Holidays!

Well, finally mock exams are over. I'm actually on my easter holiday break. Nothing to do now apart from cheap sex and Red Alert 2 lol. A lot of crap happened during the exam period, but the exams themselves were pretty easy.

I suppose that last blog post wasn't all that short after all. Since I have 11 days free, I'm gonna probably write a "LITTLE" tutorial on Skeletal Animation. This will be different from the rest so far as:

IT WILL USE openGL alone!!

Thats right, no Irrlicht, no Newton. I've gotta admit, its going to be a lot of work, especially since no 3d model file format supports everything I need. Some of you might be thinking about X and COLLADA files, but X files are hell to read and COLLADA is more of an interchange format. I've decided to write my own file format.

Then I realized that was a practical idea, especially for LunaLib. Instead of having to write small loaders for about 5 different model file formats, I write one large loader for a file format containing everything I need, like tangents and bones. The best part is, since I made it, I know everything I need to know about it.

Two other things before I go.

I have created a Devblog for Lunatek at http://lunatekdevblog.blogspot.com . It should keep you informed about things performing to LunaLib and our games. I won't be the only one posting. Sometimes Marc, Stephen and other staff members will post.

Next, take a peek at this image. It caught my eye on wikipedia so I just decided to show it here.




That image compares the styles in which characters were drawn in older animes to how they were drawn in newer animes. Interesting.

Now, this next image is a challenge that I'm going to give Stephen. Stephen's a good artist, but he's lazy, so I don't know the FULL extent of his abilities. I'm going to see if he can draw the picture below, but in different clothes and a different pose. If he does, I'll be REALLY impressed.



And to be honest, I don't know who the person in the image is.
*Grabs helmet and runs to bunker...*

Oh well.

See ya!

School is Rotting My Brain

Well, I knew it would be a lot of work, but geez...I'm overloaded. Between lab reports and my IT SBAs, I can barely find time to take a breather. Oh well, that's life.

In the time that I haven't been studying, I've been reading up on SSE and Artificial Intelligence, especially pathfinding algorithms. Pathfinding algorithms are actually strangely interesting, but then, I'm different. I've also been brushing up on a bit of shader work.

Yesterday, I got my report card. It wasn't all that bad. I got the 96% average I expected for Information Technology(pssh....) and a surprising 98% average for Additional Mathematics(I expected mid 80s). I also got a 94% average for Chemistry, and a 78% average for Physics.

My Biology grade however is shameful. That one is really gonna haunt me for a while.

Oh well, screw it. If anything, I'll just clean out the innards of my brain with a shotgun.

Yesterday, I also played against Clive in Halo 3. I LOVE THE FRIGGIN' GRAVITY HAMMER AND ENERGY SWORD. We played a match with only these two weapons, with Clive preferring the sword and me preferring the hammer. I won. Our scores were 30:20. We also played with guns, where I won again, but by a smaller margin(30:26).

Clive kept on trying to pop me with the mounted gun that he broke of, but... I'm just too good lol.

Sayonara,

Blender, Physics Engines, Holidays and Quake 4

Today, after playing Quake 4, I went on MSN messenger to talk to some friends of mine. Out of the blue, one of them suggested I should make a quake 4 mod. Fine. I started messing around with the Quake4 editor, and to my surprise, it was amazingly easy and intuitive. Another plus was that the scripting language resembled C, so I was right at home. After messing around with it for a few hours, I got bored, and decided to move on. I wasn't in the mood to work on my game engine, but I felt like improving my artistic skills, so I started working on the Blender Noob to Pro lessons and then messed around with MakeHuman. As I write this, I'm working on the modeling a die part in the beginner section of the Blender lessons.
So whats the point of all this information? Well, between all 3 programs, they have one thing in common. All of them have cleverly designed user interfaces, which gives me a great idea of what proper GUIs look like. What I've learnt will be put to good use, in the map editor for my game engine.For example:
1) I will do my best to make the whole thing Linux compatible.
2) Everything will be rendered in openGL(thus, it will use GLUT).
3) It will use a grid like the Quake 4 editor, with measurements shown.

Nerd stuff aside, in other news, today I went to my prize giving ceremony. I came second and got a book and a bunch of certificates.(Whoopdedooo!! <_<) I came second in my class. I don't mind this, because the guy that beat me has only 50% of his teeth, so he doesn't count. It was only a 1% difference.




Anyway, jokes aside(well, maybe not), today marks the official start of my Christmas holidays.

Here's another funny picture:



Bye People!!