This week has been crazy and busy.
I'm finally making time to work on my game! :P
I just finished signing up for my classes for Spring '09! :D
I have 4 registered and I'm trying to get into 1 that I don't have the prerequisites for.
I filled out all the necessary paperwork for it, unfortunately they don't process that until the week after the semester's started. :\
Oh well, if I don't get it then I only have 4 classes. :P
Lotsa time to get stuff done with only 4 classes (non-summer semester). :D
Oh, and when I come home and turn on my computer sometimes, my screen saver of my girlfriend's pictures pops up and I realize how much I miss her.
I think I'll throw a few of them on my laptop so I won't forget as easily. :D
Goodnight!
Friday, October 17, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
My first post
I've tried blogging before. I used a xanga back in junior high (no use looking for it, it's deleted!).
I thought I might try again. I know that blogging is like exercising or anything else that happens over time in the sense that you can regret not doing it rather than doing it down the road, when there's nothing you can do to change it.
So I'll try this, if not for me then for my parents and my girlfriend so they can know the daily happenings in my life at DigiPen learning to be a game programmer.
Today was pretty good!
Physics was especially boring today due to it being at 9:00am and my lack of motivation in the subject. I like physics, don't get me wrong, but I don't think I agree with my teacher's style of teaching. Either way, it's easier on my hand since I don't really have to take notes (everything he covers, except some specifics, is in the book) and all that hard writing (literally, I push too hard when I write) has finally caught up to me and my left hand is paying for it!
After class I went to my game project class and was working on my Mead assignment. For those of you who don't know who Mead is, he's a computer science teacher at DigiPen who teaches the basics of programming to us. After you have him, you know your stuff, but that only furthers the point that he does not go easy on you. Anyway, I was working on that today in GAM and was "interrupted" by a producer's meeting. Those are nice since you get to ask the instructor and the other producers of the teams questions but today I didn't want to go. I'm glad I did though because I got a good idea of where the other teams' games were at. My team consists of two people who worked over the summer on the engine and two that didn't. I'm part of the two that didn't, and the two that did have been "cleaning as they go" trying to make content creation for the game as easy as possible. It's a good goal to have your engine and your game be compeltely seperate, although it doesn't show much visual progress for quite a while. Hearing that the other teams were getting ahead in terms of visuals and physics (what I should be working on :P) kind of bummed me out but made me appreciate the work half my team is putting into the engine to make second semester as easy as possible for the game.
After GAM, I ate sausage pasta and headed to Pascal (DigiPen's largest lab) and worked on Mead (that's how we at DigiPen refer to working, by the subject or the professor if the professor is widely known (or whichever's easier to say)). I made some progress but not much. I clearly understand what I'm supposed to (and have done! :D) do now and I thank my friend Brian for that completely. He and I also got all the necessary paperwork filled out so that we could take a class on quaternions (not sure what they are but that's why I'm taking a class on them, right?) without having the prerequisite for that class. The professor doesn't think that the "necessary" prerequisite is needed for the class (since he teaches it) and waived the course for us. I might take the prerequisite class later, it's about curves and surfaces, but with all the applications of quaternions in physics, I'm glad I'm taking it.
After Nick and Sean got out of their math class (Brian, Nick, and Sean are on my team, and I live with Sean) we headed to Curie since Pascal was filling up with freshmen who were getting ready to learn some low-level electronics (CS100). Curie is nice, it's way out of the way, but it's nice. It was a little warm in there today and I was kind of grumpy since I wanted to wait to eat until we could head to Bach (my team's favorite room, it's small and nobody knows about it (those who do know about it think it's a Computer Engineering lab and don't even try to go in it)) so I worked on Mead some more. Once again, i made the assignment a lot harder than it should have been. The assignment is to program a recursive function (a function that calls itself over and over until a condition has been met, which at that point it "unwinds" and returns the result) for a knight from chess to move around a NxN sized chess board (NxN specifying any size) and touch every square only once. It's a pretty popular algorithm/problem and it's called The Knight's Tour. There's two ways of doing it, one is to brute force your way and just try a path until you realize it's a dead end (in terms of not completing the board but not being able to move) and backtrack as needed. The other is the smarter method (the one I've had lots of trouble on in terms of how to do it nicely) where you visit the squares with the least amount of paths leading to them (corners can only be reached by 2 squares, the middle squares can be reached by 8, etc...) and if you're caught with two squares that have the same amount of paths leading to them, you choose the square that's furthest from the center of the board (since the squares in the center are easier to get to than the ones further out). That took me so long. I was doing some crazy stuff, sorting and resorting and generically hacking the code to work. Brian, being the programming prodigy that he is, just told me that when I'm comparing two different moves the knight can take (and when I make my list of moves to make), compare them to their lowest levels. That means, first see if the move is on the board (if you're in the upper left corner, you can't really move left or up), compare the amount of ways you can get to each square, and if that's equal then compare the distance from the center of the board. If THAT'S equal, then choose the lowest #'d move.
|0|3|0|2|0|
|4|0|0|0|1|
|0|0|K|0|0|
|5|0|0|0|8|
|0|6|0|7|0|
With the # being the number of the move, as shown above (ASCII art FTW!).
Once Bach opened up, we moved in there, and I ate chicken chow mien (I love you mom! :D) while listening to Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" (thank you David!) on tape. I'm on the last book and I really like that series. I hope it ends well! :S
After eating, and much horsing around, I finally finished my smart method of my programming assignment (like always, the end result is MUCH simpler and MUCH cleaner than my original idea). I don't want to go into too much detail about the horseplay, except that I found an unopened Butterfinger in the trash in Curie while I was throwing something away so I took that and split it with Sean, because it's late and I've said too much already.
