I’ve been feeling the effects of my early design decisions over the past few days. With this being the most involved game engine I’ve written, I’ve definitely suffered from the lack of experience, meaning most of Day 6 and 7 needed to be spent correcting those problems. This means that on the 3D side, a bunch of the requirement that we’ve needed to implement are far overdue, and are hurting our chances of meeting the Sunday deadline. The goals for Day 7 were:
Role-playing Games (RPGs) are all about the numbers. Quantifying attributes, calculating armor values, computing damage after mitigation; It’s a thing of beauty for data geeks. Up until Day 6, we had enough on our plate to worry about just getting the world to work without thinking about the calculations and equations that are integral to it. But, finally, it’s time to bust out the Excel spreadsheets, power up the calculators and do some math. The goals:
Day 5 marks the midpoint of our development cycle, coincidentally falling on a Wednesday. I think we’ve come a long way in just the first half of the project - the trick will be continuing that pace of development over the second half. Day 5’s goals were a bit more modest compared to previous days. On the OpenGL side, I’m getting to a point where most of the development I’m doing is the kind of work I’ve never done before with this tech, so progress feels like it’s slowing down.
After 3 days of solid development time, Day 4 called for a bit of clean up in the 3D engine code. It was work that needed to be done, but unfortunately not the kind of material that makes for a good blog post. The goals for the day were more nebulous, and performance a bit harder to measure.
Day 3 continued the trend of setting goals that were just slightly out of reach. They say you’re not supposed to set unreachable goals, but it feels like, given the time crunch we’re in, making these tight schedules keeps us working as hard as possible. The goals for Day 3:
Day 2 began around noon at Kwartzlab, on the second day of the Global Synchronous Hackathon. We were feeling ambitious, and laid out another 3 goals for the day:
Day 1 started off bright and early at Kwartzlab, coinciding with the first day of February’s Global Synchronous Hackathon. We had four development goals for the day:
As a learning exercise, we (@malexw and @ryanfox) have decided to take our 5 day reading week + 4 days of weekends and write a computer game. For me, writing a game is an itch I’ve wanted to scratch for a while. I’ve come close, most recently writing a quick but incomplete OpenGL game at a Hackathon last month with some software engineering students, but I’ve never completed a game that I would be willing to release.
With Kwartzlab’s recent 3D printer aquisition, we needed to put together a set of tools for members to create objects that could be printed by the machine. The RepRap printer we purchased has an associated open source project for loading standard 3D object files, called stereolithography (STL) files, and converting them to the printer’s machine language, called G-code.
This weekend, Facebook held their first international Camp Hackathon event for students from the University of Toronto (U of T) and University of Waterloo (UW). For a full 24 hours from 5:00 PM on January 21 to January 22, over 200 students (including a full coach bus of students from U of T) occupied UW’s Student Life Center, designing, developing, and hacking fantastic new software. The goal of the hackathon was completely open-ended. While there had been rumors of a development theme for teams to work on, at the beginning of the event the organizer announced that teams should work on anything they wanted, and focus on learning new skills and developing “something awesome”.