So it begins...

Yea, I did it.
So what.


Ohhh the dangers of having a roommate. John, if you're reading this - 1) I had to. 2) You thought I was kidding. 3) Thanks.

Haha but yeah anyways, I moved my roommates 42" JVC TV into my room, for the ultimate computer monitor. It's almost... *ALMOST* too big. I was surprised to find out my graphics card wouldn't force it to a higher resolution, so since I'm so close to the screen, some images appear blocky. All the pictures I've viewed on it so far though are actually beautiful, and come in clear. So I'm actually thinking about getting one for Christmas, maybe? It'd be nice at least. And probably around 30 " would do nicely. Either that or a PS3 for Christmas, but we all know that is terrible for my GPA.

Today I had my Game Programming class, and he announced it was the final lecture, and the rest of the class periods would be used for assignment questions and such, even though I've been in his office near everyday since about a week ago. He's a really cool guy, knows a lot, and loves talking about video games. Definitely someone I need to talk to about getting started in the industry, and he's already guided me in the right direction. He tells me that I need to really look into DirectX10 and Visual C++ if I want people to even consider me as a programmer for their company. Visual C++ is basically the C++ that handles all the real-time graphics and such, unless I'm mistaken. He also told me that the 'x' in DirectX was sort of a variable, since the entire 'language' has libraries or whatever such as DirectInput, DirectAudio, DirectWhatever, I thought that was pretty interesting since I've never even really considered DirectX as something to put on my 'to learn' list, which is growing everyday. What sucks about that is, once I learn that crap, I'll have a whole new list of things to learn, since technology advances so much. I guess I better enjoy learning.

Anyway, I went to try and meet my robotics lab TA so I could pick up the newly ordered Accelerometer for the Lego NXT Robot kit. Our final projects is that we have to choose some sort of robot to build and program using these legobots. Since my room is a mechanical engineer, and I'm a computer scientist, it's basically a perfect set up. Over thankgiving, he took the functional parts home so he could build the main part of the robot, and I have the sensors and the actual 'brain' of the bot so I can program it and see the output/input stuff, and get it ready to set up wtih what he builds. We were inspired to build a lego 'missile' turret from a video on youTube which can be found here. Looks pretty sweet, hopefully it won't be too hard. If I had more time, I'd explain how it works and different ideas we had on it, but I could literally go on forever, and this post will be long enough anyway.

So after trying to find my TA, unsuccessfully (i'll have to get it from him tomorrow at noon) I went to Wendy's and got the dreaded BACONATOR, and dominated it back at home. I've basically been programming my 7th assignment for Game Programming since i've been home. (yes, that's 7 hours of programming). In this assignment, we have an avatar, and we should be able to click anywhere on the screen, and it uses a pathfinding algorithm to get to it in the shortest path. There are three different algorithms

-Breadth-First Search
-Best-First Search
-Dijkstra's Algorithm
-A* Search Algorithm

Since I wanted to fully understand the assignment, I coded all four, even though it may have been a waste of time. I really want to take the time to explain them here on this blog, since that's half of what I'm using it for, but I'm too far behind in my assignments to spend my time typing it out, unfortunately. Dijkstra's was the hardest, that's for sure, and the change from Dijkstra to A* was extremely simple, took me like 10 minutes, which was definitely nice. Also, we were supposed to animate our avatar using 'sprites', which are basically seperated frames - images - of a guy walking and his different positions, and based on the avatar's global orientation, and the amount of time he's spent walking, you can calculate which exact frame you need to be using, and apply that to the avatar. It was really simple to understand, hard as crap to program, it was terrible. Once I got it though, it was great.

I have so much I want to learn, and it sucks knowing how much work it'll take. Oh well.

Anyway, I thought since I finished that program tonight I'd allow myself some time off and play Fallout 3, a new game I bought on release night a few weeks back. It's probably one of the coolest games of the year for many reasons. You can choose to fight turn-based or in real time, although the turn based way is probably always the best choice. It's called "V.A.T.S" (i forget what it stands for) but you can basically stop time and look at your targets, choose which part of the body you want to hit, and it'll give you the percent chance to hit, and you can judge your shots based on that. You can only do this so much as it drains your Ability Points, which regen over time. So I mean when you have a super mutant that just took 4 shotgun shells to the head and he is STILL about to swing his huge spike board at you, things get pretty intense, since you have to fight him in real time. I usually end up running, fighting back, or just curling up in a corner in my room and crying since I was so scared.

I'm going home at some point this week, but I'm not sure when I should, since we are actually having thanksgiving where I'm living (Fayetteville). I still want to go back home (Fort Smith) and relax (meaning working on programming every waking moment) and seeing all the old' friends. Should be pretty fun.

I don't know when I'll post back, it's going to be a busy two weeks.

-Mojave