Stumbling Toward 'Awesomeness'

I can’t remember the last time I had a new year’s resolution. But this year I decided to go for it.

A friend and I were joking that we increasingly feel like Producers: how we spend a large chunk of our time just making sure that things are moving. That a meeting has action items, or minutes. That tasks are scoped, their dependencies tracked, have resources assigned, or have dates on a calendar. That a process has proper gates to allow for course correction, etc. I now spend a majority of my time writing emails, attending meetings, or talking at desks.

Death by Mail

But what is crippling is the emails. I feel I have made a career out of always trying to be helpful, but I was surprised how easily I reply to anything someone sends me. And how willing people are to just ‘go hunting with a shotgun’ and mail 15 others instead of trying to have a discussion with the right person. Many of the mails I saw myself spending time on were threads involving many people and important topics, I felt the need to be involved, but we rarely seemed to come to solid decisions -just running commentary. These mails often had more than 10 people added in CC ‘for awareness’, but then those people feel the need to contribute their opinion in some way.

It turned the simplest discussion a raucous ball of noise, which often then required the creation of a meeting to make a decision on how to progress.

The meetings were more successful, I think in part to the fact that only the people who needed to be involved in the decision were invited. Unfortunately, I had often spent time on the mail thread to avoid the need for a meeting, only to find myself reiterating my sentiments in a meeting the next day.

I looked for a day where I wrote the least number of mails, the number was ~35, and it was a recent sick day when I had stayed home.

Small Adjustment, Big Victory

So I decided to pull myself out of this, after all it is somewhat self-induced. Of all the options, the best seemed to limit myself to 10 work emails a day. All other communication would be in person, in meetings, or on the phone.

I didn’t think this would have the impact it did.

From this, other things started to fall in place. I really disliked how I would increasingly feel like standard operating procedure was constantly looking for dropped balls. I need to let dependencies and other departments drop their balls, and hope that they will learn from it, or hope that someone else is watching. In essence, trust people more, and as a by product: spend more time being a Director and less a Producer.

10 emails a day forced me to really choose what email discussions I want to be involved with carefully. I was not respecting my own time, and this arbitrary rule forced me to do that. As a result, it allows me to spend more time on Art Technology initiatives, looking at the project, talking with my team, and giving proper direction.

I can’t reject meeting invites, or ignore mails, but this little adjustment has really helped me more than I thought it would.

I can finally talk about something I have been working on in the past two years.  One of the reasons I returned to Crytek was to push the use of game engines in linear content creation like film and television. On Avatar I saw how much time and effort went into layout, blocking, virtual sets, etc. The tools were archaic, the feedback loop was abysmal at times. In games we have to layout massive levels that people can roam through for 8-15 hours or more and CryEngine’s tools are some of the best for that.

I have been working as Product Manager with a small team of great guys, where I basically define the goals and backlog. It’s thrilling to finally get to see things like Catmull-Clark subd in runtime, or multi-channel EXR output, or Alembic support. It’s been really fun to define what the product is and prioritize features largely without external dependencies or politics, I thank Crytek for trusting me to helm such a project.

We had a live demo kiosk at GDC; check out the Cinema Sandbox Website for more info.

I will be speaking at FMX about CineBox and the whole idea of using game engines for previs and virtual production: The Long Road to Film / Game Convergence

Perforce is a wily beast. A lot of companies use it, but I feel few outside of the IT department really have to deal with it much. As I work myself deeper and deeper into the damp hole that is asset validation, I have really been writing a lot of python to deal with certain issues; but always scripts that work from the outside.

Perforce has a system that allows you to write scripts that are run, server side, when any number of events are triggered. You can use many scripting languages, but I will only touch on Python.

Test Environment

To follow along here, you should set up a test environment. Perforce is freely downloadable, and free to use with 2 users. Of course you are going to need python, and p4python. So get your server running and add two users, a user and an administrator.

