that time of year again

December is looming, and if it isn't obvious enough with all the holiday ads showing up, Christmas will be here any minute now.

The winter holidays are the best since everybody who left for out-of-province universities will be back. My high school buddies will be sitting around having conversations as if we are still in high school. It's the cool thing about guy friends - there's always an assumption of friendship. It doesn't matter what happens, whether we split up for months or even years on end - when everybody gets together everything continues exactly the way it was left off.

Which of course, means Christmas gifts. Gosh. I remember thinking last year that I wish I could have fewer friends just for the winter so I don't have to spend so much. But now that I think about it, there's really no need to cheap out (too much) on gifts. Is there a huge difference between spending $200 total and $250 on all my gifts? No. Will it affect my life and my living conditions? Most definitely not.

My philosophy is that spending money should be strongly moderated on things that you do frequently. Do you tend to eat out a lot? Moderate that shit. Stop eating at fancy restaurants so often. On the other hand, for one-time events, you shouldn't feel so restricted. In the grand scheme of things, you spend the most money on frequent small things rather than the big things. Damn at my food spending.

So yep. Good friends will probably be getting something. I'll probably also be getting myself something, reward myself a bit for being so cool all semester.

And here's the coolest, happiest song of all time:

unsuccessful coding session

I met up with my coding partner to work on the game for a good 6 hours yesterday at UBC. It started off well - heck, it started off with eating some Mongolian BBQ at the village (amazing food, never tried it before), followed up by an analysis of the problems we were encountering and possible solutions. Today was dedicated to the swinging mechanic (like the grappling hook from Bionic Commando).

This was my proposed solution:

Leon researched a bit of pendulum swing mechanics and worked out a semi-solution basing the player movement off of angles. Personally, I find that method a bit limiting, since it's not easy to take into account the initial velocity state of the player when he enters his swing position.

My solution is based off of pure kinematics (a lot of it, at that), and in theory it should produce a nice uneven arc while taking into account both the initial x and y velocities as well as allowing for adjustable accelerations.

We decided to try out both of these solutions, since the odds are that neither solution will really work (due to some unforeseen issue with our designs), so we slaved away for 5 hours.

End result: not much.

We kept running into issues. Our next-game function design was a bit inconsistent, making it especially difficult for my solution to be implemented as well as requiring new additions to our data structure. Leon's circular swing mechanic wouldn't stop swinging, resulting in a constant circular motion from the character once his swing hooked onto a platform. By 7:30, we were both burnt out, and decided to call it a day.

Estimated number of hours worked on the game so far: 15

Estimated number of hours remaining: at least 15

It's gonna be a long ass trip. The results will be sweet, I can taste it.

alone in the dark

on my bike, that is.

I forgot how amazing it feels to be speeding through the roads at night on my bike. Of course, besides the fact that I was wearing all black today and that I could easily have gotten hit in the face by a left-turning truck. There's something about night air that makes things different. Combine that with my music playlist that I set depending on my mood (electro house, chill-out, or oldies), and it feels like heaven.

And as a bonus, I can talk to myself. Really loudly. Maybe even sing a friggin song. Fuck y'all haters staring at me like I'm a creep, you only hear me for a split second before I zip by.

muhahaha

And here is a progress report on the most amazing game that is being developed at this moment. Readers of this blog will receive a discount for the purchase of this game once it becomes huge and gets published by Microsoft Game Studios in the international game market.

There are apparently 500 lines in the code file, but that's including all the extra spaces. A good estimate on the actual lines of code would probably be in the mid 400s. This is about 3 weeks of planning, trying, and failing with my programming buddy.

Damn. That's a lot of work for not a whole lot of results.

But it feels good to have the basic framework nailed. Having the player model detect whether it's on a platform, making sure it doesn't pass through when it's velocity is too high, and allowing it to pass through in certain cases was tough to implement, especially since I didn't foresee most of the problems I would run into.

This is probably the most satisfied I've been in a loong time. When I sit on my ass to get some of this coding done, it reminds me of the times when I did the same to 3d animate. The same intense concentration, the same sense of accomplishment by the end of the work session.

Going back to my early early blog posts about me looking for real things that interest me, I think I found a practical hobby that I can really get into now. Feels good man.

Next on the to-do list: implement a grappling hook/swinging mechanic. Shit, I should've paid more attention to pendulums in physics 101.

disjointed blog post

Post featuring some random thoughts, no particular connections between them.

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When I was volunteering at a place full of little kids in grade 12, my volunteer supervisor told me that I looked like I wasn't very good at expressing my feelings.

What? What does that even mean?

It's not even that I was too quiet, because I wasn't. Come on, those fob volunteers who were just there for the hours never talked to anybody who wasn't Chinese. I never totally understood what it meant, and still don't really know what that means. I never asked her about it though, since she joked around about me not knowing how to use the dishwasher there.

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I am just chilling at my desk watching some YouTube and doing some casual music hunting, and my mom brought me my third snack for the morning. Mom, why do you work so hard? Why do you wake up at 4 every morning to make us breakfast and lunch? How are you so cheery all the time?

I know her joints hurt by the end of the day because she works so hard at everything. What can I do? It's not that I want her to stop - her food is amazing, and she loves doing it, but I want to make life easier for her. I can really only think of getting her money so that she can stop working such a tiring job.

Gosh, I feel like a terrible son sometimes.

-----

Dang, I couldn't get together with Leon for game coding yesterday since he had something to do, but I'm heading out to UBC later today to meet him. The functions are going to get amazingly complicated, and I'm not even sure if computers can run them 60 times a second. Will my laptop explode when I press run?

What's exciting is that I know we're going to fail a lot of things. We might've made a critical data structure mistake, and the game doesn't run as intended. Maybe the bar-detection function that I created yesterday is super inefficient, and won't run very well. It's really the only way I'll learn how this stuff works though, so I'll take it like a man.

bad day?

Yep, bad day. Not even a lot of things happened, and I probably have it real good compared to others. But daaaang.

Why can't I just be a robot that feels good all day every day?

friday code nights

Well, I think i'll be making this a weekly thing.

Got together with my coding buddy to start on the design of our platformer. We're going to create it in Dr. Racket first, and translate it into Java if we feel that it's necessary (in theory, it shouldn't be thaaaaat hard).

Here's a picture of some of our early work on the design (featuring teammate, Leon)

Definitely the most exciting thing I've done all week. 2.5 hours of discussing the game's mechanics, potential problems, and writing out the full data definition along with preliminary function design. Crossing my fingers that this thing turns out playable - better yet, fun.



Aaand since Caro asked, here are the requirements I put out for the group, ordered by importance:

1) Must have free time - no current honors students, cannot be taking more than 5 courses per term

2) Must be intending to go into the compsci field after graduation, whether it's for industry or research

3) Must be on a similar skill level as the rest of the members - varying skill levels will result in an unsustainable group environment and will probably be destined to fail

4) GPA is irrelevant

5) Must be: trustworthy, reliable, be willing to self-learn, (insert more positive character traits here)

Purpose: to create our own projects together and learn how to code effectively in a group setting

If interested, apply now.