could have shaved 30 minutes off that (Train schedule) but even so it’s around the 3 hour mark to go to the gym just once.

Everything has scaled similarly though, popping out to get milk was to the nearby Tesco Express and less than 10 minutes but now involves walking across Beeston to the big 24 hour Tescos (or further for Sainsburys) because that’s the nearest one that does the Lactofree stuff. I’ve also been getting to the doctors (knee injury and anxiety attack stuff), dentists (keep flossing!!!) and the talking therapy place for an assessment (I’m not mad, might want to work on my confidence in a couple of months – quitting was the right thing to do apparently!).

At first I was worried about how this was going ot impact on two of my stated goals from the previous post:

1. Work through some UDK tutorials – the new job is on Unreal Engine 4 so I think getting a footing in the tech’ will be good for me,
2. Work through Frank D Luna’s D3D 11 tutorials but convert them to OpenGL 4.0 – Been meaning to do this for a while, it’s a good ramp up and parallels these SlimDX posts,

…but screw that, I’ve really really really (emphasis!!!) needed this downtime to get myself sorted and simply running into yet more challenging stuff and then freaking out about that wasn’t going to help anyone least of all me.

My plans haven’t changed, I still want to dive into the UDK stuff – I have it all installed and a selection of tutorials ready, I’ve just pushed the start of it back until this weekend or Monday. That takes the pressure off me for doing the Pioneer Oculus Rift integration which is acting like a pressure valve and gentle reentry into doing some coding again for fun.

Now though I’m going to go and tidy up downstairs before Danni gets home. She’s started at a secondment to a new primary school which is in Special Measures. It’s taking a lot of her time and mental capacity, everyone there is under tremendous pressure, so I’m trying to suck less at the housework. Of course I come from a position of sucking _utterly_ to begin with but I am getting less awful :)

Andy

Well this should probably be another post about Pioneer and it’s terrain generation / rendering, instead that’s all taken a back seat as things have gone steadily more wrong at Crytek and I’ve finally quit.

I wish I could put my finger on the “what” of went wrong but I’ve struggled to do so.

The effects however are much easier to list:

• anxiety
• panic attacks
• no concentration at all
• some truly terrible code (embarrasingly bad at times)
• really struggling to implement even basic algorithms because of all the above

I finally got some medication to control the panic attacks and have been referred for other help but suffice to say that whatever the combination of things wrong with my time at Crytek it simply didn’t matter anymore, I had to get out.

Seeing that things were not right I started looking for something else and decided that I had enough strong leads – and with one offer on the table already – it was simply time to get out.

Friday 30th August was my last day and for that last week I didn’t need to take the anti-panic-attack medication once during the proceeding week.

I felt much better, I felt enthusiastic again, I had energy, I even started doing some coding at home and on Pioneer after months of twiddling with projects and solution updates.

I accepted the offer I’d had, it’s a work from home role and I’ll discuss it in another post in the future, that starts on the 30th September so I have a bit of a break to get better again.

To that end I’m going to do a few things:

1. Work through some UDK tutorials – the new job is on Unreal Engine 4 so I think getting a footing in the tech’ will be good for me,
2. Work through Frank D Luna’s D3D 11 tutorials but convert them to OpenGL 4.0 – Been meaning to do this for a while, it’s a good ramp up and parallels these SlimDX posts,
3. Get back to doing Pioneer coding – I have a massive to do list for this,
4. Cycle around the nature reserve more and in town when I go during the day,
5. Keep going to the gym and eating healthily.

That’s a lot of things but I’m not going to fit them all into a month :D these are things I’ll simply be starting in this month, and taking slowly so as not to get overwhelmed. I suspect I’ll stop the UDK ones once I’m up to speed at the new job and I’ll be flexible with myself about all of the above, doing more or less as I see fit and when I feel fit.

Right now… off out for Sunday lunch with Danni and other friends :)

More “recovery” don’t ya know!

Yeti

PS: I should probably on reflection, add that Crytek isn’t a bad place to work, far from it, lots of people seem to really like it. All of the above is solely how *I* have found it.