I realise I haven’t kept this blog up to date with what’s happening and what has happened.
- I started working at Evos (pronounced ee-voss) around 3 months ago.
- I do indeed have two beautiful 24″ screens on my desk. I can never go back. Everytime I go to work I feel cramped on a single 20″ screen.
- We moved flats (hence the flatwarming in a previous post.)
- We have fast internet (hence the wow omg post.)
- I haven’t finished Uni yet. Next year is the plan.
- I thought Transformers was ho hum.
- The iPhone might be in asia (us?) in 2008.
- There are some dedicated people over at iPhone Dev hacking the iPhone. Hopefully we will be able to start running custom applications soon. By ‘we’ I mean not me, the metaphysical ‘we’.
I have bought a Wiimote to control my mac. I use Remote Buddy which is awesome. I am in the process of creating a ’sensor bar’ so I can point the mouse using the remote. The sensor bar doesn’t actually do any sensing, the Wiimote has a tiny camera that picks up infra red from IR LED’s in the sensor bar. I want to make mine clip onto the top of my screen, but is looks like bluetack is going to be the answer for now.
I didn’t.
I didn’t spend $7,000 last week and I definitely didn’t order a 24″ dell lcd screen and 2.66GHz Mac Pro. I also didn’t order the X1900 XT upgrade option and the Airport Express and Bluetooth modules while I was wasn’t at it.
It hasn’t been done, and I am now not poor.
And while I’m at it, I didn’t start a game ideas wiki and I haven’t been slowly filling it with information and that’s not why I haven’t posted in a while.
Actually it’s not, I’ve just been quite busy with Uni and work (I’m working mondays now). I do believe that’s the longest I’ve kept up a mock sarcasm ever.
Two assignments due this week!
I’ve just coded a 2, 3 and 4 dimension Vector class, a 2, 3 and 4 dimension Matrix class and a Quaternion class (also a couple of container classes). 2400 lines of code in about a day. I accidentally missed one of my lectures today as I was too busy coding.
Quaternions are cool! Anything in 4 dimensions is cool. A quaternion is a rotation in 3 dimensions that, among other things, prevents ‘Gimbal Lock’. It’s also easy to do smooth rotation through interpolation of quaternions.
Quaternions come from an obsure branch of mathematics from the 19th century. They have pretty much been superseded by vector mathematics, but have their uses in computer graphics.
Here endith the lesson for today.
This semester at uni I will be programming:
A digital library
A sheet music image recognition program
A 3D renderer of bezier splines from scratch
A currency indicator thing with JavaBeans
And other things I haven’t yet found out about.
GAH! Apart from the 3D renderer this isn’t cool games.
Also through some cruel twist of fate (and some fruity paper choices on his part) Alex is in all my classes yet again.
I did a bit more ‘haxing’ to let the authors name come up for each post as we now have more than one author on this here blog.
I’m going through my stuff making it a bit less ‘me’ and a bit more ‘us’…
I’m not looking forward to finishing the flash game that we have been working on for a good part of this semester. Every minute spent in flash makes me more and more angry and crazed, how can an expensive and professional piece of software that is used by so many be so frustrating and hard to use? If flash is the introduction that budding animators and programmers get to the world of computer development I feel sorry for them.
I’m finding it hard to get things done with constant interruptions, uni assignments and other things I’m required to do. Again Voodoo hasn’t been worked on for a while. I’ve decided to restart a bit and use a slightly different paradigm for the parser. It’s more like flex and bison now, but the scanner only returns 4 different types of tokens. Identifier, Number, Symbol and Literal (for string literals). The parser class asks the scanner for the next token, it returns and the scanner can be asked questions about the location and indentation of that token. The scanner can also be told that the last token it returned was bad and it will be able to print out it’s location.
So each individual parse method will be a lot smaller which will be good, and I will still be able to use the cool parser errors that using flex and bison won’t give me.
Edit: I’ve also fixed a problem with the /author pages, the authors name wasn’t coming up. I used a bit of a hack, but it works. I want to submit the bug report but the signup email is taking yonks.