Evenings are dark again!

Here's one more short post, and a warning that I'm on holiday for one week beginning Friday, so my next post may end up being scheduled and therefore old news.

I shall be here in a week. Expect numerous photographs, of nowhere near this artistic quality.

I've actually made decent progress with the game - I'm now at 6.5K lines of Java code, which to be fair doesn't sound like much, but does represent significant progress. By comparison, Unreal Engine + Editor is reportedly over 1.4M lines, Source SDK at 780K, Quake 3 at 310K, and the Crysis SDK at 280K lines. In any case, judging a program by the number of lines of code is like judging an aircraft by its weight [quote shamelessly paraphrased from Bill Gates]. I'm aiming to have a working renderer with terrain, water, models and UI working in "real" space within the week - which should be achievable. One significant annoyance for me is that OpenGL intentionally doesn't have any native way of handling fonts - which is going to add a significant amount of code (unless I cheat, and just bake every bit of text into images, which isn't possible for stuff like resource count).

Once I've got the renderer up and running, the rest of the engine is actually much less complex in terms of the maths, and doesn't have to be nearly as efficient or fast. Keeping everything in sync across a network isn't too bad as long as you aren't doing any prediction (for those who are interested, there's a very impressive explanation of how games like Counter-Strike predict movement over in the Valve wiki or for the older Quake here) From there all I need to know in terms of engine is skeletal animation (I could probably implement it now, but don't fully understand it - there's some maths we simply haven't covered - Quaternions - from what I understand, essentially multi-dimensional imaginary numbers - the extension of an Argand diagram into 3 or 4 dimensional space - too many hyphens - I think not!). After that the client needs sound, encryption and streaming of textures/file manager, and then is finished.  Server-side requires a file server, gameplay logic, account manager and AI (PvP would of course solve this, but it's worth having very basic AI to help the game start and get people acquainted with controls and basic gameplay). From there, my job is level design tools. supporting the artists and gameplay, and the website/backend.

Ambitious? Yes. Achievable? Let's find out, shall we?
Charlie

What's eating your time?

Despite having disassembled my main desktop, I've found that I still have ample distraction even on a Linux laptop - so I decided to present, in list form, the top 5 web-apps I use to distract myself:

5. Webmasters Tools/Analytics/AWS Control Panel
All are just small apps you can use to check the status of a site or sites and how they are performing - useful tools for analysing your sites. Not so useful to check every half-hour though, since the data is updated daily.

4. Whatever tab is to the left of this one
This rule sadly also applies - instead of concentrating on the contents of one tab, if one starts to lose its appeal, the one to its left starts to look all the more tempting. If I happen to be on the left-most tab then.... yeah, right - like I'd ever make it over there. The tabs on the left haven't seen the light of day since the machine was last booted

3. Grooveshark
Finding new music is easy. Concentrating with said music playing is often harder.

2. YouTube:

With awesomeness like that throwing itself at you, what's not to like?

1. Facebook
This one doesn't need any explanation.

(Twitter, Reader, and a few other sites also feature but less prominently)

There's an entry on the XKCD blog that looks at the procrastination response, which is surprisingly interesting. Essentially, in the absence of a clear way forward in solving a problem, the brain will throw out the potential longer-term satisfaction of solving the problem, for the shorter-term reward gained by, for example, opening up a new tab and browsing Facebook. The new action, as long as it has some novelty value, will almost always be more appealing, because it provides an instant and always-available reward. Hence, over time, more challenging things are pushed aside by the short-term rewards of a quickly-changing social site such as Facebook, which never loses its novelty value because of its continually-current nature. Similarly, sites like Twitter and YouTube can also become ingrained responses when faced with the slightest of problems in your intended work.

As for solving the above? If I find a solution in time for my Chemistry exam, it'll both save me from an embarrassing and complete failure, and will be shared on here next time.

Number of times I alt-tabbed to another window whilst writing this: 6
Charlie

The last 604,800 seconds

Give or take a few percent:

• In the last 200, I've probably pissed off 40% of the contents of the house by dropping heavy things great distances at 4AM. I hope they don't repay the favour.
• In the last 2,000, Osama Bin Laden is announced dead. Convenient that the announcement came around re-election time...
• In the last 20,000, I've written a good few hundred lines of code. Not much, but enough to not feel like an utter procrastinator either.
• In the last 200,000, I've watched Thor, but that's already been covered by Benji about ten times better than I ever could over here. I also finished a damn good book (more to follow).

And looking forward:

• In the next 200, I'll probably spend 100 of them staring at the screen proof-reading and feeling desperately inadequate, and guilty for not revising.
• In the next 2,000, I might even get some sleep.
• In the next 200,000 I need to do about 9 maths papers, give or take.
• In the next 2,000,000 we will begin sitting our exams, quite potentially altering our university options and deciding entire career paths.
• For the purposes of not going down a much darker, existential path, I'll gloss over the fact that 3 lines more is a lifespan, maybe 4 at maximum is everything we know of and can care about, and about 1.5 beyond that is the start of recorded history.

On a lighter note, I appear to have officially taken up reading again (having read 5 books in about 2-3 weeks). Yesterday, I read "Will Grayson, Will Grayson", a stunning collaboration between John Green (of whom I'm a massive fan) and David Levithan. 

It's all sparkly and pretty in real life. 

The book is an engaging read from start to finish, featuring a clever plot, genuine characters and relationships who change believably as the plot progresses. I personally loved its pace and twists, and pretty much everything about it. It isn't perfect by any stretch (what book is?), but it's definitely well worth picking up a copy and spending a few hours on, as is any John Green book (he's also a YouTuber, which is how I discovered his books - see here for more information).

Want to pick up a copy? If you know me, I'll lend you my copy, or pick one up from Amazon:

Forfeit vlog (would have been today except for an annoyance with the microphone) and 3D printer progress to follow in due time...

That is the reason why logarithmic scales could be considered depressing...

Charlie

Nine Days of Freedom

That's right, it's been nine days since school finished. To make myself feel slightly better, I decided to work out what I've done with my time instead of revising:

• L'artista
• RC car on the Heath
• Plenty of coding and database work (now fairly comfortable with JavaScript and AJAX, if by "comfortable" you read "no longer feel gut-wrenching terror at seeing statements like $('#element').load("somefile.htm").fadeIn(1000, new function(alert("BOO!");));" - that is a valid and "sensible" line of code AND grammar, by the way.)
• Writing a haiku to express my undying hatred for IE6
• Portal!
• Mathematics (sadly, unrelated to anything in the exams, but happily, related to my game)
• Benji's
• Extracting dustballs from my brother's laptop. 

I think that justifies spending no time on revision?

Under the sub-heading "Portal!" I was messing around with some screen recording software, and was pretty happy with this run-through. (shameless segway into my "rich media" of the week):

Click me, you know you want to?

T minus 8 days,

Charlie