Your First Trigger

Let’s create the simplest python script. It will be a submit trigger that says ‘Hello World’ then passes or fails. If it passes, the item will be checked in to perforce, if it fails, it will not. exiting while returning a ’1′ is considered a fail, ’0′ a pass.

print 'Hello World!'
print 'No checkin for you!'
sys.exit(1)

Ok, so save this file as hello_trigger.py. Now go to a command line and enter ‘p4 triggers’ this will open a text document, edit that document to point to your trigger, like so (but point to the location of your script on disk):

Triggers:
	hello_trigger change-submit //depot/... "python X:/projects/2010/p4/hello_trigger.py"

Close/save the trigger TMP file, you should see ‘Triggers saved.’ echo’d at the prompt. Now, when we try to submit a file to the depot, we will get this:

So: awesome, you just DENIED your first check-in!

Connecting to Perforce from Inside a Trigger

So we are now denying check-ins, but let’s try to do some other things, let’s connect to perforce from inside a trigger.

from P4 import P4, P4Exception
 
p4 = P4()
 
try:
	#use whatever your admin l/p was
	#this isn't the safest, but it works at this beginner level
	p4.user = "admin"
	p4.password = "admin"
	p4.port = "1666"
	p4.connect()
	info = p4.run("info")
	print info
	sys.exit(1)
 
#this will return any errors
except P4Exception:
	for e in p4.errors: print e
	sys.exit(1)

So now when you try to submit a file to depot you will get this:

Passing Info to the Trigger

Now we are running triggers, accepting or denying checkins, but we really don’t know much about them. Let’s try to get enough info to where we could make a decision about whether or not we want the file to pass validation. Let’s make another python trigger, trigger_test.py, and let’s query something from the perforce server in the submit trigger. To do this we need to edit our trigger file like so:

Triggers:
	test change-submit //depot/... "python X:/projects/2010/p4/test_trigger.py %user% %changelist%"

This will pass the user and changelist number into the python script as an arg, the same way dragging/dropping passed args to python in my previous example. So let’s set that up, save the script from before as ‘test_trigger.py’ as shown above, and add the following:

import sys
from P4 import P4, P4Exception
 
p4 = P4()
describe = []
 
try:
	p4.user = "admin"
	p4.password = "admin"
	p4.port = "1666"
	p4.connect()
 
except P4Exception:
	for e in p4.errors: print e
	sys.exit(1)
 
print str(sys.argv)
describe = p4.run('describe',sys.argv[2])
print str(describe)
 
p4.disconnect()
sys.exit(1)

So, as you can see, it has returned the user and changelist number:

However, for this changelist to be useful, we query p4, asking the server to describe the changelist. This returns a lot of information about the changelist.

Where to Go From here

The few simple things shown here really give you the tools to do many more things. Here are some examples of triggers that can be  created with the know-how above:

• Deny check-ins of a certain filetype (like deny compiled source files/assets)
• Deny check-ins whose hash digest matches an existing file on the server
• Deny/allow a certain type of file check-in from a user in a certain group
• Email a lead any time a file in a certain folder is updated

Did you find this helpful? What creative triggers have you written?

I have gotten back into some pyqt in my spare time, just because it’s what I used on a daily basis at the last place I worked at. However, I had trouble getting it to run in my text editor of choice. (SciTE)

I couldn’t find a solution with like 45 minutes of googling. When trying to import PyQt4 it would give me a dll error, but I could paste the code into IDLE and it would execute fine. I found a solution by editing the python preferences of SciTE. I noticed that it wasn’t running python scripts the way IDLE was, but compiling them (?). I edited the last line to just run the script, and viola! It worked.

Find this line (usually the last):

command.1.*.py=python -c "import py_compile; py_compile.compile(r'$(FilePath)')"

And change it to:

command.1.*.py=python "(r'$(FilePath)')"

I don’t really know if this messes anything else up, but it does allow the PyQt4 libs to load and do their thing.

Size Matters.

Theaters presenting Avatar in 2D and Real3D, show a cropped 2.35:1 version, while 3D IMAX shows the original work at 1.85:1. You might not think that this matters, but you are losing a lot of the image in the crop. If you want to see it as the artists/director intended it looks like IMAX 3D is your only option.