ID:81113
 
Does everybody know what time is it?
TOOL TIME! OBLIGATORY LIFE POST THAT WILL HOPEFULLY JUSTIFY MY HAVING A BLOG!

...TIME!

Hilarious allusions to nineties' television aside, a fair amount has actually been happening in my life.

First off, I'll be attending DePaul University going for a B.S. in Computer Game Development, starting next week. I'm commuting to save some $$$, so that means two hours on the train that I can spend studying/developing. I spent the past year at a community college chipping away at the Liberal Studies requirements, so I get to jump into some more interesting classes:

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES I: C/C++
ANIMATION FOR NON-MAJORS
INTRODUCTION TO SCREENWRITING
INTRODUCTION TO GAME DESIGN

DePaul is on a Trimester system, so I'll be done with these classes by Thanksgiving.


I'm also working on two games at the moment: Ultimate Laser Tag (which I started a while back for Ian's Get Something Done challenge) and Run Them Through. The latter of which is a casual-strategy game, and former of which will never be finished if I keep putting it aside. Regardless, I did manage to more-or-less finish that Static Lighting Generator (more in that is runs, less in that it is undocumented and designed for a specialized circumstance).

I'll post more on Run Them Through (which should actually be finished relatively soon) later.

Anywho, I'm supposed to be in Chicago in less than twelve hours, so I had better start printing out some maps and train schedules and stop procrastinating :P


P.S. They sell flash drives bigger than my hard drive now!
Good for you.
That static lighting generator is pretty good, other than speed it's awesome, could the speed ever be improved significantly? I haven't looked through the code but I was just wondering.
two hours on a train that can be spent mapping? :D hope all is well brother.
Haywire wrote:
That static lighting generator is pretty good, other than speed it's awesome, could the speed ever be improved significantly? I haven't looked through the code but I was just wondering.

Already has been, a couple times since it was first made. DM isn't the fastest language out there, unfortunately. At least the results still look sweet.
Well, I survived my day in Chicago. It was quite fun, although I broke a salt shaker :(

Tsfreaks wrote:
Good for you.

Thanks! I can't wait to take a real programming course :)

Haywire wrote:
That static lighting generator is pretty good, other than speed it's awesome, could the speed ever be improved significantly? I haven't looked through the code but I was just wondering.

Kaiochao wrote:
Haywire wrote:
That static lighting generator is pretty good, other than speed it's awesome, could the speed ever be improved significantly? I haven't looked through the code but I was just wondering.

Already has been, a couple times since it was first made. DM isn't the fastest language out there, unfortunately. At least the results still look sweet.

As Kaiochao noted, I've already optimized it several times. Unfortunately, the only real bottleneck is the drawing, and I can't do much to optimize Shift() and Blend(). I did my best by caching as many of the parts as I reasonably could, and by implementing a hashing system. One other improvement I was considering was adding flip-detection to my hashing system. Besides that, the only method I can think of to reduce the time it takes would be to offload the actual drawing onto an external program, maybe a python script.


Zxcvdnm wrote:
two hours on a train that can be spent mapping? :D hope all is well brother.

Hah, indeed! Now that Tib's life has settled a bit, we should start cranking away at Isorath again! I may put together some underground area shells while we're still working out actual placement and gameplay.