Week 5 - The Longest Week Ever

Well, after seven of the longest days of my life, I'm happy to say that I was able to figure out three of the easy questions and get them handed in for marks. The first question wasn't too bad, the real challenge there was getting the model loaded in. After that the lights weren't too difficult as it was just a simple implementation of scene graph elements mostly.

But it was only easy because of all the scene graph practice I got while doing easy question two. After the excruciating experience of getting the procedural libraries to function correctly, actually implementing the question was fairly easy, if not long and tedious. I worked out a solution to getting everything parented, positioned, and rotated correctly and I'm actually kind of proud of how it turned out. I did however struggle for a long time with getting ogre to render the primitives with a material though, which I later found out had been working all along...there were just no lights in the scene. Whoops.

For the life of me, I couldn't get the billboards to function correctly, but I did manage to get easy question six done, which was the skydome with a texture animated on it. Turns out it was only about four lines of code to get working properly. I wish more things could be done in four lines. Sigh.

All I have to do now in order to qualify for the midterm is get the solar system medium question done for Friday. Yay(?).

Week 4: Spinning My Wheels

Since my last post I've been trying and failing miserably just to get a homework question done in time for the cut-off date. I've never been so aggrivated in my entire life. Today I said to hell with it and spent time on a business assignment due tomorrow and a neglected essay due next Monday.

In terms of what I've learned in this period of time, I will now question every textbook buying decision I ever make. I'm currently staring at a shelf full of them, about $3,000.00 worth, a couple of which I opened only once or twice and ended up with high 80s at the end of the term. Then there's the book in my hand, for this course, which I've been pouring through, and have nothing to show for it.

Here's hoping next week's post will be more than just a sadder, angrier version of this.

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                This week was rather uneventful, as we only got the engine we are to use on Friday. Once I had access to it however, I was able to explore a few of the examples given, and started to get an idea of how the engine did rudimentary tasks. In all honesty, I was just happy to have the engine up and running, as now my personal work schedule can begin, be that as it may, unhindered by the lack of proper tools. It’s a small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.

                I also read through the week’s readings, even though a lot of it was just a brief overview of games in general. It was interesting to lay such a basic framework and think about games in essential parts of a whole. For example, under fighting games it lists high precision controls, accurate hit detection, and rich animation to be its basis. Even while attending this school, and having made a fighting game in first year, I’ve never thought of them in such fundamental terms, and realised that every fighting games, or at least the quality ones, can attribute their success to this basis, regardless of the actual game built around them.

                The book then transitioned more into the structure of commercial engines, and listed some features that were common amongst some or all of them, such as graphics renderers, character animation packages, and (although much less common) low level AI tools to get developers started.

                All in all it’s been a nothing week in terms of the course, which coupled with the awkward deadline of this post made for a meagre experience to draw from in terms of things to write about. Hopefully once the course gets into full swing these will get more interesting.