Working in IT

[lurching]

You really believe that Sony's VR is NOT influenced by Oculus? That's pretty bold
How do you like working with it anyway?

And yeah I'll agree there's such a thing as past glory, but Carmack seems to be going strong still (oh and Sweeney too, perhaps graphics engine programming keeps you young?).

 

[Josh]

You really believe that Sony's VR is NOT influenced by Oculus? That's pretty bold
How do you like working with it anyway?

How do you know it's the Morpheus I'm working with? It's better than the DK2 I also have on my desk anyway, maybe not in terms of screen quality but the positional tracking is shit hot. Quite a lot of what makes it good is by NOT doing what Oculus have, I guess that counts as being influenced by them though haha.

It's fun to work with, but what really makes my life hard is also what will make or break VR headsets in the consumer markets. What we're learning through a lot of demo content creation is that the normal game dev rulebook is thrown out the window. Loads of things that we're used to doing just don't work on the headsets, I've got a whole sheet of bullet points printed out on my desk just for things that make a player feel sick, such as detaching camera control, dropping below 60fps. High noise textures don't work at all either, the eyes don't process the offsets well and you get a weird moire shimmer.

So, with 60fps, having to render everything twice, and loads of graphical restrictions that pretty much rule out rendering photorealistically, don't expect any 8k mega textures (although I still author at 4k to get lovely subpixel detail when we resize for the target) as mentioned above any time soon!

 

[felix]

Ooh, new thread.

I worked in IT (officially) for about 3 years back in 2001 onwards, as a "system implementation analyst". One of a team of 6, but it was mostly 2 of us doing all the work. This was part of a huge multimillion quid project creating a global company-wide system. I had to consult with the users, map out existing business processes, come up with better ones that could actually work with a system, document that shit, consult some more, document that shit, interact with Scandinavian developers who knew fuck all about our business, come to an agreement about what could be done, re-consult with the users & management, document that shit, design the front end of the system and its intended functionality, document that shit, test the modules as they arrived, document fucking endless bugs, fly to Scandinavia every other week for a week and sit on their shoulders, give presentations to the MD and VPs etc. about how wonderful it all is, test more bits, find more bugs, document that shit, re-consult with users & management, plead for more money for last-minute changes, test those changes, design a front-end menu screen on a sheet of A4 the day before we went live (no shit), and after that, write half the online help documentation.

After that, it was a simple job of visiting sites in the UK and US as they went live, kicking the shitty system into submission until it worked, training all the users, documenting that shit, and then being told that our external clients had changed their mind, deciding not to go with us (but thanks for all the good ideas), and the project was cancelled.

During all that, I was unofficial level 1 desktop & network support for about 200 boxes, half the time telling the actual IT guys how to do stuff.

Never. fucking. again.

P.S. Our main client's site in Louisiana was WIPED OUT by Hurricane Katrina the year after, and as far as I was concerned they could go fuck themselves. :D

 

[BigG]

So your saying you documented a lot of shit then?

 

[felix]

Literally, yes. :D

Addendum:

A few years before that, I worked as a grunt in a warehouse for the same company. Not an IT person, except at home. We used to use about 6 paper folders to book everything in. Which was complete shit, took ages to find anything, and there used to be queues at each folder with people waiting to book things in. (Which resulted in many things NOT being booked in.) 8)

I created a reasonably simple Access database to replace all that shit. At home, in my own time. Showed it to my boss, who said to roll it out ASAP. It worked, everyone loved it, you could search for stuff instantly, no more queues, you could run reports for management at the click of a button (rather than photocopying reams of paper and manually counting stuff every week), and it ended up getting rolled out at other bases across the UK too.

That's why I got seconded to IT for that project above. And I still used to get support calls from IT years after I left the company, because they couldn't figure out how to back up a fucking Access DB which was on their own server, despite all my idiot-proof documentation.

I sometimes wonder if that little DB is still going. :D

 

[F.U.B.A.R.]

I used to work in a small test lab for a mobile phone company, but spent a significant amount of time maintaining and updating our clunky old access database because nobody on the IT department had a clue. Also, when Windows 3 on our main srandalone test PC decided to keel over and die one day, it was down to me to use DOS to copy all the important test parameters onto floppy and transfer to another machine because again, IT didn't have a clue. In fact, every time something when tits up with our machines we made a point of NOT calling IT because they usually made things even worse..