DevLog

Hey. It’s been awhile since I’ve done any math-intensive apps, and I was starting to get a little nervous about “losing my touch”. Not to mention, all I’ve worked on for the past several months is Chase, and the last thing I want is for me to get bored of it. So I something different, and programmed a real quick application of some random effect. I like rotating things in isometric space (who doesn’t?), and always thought that it’d be neat to do some sort of depth-of-view thing, so I threw this together.

I’ll probably release the source tomorrow (assuming I have time), after optimizing and making it a bit easier to read. Don’t forget that I have other apps you can watch and get briefly entertained by here, if you’re ever bored.

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 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.

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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.

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Galaxy is another one of my Processing Apps. It’s another particle engine, but with the particles all rotating around the center on their own axis. Each particle’s speed is determined by the distance from the center, and can be effected by the user dragging the cursor left or right.

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