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.

(continue reading…)

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.

I normally set aside my weekends for developing programs (in this case, Chase), but it’s looking like I won’t be this weekend. We have finals this Friday, next Monday, and the day after that, and I need to prepare for that. Also, we’ll be having company on Saturday, and my sister is coming over from College on Monday.

Development on Chase up to this point has been going super slow. I’ve only been able to use a few weekends to work on it. I’d work on it on the week days if I didn’t have school crowding my time, and family keeps making plans with me during some weekends. I’ve only had 6 days since the 21st of November to work on this. At this rate, Chase isn’t going to be completed any time soon, unless I get together a development team of some sort, which I doubt I’ll do.

(continue reading…)

I’ve been working on a game for a little under a month (ever since November 21st). It started out as an idea several months earlier, in which I proceeded to work on in mSL.  I got a  wireframe isometric engine made and running fairly nice (roughly 40 fps, which was godly for such a slow language). I had some problems with mSL, however. Resources played too large of a factor, and involved having to use every little hack I could come up with to speed it up. I was literally optimizing it to the very byte. That would’ve been fine for a simple game, but I had bigger plans for my game.

(continue reading…)

I didn’t have much time last night to fully revise Explode’s code. So today I finished that job. I revised a lot of the comments, converted the coordinates from float to PVector datatype, PVector is a class object in Processing’s API, which allows programmers to easily manage vector coordinates in 2 or 3 dimensions. I combined two calculations done to find the new coordinate of each particle into one, among other changes.

I also updated Galaxy, but I’ve yet to document the actual app on here. If you’ve seen the app before (on OpenProcessing), you’ll find that there’s a noticeable change now.  The speeds are inverted. Instead of being faster on the outside and slower on the inside, it’s now faster on the inside and slower on the outside. I also did similar changes to Galaxy as I did to Explode. Coordinates converted to PVector, and revised comments and code.

It’s been pretty hard in keeping up with programming. I’m taking Drivers Ed, which is taking up a good part of my day, and I’m often exhausted by the time I return from school.