SharkOne

Appartement

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:18:01 -0700

IMAGE_037

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:07:03 -0700

Montreal customs

One week later

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:04:11 -0700

Hi everyone! No I'm not dead, yes I'm still alive and kicking! It's 20:11 and I' starting this post on my phone while waiting for the subway in station Laurier. So what's new for me here in Montreal since the last time I wrote something here... I had nice last week at work, still hard but it's becoming enjoyable. The deadlines are getting closer and closer and there is still a lot of work to do (fortunately, not only for me ;p). Last week-end was also very nice. I met David's friend Antoine who's also an ex Epitech student (promo 2005). Very cool guy. We went to his place on friday night and it was great to finally be able to chat with some french people ! On the saturday I did nothing very interesting apart from finishing watching the anime Death Note (which by the way is now in my top 3 anime list). On sunday, I went to the movies and watched The Bourne Ultimatum. I already like the first two episodes and I think that this one might actually be the best. I then decided, as the weather was sunny, to go and check the famous "piknic electronik" in the Parc Jean Drapeau. It's amazing to see so many people enjoying electronic music in broad daylight, every sunday of the summer. I might add some pics and videos when I get home later. I then left to join David and Antoine to kick some balls in a little park near David's place (very very nice place by the way, but at the very end of Mont-Royal, which is very very far from place ;). I just couldn't wait the buses to get back home, totally exhausted, so I obviously took a taxi. And finally today, at work. I'm fairly happy of my work, I managed to close some nasty bugs, and I finally feel I'm not totally lost ;) This week is going to be pretty tough with probably a lot of overtime before next week's code freeze. On a personal side, I think I'm liking Montreal more and more. The life alone is new for me, and it's not easy everyday, even more when you don't really where everything is and can be bought. But I'm trying my best ;) Having some friends around sure helps a lot ! Next stop is my station, Guy-Concordia. I'll finish this post at home. Bye. Back again, damn Bluetooth which didn't want to work, and damn Windows Mobile 6 which saved my Word file using the shitty Word 2007 format (.docx), had to get a converter for my laptop. Well sorry, I wanted to post some pics and vids but unfortunately Bluetooth seems to hate me today refuse to send them to my laptop. I should be working better with Mac OS X but I don't want to reboot now. I'll post them later ! Bye bye everybody ! See you soon !

I hate bones

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:04:17 -0700

20:50, back from work, thanks Ubisoft for the diner. Ok I just wanted to do a quick post about my troubles at work today. I spent my whole day trying to figure out a way to fix a glitch, pretty serious one actually. As I already told you, I'm working on the Horse behavior. I got to fix a nasty bug concerning the horse and its rider. As you would have imagined, when mounting on the horse, the player loses control of the main character and now controls the horse itself. The main character is "just" put on top of the horse and everything should be fine. But I found out that the character is not directly linked / tied to the horse, it's being manually replaced on the saddle using the saddle bone. The problem is that the rider seems to be adjusted BEFORE updating the full skeleton of the horse, which means that when the the code responsible for replacing the rider requests the position of the saddle bone, it seems to receive the position of the bone OF THE PREVIOUS frame... Let's try to put it in a simpler way (for my mom :p). The rider is always late behing the horse. When the framerate is high (the game is running perfectly smoothly), the difference of position of the saddle between two frames is very short, you can't really that the rider is late. But when the framerate drops even a little, this difference starts to become very noticeable and in the worst cases the rider can actually be seen sitting on the butt of the horse, or even worse, next to the horse when turning ! Damn I hate bone physics and this kind of stuff... I hope I'll be able to find a way to hack that bug away tomorrow. See you all. Here's something to end this post on a lighter note:

