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.

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

~phil

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*