Blog

Well, Xmas has been and gone, but for some reason they were still playing carols over the speakers in Safeways this morning. I don’t get that, but we’ll move on.

Spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1. Great game, very dramatic. Will get a copy of MW2 at some point, but probly after I’ve had a chance to finish off some of the other titles in the increasing pile of uncompleted games. I’ve also had an odd inclination this holidays to go and revisit some of the classics, which had me trundling through the depths of Black Mesa the other day as well… I never thought I would ever see a resonance cascade.

On to other things, this time schoolwork. about mid-way through first year, we created a 2D C++ game framework using OpenGL, which we then used to make a couple of other projects, a tech demo for particle effects, and a game for our final project. Flagged on the list of optional holiday work is learning some basic DirectX graphics calls, and modifying some of the items in our 2D framework to fit in with what comes packaged in DirectX. This is my homework for tonight.

I liked OpenGL – it made a lot of sense intrinsically, and it was easy to understand and write for. I’m yet to get any hands-on experience with DirectX yet, but looking at the code from a couple of examples I’ve looked at so far, it looks very much like windows code, which is to say it looks ugly as hell. If you’ve ever seen the minimum amount of code required to create a blank window to create a windows app, you’ll know what I mean.

But then again, I recognise that I’m bitching about something I haven’t worked with yet. We’re looking to create some basic 2D and 3D graphics apps, and also implement our Vector/Node/etc objects with the existing DirectX matrices, etc. Will be cool to get it working and see what it’s actually like. And hey, like it or not, I’m going to have to learn it at some point anyway.

Apologies for the nonsensical ranting nature of this post. It’s getting rather hot here in the study today, and by the look of the weather report we’re in for more of the same over the next week. Methinks I might drop down and grab a cold drink before getting started.

Cheers all,
Craig.