First week over

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 17:49:18 -0700

Hello fellow readers, it's 17:02 right now and I just got back from a little "magasinage" (shopping). So let me start from where I left off a few days ago. Thursday, my first pretty nice day at work. It was hard, but I managed to fix some bugs which is good for your nerves :) No very big stuff, but always hard to pinpoint. I'm working on the Horse behavior, controls and of course bug fixing :) I'm not (at least right now) developing any new features (anyway I doubt any new feature will be developed at all, since we're approaching the beta phase). First check-in in the Perforce source control :) Friday was pretty much the same at work so I guess I'll skip that part. After work I gathered with my friend David and it was really cool to spend some time with someone I know. We went to a pretty nice little "creperie" restaurant and then went for a drink with some of his colleagues in a bar called "Edgar Hypertaverne". Pretty neat. After that we walked a bit (half hour I guess) and joined a little "party quebecoise" in the house of one of David's colleagues (David is working on the Lost game). Very fun, hanging out with some locals, about the same age as me. We left at around 1:30 and David took me to a club nearby called "Le salon Daome". Nice too, it's a small club held in a big condo on the second floor of one of these typical 2 floors building they have here. The music was ok ("pas pire" as they would say here), Detroit style house music mostly, not very uplifting but nice to move a bit (still can't wait for Boys Noize in September for some real action!). The clubs work a bit differently than in France. Apparently the clubs close at 3:00. You can then go to some other places for the "After" (in France the Afters are really starting at around 6:00). As we were already tired we decided to leave at something like 2:45 and headed back home. Taxi powered. By the way, I think I'm now pretty decent at using the public transports here. I now know the prices, a few bus and metro lines. I'll finally be able to use a weekly card on Monday (it was too late in the month to buy a monthly card, and also too late in the week for a weekly one). The single ticket is expensive: 2.75$. I will save a lot of money by using a prepaid card. So this first night out in Montreal was a nice one. I really enjoyed it and I'm looking for more now. I went to bed at around 4:00 and finally got some sleep after this hard week. Saturday was nice too. I went to the "Parc La Fontaine" (a bit far from my place, but easily doable using the bus) to (try to) play football with David and his colleagues. The sun was burning, the air was hot. I died after about 15 minutes of play, and my Zidane shirt of course didn't help at all :) I think I hadn't run for about a year and damn, this was hard ! Like I already said before, muscles sucks. They're useless if you don't practice everyday :) In the evening I was invited by my friend Laurent for dinner at his place. What a learned during the evening was that it was actually it's birthday ! Too bad, I didn't bring any present. Anyway, Laurent moved to Montreal a few months ago with his girlfriend Gaelle. Their place is really nice although not totally furnished yet. The "party" was really fun. I met some cool people and I discovered that apparently the best Vodka in the world is a French one and it's true that it was veerryy smooth :). Can't remember the name though. Today sunday, I had to go to work to do some overtime (not that much: 10:00 to 15:00). I then came back and decided to do some "magasinage" as I needed some stuff for the appartment. I walked along the Ste Catherine Street, wandering pretty much everywhere. The nice sun and the music in my ears... I love that (I was listening to Digitalism - Live at Essential Mix from last July and oh my god this was so good). I came across one of my favorite brand/shop, FCUK and bought a new pair of shorts and a cool shirt. I also bought a long network cable at Future Shop, I haven't tested it yet but I guess it should be long enough for me to have Internet access in my bed :) And finally, Pharmaprix, which as its name suggests is a place where you can bind meds, but I only needed some deo spray, detergent, corn flakes, body wash... Yes theses "pharmacies" are a lot more like supermarket actually. And now here I am in my place, typing this blog post. Pretty happy to finally settle down. I guess tonight I'll geek a little by watching some TV shows like Death Note, a very cool Anime I'm currently watching. Bye bye everyone and in order to conclude the longest post ever of this blog, the now usual fun bonus:

