Posts Tagged ‘visual studio’

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Deck The Halls With Visual Studio? Nah.

December 31, 2008

I might as well make one last post this year, before going back to working my ass off on my GS1 code. Also, 4000 page views… thanks?

Christmas has been alright, althought it’s a bit depressing when you have a deadline constantly looming over your head, and you spend every moment you’re not working thinking ‘why am I not working?’ So… yeah. Cheery. Between relatives and money from an old bank account, I’ve currently got around £450 to spend on a laptop, methinks I’ll go for a Dell Vostro 1310 which should cost me around £570… I’d better wait for my loan to come in first in a few days time, then I’ll have money in my account to actually buy it ¬¬

And then there’s my Games Software Development ICA. Actually, after the work I did yesterday, I’m feeling pretty confident, as I have my tile manager / map generator up and running and drawing 342 tiles at 220fps – I wouldn’t mind modifying the blit function to accept vertical tile strips rather than horizontal (better efficiency, less memory jumping), but that’s the least of my worries. By no means am I anywhere near failing the module (I managed a defnite pass 3 or 4 weeks ago), it’s just whether I’ll get it up to the standard I see in my head. As far as major game elements go, I still need to do collision, as well as a bullet manager and tile-based AI. And I have a week left to do it in. Great. It doesn’t help that I’m downscaled to a single 17″ monitor and no speakers, but it’s not so bad. I just need to put the effort in.

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Merry belated Christmas and all the best for the new year,

~phil

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So Far, So Good.

October 21, 2008

I guess that I’ve done enough of the second year to get a grip on how things are going… it’s now the fourth week, and things seem to be going fairly smoothly course-wise. Well, nearly.

By far my favourite module this year is Games Software Development 1 – Keith is a fantastic lecturer, and seeing as we’re working with then API that he wrote himself, he’s completely knowledgeable on the module content. I’m also enjoying Middleware quite a bit, playing around with Unreal Editor is certainly more interesting than using Maya like last year. Windows GUI Programming is growing on me as well – Graham is a stern teacher at times, but he certainly knows his stuff, and everything is structured just right. I’m staying behind for half an hour or so after practicals so I can finish my C# projects ^^

However, not all modules are fun. 4 weeks in, and I still don’t know what we’re actually doing in the Tools Programming for Games module – coding Windows in C++ just seems too damn complicated after doing it all in C#. And as for Algorithms & Data Structures… boring code, with a practical tutor that doesn’t even know how to use a computer. Great ¬¬

It’s still an improvement over last year’s modules, though. This time they’re all relavent, and I’m producing small projects that can actually go towards a portfolio… which is still in construction, actually. It’s a shame my HTML is kinda crappy, but you can check it out over at http://www.nearlyphil.co.uk/ if you so wish. Now, to get around to filling out my placement year application form… *sigh*