Christmas Season
Posted: 19th December 2009
Its that time of year again and this year is quite different for me. I'm currently in the middle of my two week jury duty (which so far has been a total waste of time as I am yet to be picked) and university finished yesterday (although I have plenty of things to be getting on with).
Since my last post I have handed in two more assignments: one was to build a scene using Lego meshes (which I had to build myself) and the other was an optimization exercise using x86 assembly. Both were challenging yet interesting. There is a video presentation of the final version of the Lego assignment on Youtube and there is also a development stage version. I will be uploading screenshots of my work very soon. In the optimization assignment I was able to speed up the program considerably before I had even re-written the entire program in assembly but I did prove (using Newton's quotient) that the assembly version was more efficient for larger datasets as its rate of change was lower than that of the pure C++ version.
However just because university has officially finished teaching for this semester does not mean I am short of work. I have another graphics assignment to hand in (this time it is to construct a realistic fireworks display using a particle system) and also need to continue working on our game prototype. Both assignments are in for the 25th of January but I am currently concentrating on the prototype as I seem to be one with the Unreal Editor at the moment. I am slightly kicking myself for not checking out other engines (Unity in particular) as I have found Unreal rather frustrating (the fact that the Unreal Editor and the UDK are entirely different animals for a start). It'll be worth it though and I might upload some work in progress shots.
The future looks exciting: I am skiing in Les Arcs 1800 at the end of January, university starts again and I'm hoping to go to GDC Europe next year as a lot of our proposed projects are based upon what has been presented there. I'm also shortlisted to learn how to lead climb as I become more confident and hopefully I'll be able to go on a trip this time round (I had to cancel my trip to Snowden at the last moment when I realised I had miscalculated the deadline for the Lego assignment).
Merry Christmas and see you in the next decade!