Running Scared

For the first time in my academic career I'm genuinely frightened of the upcoming weeks.

That's heard a lot, I understand, and my friends and family are quick to point out that I have spoken such "nonsense" before.  I stipulate, however, that this time is genuinely different at set apart from the previous set of experiences.  I have only one final to study for.  On the flip side, I have three monumental projects to complete... In a little under two weeks.  Less, actually.

Capstone needs menus. Badly.  I hate UI programming, but essentially that's one of the only things left on the list.  It's time consuming and arduous, but absolutely, positively, painfully necessary

In multiplayer I still have zero idea if my theoretical networked code will run.  I haven't been able to  test it, I don't have access to another computer that can run the friggin' windows live that the project requires.  The school computers are all out of date and I can't install or update them with Windows Live because I don't have administrative access, of course.

And I just barely got started with Graphics, which involves building an entire particle system utilizing the graphics card.  This assignment is what has me sweating bullets, I got such a late start because of other factors in school and I have no idea what I'm doing and despite the academic papers I've read there is no authority on the subject that I can find with any sort of examples or "baby steps" to follow.

Ordinarily, I would relish the opportunity to learn something from complete scratch, however, given my time constraints and the fact that these final projects are huge portions of my grade I really can't afford to get stuck on ANY of my projects.

And I'm stuck on ALL of them.  Capstone is bogged in UI, I have no clue what's happening in RenderGL, the "lovely" open-GL framework DePaul has (with shoddy documentation) and I can't even see where I stand in Multiplayer until I somehow get access to another computer.

And that doesn't even factor in my Calculus work, of which I have 5 outstanding assignments all given within the past week and a take-home quiz to complete.

...Check, please.

-Kev

The Little Things

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

Yeah, it's been some time.  Partially for good reasons, partially not.  Tonight won't be a super long update, as I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow and It's currently 2:05 in the morning.  Dang it, that was not supposed to happen.

And I haven't been up to anything productive, per se.  I have a mountain of programming homework to tackle this weekend, and not enough time to do it.  That being said, I spent 4+ hours this evening (maybe? I guess that's right, maybe more like 3 or 2) doing little tweaks to capstone.  I fixed dumb things like a lag error in our particle effects.  I knew what the problem was, or at least I had suspected, for some time but I had not acted on it.  I finally got that out of the way today, which felt really satisfying.  It was a simple problem, I had all of my object stored in a linked list (I have my justifications, I'm using C# which is a memory-managed language, it automatically reduces memory fragmentation and I get O(1) insertion/removal time with my method, don't anyone start telling me that Linked Lists can't have a O(1) removal or I'll keyboard-smack you harder than that one guy did in Wanted) but I did my removals in a rather stupid manner, e.g. yoinking any object calling for removal immediately, which didn't break, stop, or even halt the game.  It would, however, halt the update of some of the other objects in that class group for just a fraction of a second.  I don't know the exact specifics, but yanking from the linked list caused the rest of the linked list's update to be skipped or short-changed.

Long story short I threw in a small vector list that stored the positions of all of the to-be-removed nodes, and then AFTER all those happy-go-lucky nodes updated, I swept through the list and plucked out anything that needed to be removed.  Problem solved in < 5 minutes.

And sometimes, as a programmer, you need that.  I've been wrestling with bugs and problems for months, in some cases, I needed a small, polish task that I could get done and move onto the next one on the list.  That just feels good.  And I could use some moral boost.

I also took down a number of other small issues.

Apparently our background clouds were supposed to animate, I don't remember ever being told this, so perhaps I wasn't paying attention, but I threw the scrolling clouds in in a few minutes.  I did some art-related exchanges, Justin got me the newly saturated sprites, which amped up the color and the overall aesthetic of our game immediately.

And... I completely forgot the other changes I've made.  There were a number of them, again, only small, quick little tweaks, but stuff that felt good to put in and have just WORK and not complain at me.

Oh yeah, I threw in limbs, that was one thing.  When a creep is hit so hard or has had so much damage dealt to him he simply explodes and a few limbs pop off and skitter across the screen, spraying blood as they go.

I love doing this, when it isn't slowly killing me!

I don't have any doodles for you, unfortunately, not at the moment.

Hold on, I recently uploaded a whole batch! It's (possibly?) your lucky day.

(Apologies for any obscenities, I have a class that I really hate this quarter, and sometimes feelings are manifested into written words)

-Kev