Average Achievements

Update: turns out class average for the project was 53%.

At least I won’t have much competition for employment at the end of this…

Sweet Maria Ripens

Around the start of the summer I was given a ‘Twilight’ variety chili pepper plant; “an unusual medium/hot variety producing a rainbow of fruits. Harvest July to September”.

The plant – now named Maria – was well-watered, dosed with organic tomato feed, and given as much sunshine as it could take. It produced was a mass of tiny white flowers which turned into a mass of miniature, hard, purple chilies. Over the last couple of weeks or so the fruits have started to grow and ripen. The very first chili harvested contained a maggot; the second two batches were better, four or so small, hot, chilies. They might have been picked a touch under-ripe. A number of fruits are beginning to really ripen now, including a few nice large ones (ding dong, carry on). Ripening starts with the dark purple blanching unpleasantly into a jaundice yellow; that ripen though oranges and reds, starting at the tip and heading to stem.

The plant itself is lovely, a good two-foot high and wide. It dominates the window and is easily seen from the ground, two floors down. Some of the leaves have wilted, there is some leaf burn, and several leaves have a few bites out of them. I removed one caterpillar and two aphids; and I have left several small spiders. The debut crops were used in soups (chicken and vegetable, ham and potato) and were spiced-up marvelously by them. Looks like a bumper crop of hot chilies over the next few weeks. Let’s see if Maria survives the winter – perhaps I should dump her away in a manger somewhere.

The photos demonstrate something more than the plant: that my camera is now working again. Beware, photophobes!

The decidedly surreal final photo is insisde my apartment hall, entering from the front door. That’s The Dude starting at you: through a mirror, on my door, behind kaleidoscopic lenses. Mirrors, doors, and lenses are all good perception references, so I’m sure he would approve.

Fleshers Weak

Two days gone of freshers, plus a weekend. So far, so good. I’m sharing Halls of Residence with some very cool people: a couple of Canadians, a Frenchman, a Scot, and an Englishman. We’ve made friends, and made friends with various people around the halls. Speaking of which, they’re very nice. Clean, modern, comfortable. The shared facilities does not include a living room, but does include a well-equipped kitchen (multiple fridges and cookers, etc.). It has been VERY noisy until 4am, each and every morning, but I survive with equal measures of vodka, going down to say hi, and earplugs.

The University itself is large, overwhelming even. The library has multiple rooms on each of the multiple floors, and there are many buildings. Students jumping first-year, i.e. me, are given morning sessions on the differences between further and higher education, stuff like the Harvard referencing system. Much of it is common-sense. It has been fun to meet the guys from last year – all but two of them are on the course, and all but two of them have been in this week. They are all into the Nintendo DS, and looking at writing homebrew applications for fun, education, and profit. In this respect they are four months behind me (none of them demonstrated interest last year) but it’s good they are heading in the same direction now.

Not much else to report. Looks like I will be founding one games club (board, card, rpg), and have managed to negotiate a discount at the local game retailer. Some of the guys on the course want to start a computer/video games club, have suggested they go ahead and start one.

Grinding Teeth Scrape

Have finished two projects, three remaining and are mostly done. One more busy week and I should be done. Java was frightening. Class had a 20 question multiple choice exams on Java theory and code. I was the only pass, well beyond the pass mark (75%, 60% required) but hardly perfect. The rest failed; including someone who has previously studied Java. This was not perhaps entirely unexpected. There has been a discontinuity of Java teaching over the year, with two lecturers leaving for plum industry jobs. The class managed to convince the Elders and Betters to provide us with fixed, extra Java tutorial each week. Surprisingly – and pleasingly – in the times of budget cuts, they agreed. Unfortunately most of that time has been taken up with someone attempting to make us expert in the areas our projects require (icon placement, file handling, etc.). He hasn’t been teaching general Java. I’d taken to reading Sun’s online documentation, tutorials from the Internet, and on-line quizzes.

And the questions were undeniably challenging. Four reasonable-sounding answers were provided to each question, not one or two reasonable answers and others helpfully wildly incorrect. There was a noticeable gulf within the cull; some missing by a question or two, others hitting scores more often associated with random selection. The class is going to get a couple of hours of Java overview, and a re-test. I’ll sit in the recap then scarper for a cuppa. I’m glad to have it over with. Java was one of the disciplines that yielded a fail last year, so a tense period for some.

I don’t see myself becoming a full-time Java developer, but it can develop quite useful programs that will run on a huge range of platforms. I suspect I won’t be putting in any practise hours over the summer. What code I do in the holidays will be split between C++ and extending the current Dark Basic Pro game. On that front, one of the developers of another game wants to hook up and do some game coding over the summer. He’s an experienced mathematician, before decided he wouldn’t make any money in the field and switching to games development, he was studying astrophysics. He’s certainly able to get interesting sine waves and particle effects going in a 3D engine, and he’s written a modest ballistic physics engine. It looks like he’s going to develop some kind of physics-based game, me helping with implementation; I’ll continue work my work on the shooter, with him offering functions for background particle effects, menu wipes, and the like. The model-maker and animator is still keen to finish the game for public release.

This will only be a minority of the summer, though. Have to earn money, and want to spend time with the people I just haven’t had the time to spend time with recently. And catching a few rays wouldn’t hurt either.

Paperwork Time

At the end of University you get exams. You might have some hand-in work too, but you get exams. At the end of a first-year equivalent course in college, you don’t get exams. Or you do but they’re really easy ones, mostly multiple choice. What you do have to do is hand in a ton of homework.

For June the 1st I have to hand in a CGI-film, a team-made arcade game, a personal Java card game, and fixes to a 3D shooter. It’s the documentation that’s the slog: five design documents, three business plans, three project plans, two gantt charts, three user manuals, three technical manuals, story boards, endless PDL, two design diagrams, three test strategies, three lots of weekly work logs from start of term, and the magnum opus of ethical issues reports.

I don’t mind too much getting on with it methodically. A few hours throwing a few words into Word, then head into XSI. There I model and animate for a while, a nicely creative exercise after documenting. Lately the scenes have reached the stage I get the first renders. Compositing a film, changing the models and animation, is great fun.

As for admitting to using Word, I checked out Open Office. It looks amazing, have started downloading it. I’ll certainly find a use for the Math and Draw suites.

Project Mayhem IV

Today none of the members of my former team turned up for any lectures, whereas my entire current team has. We have re-branded, Noob Games has become Project Mayhem, i.e. it’s our team name. We have yet to finalise a game-name. The lecturer, who doubled laughing at the team name, has a blog about the various teams but I don’t have the URL to hand, I’ll post it when I know.

We did a few tech-tests, mostly playing animated models. With a few clicks in the art package to create a loop-the-loop effect, just a single ‘play’ command the effect happens. Very cool, and very easy. The art guys are now having to model, skin, light-map, and then put in lots of amazing animations. The pair of them are heroes!

For my part I want more programs, professional add-ons to language used, to cover items such as shader creation, object rotation, AI, and dynamic lighting. The cost of these programs are about £15 each, I’m in the process of talking my classmates into these programs. If we share the costs it’ll be a couple of quid each, plus we’ll make much better games.