First two real days at work

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:53:41 -0700

Hello there, It's 20:24 when I'm starting this blog post and I just got back home. But first let me tell you a bit about yesterday. Yesterday was pretty much "powerless" day. I mean, pretty much everything I tried to do failed miserably. It all started in the morning when I finally got my own card allowing to enter the studio (the Montreal studio is filled with various gates and doors which can only be open using a badge). I got it but of course it didn't work. I had to request another one. During my wandering, I ran into my friend David a.k.a RamOurs from school ! Pure luck since I just walked by this office and he yelled at me "Shark!". I was really surprised because nearly nobody knows my nickname here :) I'm very glad I found him ! On the work side, I finally managed to get up and running (but slowly, can you imagine that my Bi-Xeon 3.2 GHz, 3 Gb of Ram, 7800 GS could deliver such slow framerate on debug builds ?) but every bug I tried to track down seemed to get scared of me and decided to hide itself. It can be really frustrating when you see the bugs assigned to you just pile up on Jira and you can't seem to be able to do anything about it. I got really nervous and angry and decided to leave early as I wanted to visit a shop I had already spotted on the Internet before coming : Moog Audio. It's located down on St Laurent not that far from Ubisoft but pretty far at the same time. I guess it's something like 2 km since I suspect the numbers on the street to represent distance (1 km between 1 and 1000, if someone could confirm that ?). It's pretty nice to walk as the weather is pretty nice, but it's very true that everything is far from everything. No wonder a lot of people use bicycles to move in the city. I got to the shop and bought what I needed (a USB MIDI interface to hook up my Korg Electribe MX-1 to my laptop. I got back home, tried to hook everything up, but unfortunately, the Korg didn't light up. Two options here, it could have been damaged from the flight (I hope not, it was tightly packaged between my shirts :), or it's just the voltage stuff (my charger only says it can support 220V and it's 110V here) and damnit I could have checked that in France :/ That would explain why the screen lights up but stay blank, not enough voltage. Anyway, it's pretty useless now... I might try to get a 110V charger but I guess it's expensive... I went down and grabbed a quick Subway "sous-marin" (sandwich) and of course got overwhelmed by all the various options there. You have to choose your bread including its size, your meat, the vegetables, the toasting... But it's decent. One bad thing about my appartment is that the Internet plug is near the table, which is very far from the bed. I wish I could either watch TV, or browse the Internet in bed... That's why, totally bored, with nobody on the Internet for me cause of the time difference and nothing really worth staying up on TV, I went to bed at 22:00. What a shame... Well I initially to do a two-day post, but I'm getting tired of typing :) That's all for today folks, but just to tease you a little, today was a decent day. I managed to do some stuff at work so I'm in a better state of mind now. And the week-end is coming and I got some plans so that should be pretty cool. Thanks for reading this huge post. Here's the fun bonus, nothing new and related to this post, but I just saw it today:

One of the longest days of my life (continued)

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:46:15 -0700

Ok ok ok, back from my first day. I met my new collegues of the Assassin's Creed team today, very cool people (I even found future partners to play both Quake 3 and Call of Duty 2 !). I had forgotten how painful it can be to get to work on a big project during the last months. Enormous code base, huge datasets, and each time a whole new environment to setup and use. I spent my day getting latest versions, trying to build the various tools... I left at 20:30 and I'm still not able to run the game on PC and put breakpoints in the code... Somehow it seems everything fails for me, but like I said it's always the case when you get parachuted right in the middle of a work-in-progress project and have to setup your workflow. Let's hope I'll finally be able to do some real work tomorrow. Who would have thought that making video games required so many programs running at once... (Sorry can't elaborate more, you know what they say about NDA :) To reassure my mom over there about my eating, I'm eating well :) I went to the restaurant at launch after running by pure luck on my friend Laurent a.k.a Sanx (founder of Epidemic, EPITA demoscene association, back in my school days...) who's been living and working in Montreal for a few months now. And as I stayed a bit late, I decided to enjoy the free dinner paid by Ubisoft for overtimers (I picked the Japanese restaurant, damn I just could eat sushis everyday !). It's very convenient not having to cook :) And if I ever get hungry while at home, there's always the "depanneur" (grocery store, epicerie) right at the entry of my building :) Tomorrow I will try to get out earlier, probably something like 18h00 19h00 to try to figure out this bus stuff, because paying about 10$ for a taxi ride twice a day isn't really cheap... That's all for today I guess. I'll just end with a quick bonus. Remember the Electromind festival in Montpellier I told many people about ? I unfortunately couldn't make it there :( But luckily for me, Boys Noize will be in Montreal the 13th of september for his new album (Oi Oi Oi) release party, can't wait to see him perform live, just like here at Montpellier:

