September 2008

16:00 - 19/09/08 - Yaaarrr!

21:30 - 08/09/08 - Finally an Update

I was hoping to update this site a month and a half ago from my new laptop that I am buying to work on (and keep this desktop as a gaming rig) alas I have no new laptop. There has been several significant delays, but now fingers crossed I should be recieving a shiny laptop in a week or two. The original plan was to set up this new laptop with all the tools I'd need to program and it would be nice and clean and not have distractions (or the association of sitting at the computer and playing games as I do with this desktop) and I was going to wait until I got it to start improving my C++. However given the delays I decided to start working through some things on this computer, so far I've got the gist of windows event programing and the 2D aspect of DirectX allowing me to create a little breakout game! It was using a framework provided by the text I'm learning from but I was quite happy with myself for altering it in several ways, including stopping it carrying on when you alt tab, and actually allowing you to continue controlling the game when alt tabbing back as well as adding dynamic text etc which wasn't covered in the book, yay.

Now I've moved onto 3D programming, have done the "yay! I can render a cube!" project and messed around with object rotation and camera movement / rotation in that, as well as integrating an mp3 class because the basic DirectX sound code only likes .wavs and I don't think the advanced likes anything except .wma, or possibly .xwma. Now I'm onto the whole rendering a model / mesh file and trying to get everything into one vertex buffer, because the framework just creates a new one for every 'Quad' (i.e. two triangles) at the moment which isn't exactly effiecent or fast, however thinking about all the vertices and their associated textures is giving me something of a head ache, so I'm updating my website instead.

I've also taken to uploading gaming video clips onto you tube of things I've frapsed, if you like Audiosurf or World of Warcraft you might enjoy them, here's my personal page thingy.

In real life news, I've been to italy for over 3 weeks and graduated from university with a 2:1, which is respectable although I would have liked to have done better. At least my MSci project came out well with 73%, a was a little worried I had nothing useful to say except show the graphs my program spat out that showed that the position representation was the prefered basis for Quantum Brownian Motion, which is hardly much... Now I'm going to keep coding till I've got a couple of projects I'm happy to attach to my CV and then I'm going to start applying to game studios for a graduate job although I'm not sure I'll have much luck until the next set of recruitments come around at the start of next year, always worth trying though.

To finish, here's me Audiosurfing - Tatu - Dangerous and Moving on 'Ninja Mono Ironmode', love that little game.