Then I came home, got a text from my lovely Emma, packed for tomorrow, started talking, and started this blog, and now I'm done for the day!
Good day.
I thought I might try again. I know that blogging is like exercising or anything else that happens over time in the sense that you can regret not doing it rather than doing it down the road, when there's nothing you can do to change it.
So I'll try this, if not for me then for my parents and my girlfriend so they can know the daily happenings in my life at DigiPen learning to be a game programmer.
Today was pretty good!
Physics was especially boring today due to it being at 9:00am and my lack of motivation in the subject. I like physics, don't get me wrong, but I don't think I agree with my teacher's style of teaching. Either way, it's easier on my hand since I don't really have to take notes (everything he covers, except some specifics, is in the book) and all that hard writing (literally, I push too hard when I write) has finally caught up to me and my left hand is paying for it!
After class I went to my game project class and was working on my Mead assignment. For those of you who don't know who Mead is, he's a computer science teacher at DigiPen who teaches the basics of programming to us. After you have him, you know your stuff, but that only furthers the point that he does not go easy on you. Anyway, I was working on that today in GAM and was "interrupted" by a producer's meeting. Those are nice since you get to ask the instructor and the other producers of the teams questions but today I didn't want to go. I'm glad I did though because I got a good idea of where the other teams' games were at. My team consists of two people who worked over the summer on the engine and two that didn't. I'm part of the two that didn't, and the two that did have been "cleaning as they go" trying to make content creation for the game as easy as possible. It's a good goal to have your engine and your game be compeltely seperate, although it doesn't show much visual progress for quite a while. Hearing that the other teams were getting ahead in terms of visuals and physics (what I should be working on :P) kind of bummed me out but made me appreciate the work half my team is putting into the engine to make second semester as easy as possible for the game.
After GAM, I ate sausage pasta and headed to Pascal (DigiPen's largest lab) and worked on Mead (that's how we at DigiPen refer to working, by the subject or the professor if the professor is widely known (or whichever's easier to say)). I made some progress but not much. I clearly understand what I'm supposed to (and have done! :D) do now and I thank my friend Brian for that completely. He and I also got all the necessary paperwork filled out so that we could take a class on quaternions (not sure what they are but that's why I'm taking a class on them, right?) without having the prerequisite for that class. The professor doesn't think that the "necessary" prerequisite is needed for the class (since he teaches it) and waived the course for us. I might take the prerequisite class later, it's about curves and surfaces, but with all the applications of quaternions in physics, I'm glad I'm taking it.
After Nick and Sean got out of their math class (Brian, Nick, and Sean are on my team, and I live with Sean) we headed to Curie since Pascal was filling up with freshmen who were getting ready to learn some low-level electronics (CS100). Curie is nice, it's way out of the way, but it's nice. It was a little warm in there today and I was kind of grumpy since I wanted to wait to eat until we could head to Bach (my team's favorite room, it's small and nobody knows about it (those who do know about it think it's a Computer Engineering lab and don't even try to go in it)) so I worked on Mead some more. Once again, i made the assignment a lot harder than it should have been. The assignment is to program a recursive function (a function that calls itself over and over until a condition has been met, which at that point it "unwinds" and returns the result) for a knight from chess to move around a NxN sized chess board (NxN specifying any size) and touch every square only once. It's a pretty popular algorithm/problem and it's called The Knight's Tour. There's two ways of doing it, one is to brute force your way and just try a path until you realize it's a dead end (in terms of not completing the board but not being able to move) and backtrack as needed. The other is the smarter method (the one I've had lots of trouble on in terms of how to do it nicely) where you visit the squares with the least amount of paths leading to them (corners can only be reached by 2 squares, the middle squares can be reached by 8, etc...) and if you're caught with two squares that have the same amount of paths leading to them, you choose the square that's furthest from the center of the board (since the squares in the center are easier to get to than the ones further out). That took me so long. I was doing some crazy stuff, sorting and resorting and generically hacking the code to work. Brian, being the programming prodigy that he is, just told me that when I'm comparing two different moves the knight can take (and when I make my list of moves to make), compare them to their lowest levels. That means, first see if the move is on the board (if you're in the upper left corner, you can't really move left or up), compare the amount of ways you can get to each square, and if that's equal then compare the distance from the center of the board. If THAT'S equal, then choose the lowest #'d move.
|0|3|0|2|0|
|4|0|0|0|1|
|0|0|K|0|0|
|5|0|0|0|8|
|0|6|0|7|0|
With the # being the number of the move, as shown above (ASCII art FTW!).
Once Bach opened up, we moved in there, and I ate chicken chow mien (I love you mom! :D) while listening to Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" (thank you David!) on tape. I'm on the last book and I really like that series. I hope it ends well! :S
After eating, and much horsing around, I finally finished my smart method of my programming assignment (like always, the end result is MUCH simpler and MUCH cleaner than my original idea). I don't want to go into too much detail about the horseplay, except that I found an unopened Butterfinger in the trash in Curie while I was throwing something away so I took that and split it with Sean, because it's late and I've said too much already.
Then I came home, got a text from my lovely Emma, packed for tomorrow, started talking, and started this blog, and now I'm done for the day!
Good day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)