One of the longest days of my life

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:26:06 -0700

Hello everyone ! I finally made it ! I'm finally in my apartment in Montreal, it's 20:51 local time which means something like 2:00 in Paris and I'm pretty tired. I could easily name this day "the waiting day". Everything started just as planned, I arrived pretty early at the Charles De Gaulle airport (thanks to my friend Johnny and his new Porsche Twingo!). I quickly found where to do the check-in and drop my luggage and I got in the line. After waiting for something like 20 min, unfortunately someone forgot a bag somewhere in the terminal --> potential bomb alert -> everybody out !! I was the next in line damnit !! After another 20 min wait outside (and under the rain), time to get back in line, 15 min later, check-in done. I then walked in the international zone, and took a VERY quick walk in the only duty free shop (actually, the terminal 3 of this airport is pretty much a hangar, for all the cheap companies), I waited another 40 min for the boarding. I got in the plane at 13:40 and it took off as planned at 14:20. The 7h40 flight went pretty well even if Air Transat is a cheap canadian company with a website looking just like the Oceanic Airlines website (the company of the plane which crashed on the island of Lost). Too bad I couldn't fly with Air France (twice the price) to watch movies on a tiny screen just on the seat in front of me... We landed a 16:00 local time and the waiting just went on and on. Guess what I discovered, when walking to the customs area : Yeah right, 1h30 just walking in lanes is very good for your mental health...or not. Let's not forget that I also had to go the Immigration service to request my "permis de travail" (which allows me to work here in Canada), another 30 min... I'm getting pretty tired just typing about waiting, so let's cut the crap. I finally got out of the airport at something like 19:00 local time (3h after landing) and headed downtown (on Sherbrooke East) in a cab to get the keys of my appartment. No problems there, and I decided to walk to go there. It was nice to walk on Sherbrooke again (my loved Sofitel is still there !), but a little tiring because of the sucky sidewalks and my crappy rolling luggage. My apparement is in Rue Guy, pretty nice neighborhood, 2 blocks away from Rue Crescent and all the bars and clubs but a bit far from Ubisoft. Tomorrow morning I think I'll take a cab to make sure I'll be on time for work but I'll have to figure out how to go there by bus if I don't want to blow all my money on cabs :) I got a very nice Internet connection here (downloading at something like 900kB/s and uploading at 110kB/s), too bad the ping to France is 100ms, I won't be able to play Quake with my french buddies :) Anyway, here's a quick walkthrough of the appartement (sorry for the quality, crappy camera on my phone) : By the way, my phone is not working and I don't know why, that sucks, it used to work last time I came here. Gotta check if Orange removed the International/Roaming option without telling me grrrr... Ok that's all for today folks. I'll try to update this blog as often as possible, but as I'll be staying for two months, don't expect everyday updates :) Bye bye!

File New Project

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:49:36 -0700

Hello everyone. I will very soon be leaving for Montreal, Canada for something like two months, working in the Ubisoft Montreal studio (more infos soon). I decided I should get some kind of blog to keep in touch with everyone back in France, post photos, videos and stuff. This is where this Virb page comes into play! Virb seems like a very cool Myspace-like platform, only ten times cooler, prettier, smarter... I hope I will have interesting things to show you, tiny exciting bits of my life to come. Just come back regularly to check it out! You can also use the RSS feed available here. Stay tuned!