DevLog

It’s been over a month since my last post. I apologize for the lack of updates. I truly wish I could keep up with Chase at the moment, but I’ve been getting some other things done lately. For a month I’ve been training to get into track. My primary reason for training is for health though. I find that running for 3 miles can have the same effect on me as a cup of coffee, except longer lasting. This, hopefully, will help me productivity-wise in the long run. I have been getting into the habit of running a mile before school on week days, which hopefully will keep me in top conditions.

Not much has happened on Chase, or any other of my projects. I re-organized some of the files in Chase, and made some progress in the Scene classes. I also started on a data importer and exporter (a function that can save and load models and other junk). I’ll likely not get much done on Chase in the next week or so due to some after-school classes I’m taking, and me training for the last week before track starts. But after that, I’ll hopefully be able to get a good pace going, and start making progress again.

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On Sunday of last week, I had a pretty neat idea. I was looking around the internet, and ran into some sort of gaming glove. I thought “Hey! That’s pretty cool.” I had something different in mind, and found that this glove didn’t have the capabilities I’d hope for. I was thinking of something like a wiimote but in the form of a glove.

I remembered seeing Johnny Lee’s videos of his wiimote hacks. He set up his wiimote to receive input from external infrared lights, and to track it while doing several neat things like head-tracking or a multi-touch projector white-board. This was all very impressive, considering he was using very cheap supplies to accomplish these things. He also made a finger-tracker using an infrared light array (grid of lights), and some reflectors taped onto his fingers. I eventually came to the idea of using an IR light with the webcam. I understood that cameras have a tendency of picking up infrared lights, unlike our human eyes. I grabbed a TV remote, wrote a quick script, and it worked greatly!

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Remember yesterday, I said “If tomorrow also provides the convenience of a snow day, I’ll take advantage of that as well…”? Well, today happened to also be a snow day (woohoo!), and I did as I told you. I worked on Chase’s Engine. I’m currently at about 744 lines of code, so I’ve made some progress since I started the conversion. Yesterday’s version included support for handling coordinates, polygons, and models in 3D space. It also had some transformation functions (translate, dilate, and rotate) for coordinates and polygons.

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Good day! Over the winter break, I began working on Chase’s conversion over to C++. Today, I’ve had the convenience of a snow day, so I took advantage of it and proceeded to work on Chase’s Engine. Note, however, I haven’t really made any *real* progress. I will count this as a day though, since a lot has been done in the conversion.

The conversion isn’t done yet. I’ve got all the coordinate, polygon, and model classes converted (although certainly not finished in terms of features), as well as the transformation functions. If tomorrow also provides the convenience of a snow day, I’ll take advantage of that as well, and hopefully get Chase’s C++ engine up to an equivalent of Chase’s Processing (the API for Java!) engine.

I’ve uploaded a picture of my colorfully written rough draft for how my .h and .cpp files should work out. My compiler (Dev-C++) has an awfully convenient feature which allows me to place individual files in their own folders unlike the Processing IDE, as far as I’m aware of. You can check out the picture by clicking the image to the left/top of this post’s text. Feel free to give me any feedback or comments.

No significant additions today. Mostly optimizing and polishing of the graphics engine. I also did a lot of commenting for easier referencing. I’ve been experimenting around, trying to find the most efficient and clean way of rendering and handling 3D graphical data.

Christmas was fun. I got some sketchpads, so now I can keep all my notes and junk all in one place, instead of scattered all over my desk (I should probably clean this up). I’m using one sketchpad for the notes, and the other for all my formulas and algorithms. I also bought myself some pretty nice pens, of different colors, so labeling shouldn’t be a problem.

There’s officially been about a week’s worth of development for Chase.

Today, however, was admittedly disappointing in terms of progress. I started working on a quick reference, since the code was getting more and more complex, and keeping track of parameters for each function was difficult. This would be especially useful, since I’m developing Chase over a long time (up to a week or two between development days). The quick reference, however, wasn’t so quick. It ended up taking me longer to document the different functions than it did for me to actually make some of the functions, so I decided that it was a waste of time, and to ditch it. If it’s getting difficult for me to keep track of things, then it’s probably time for me to re-organize and clean up the code a bit.

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I spent most of the day managing data, organizing data, and extending the graphics engine. Currently, the buffering accounts for translations, zooming, and rotations. Models can be displayed at different parts of the environment, and can be rotated and scaled freely now.

I plan to later add different features, such as 3D rotations to the model drawing, and possibly lighting and texturing. It really depends on how much resources will remain when the engine nears completion.