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I remember saying something about not letting too much time pass between blog posts

Been very busy last couple of weeks on our graphics assignment at school. We did it over around 6 weeks in groups of three, with my part of the project being developing shader effects. We made an underwater submarine simultion, and I made a series of shaders to create various underwater effects, such as seaweed waving in the current, an overall all-screen wave to simulate light refraction between the water and air, and blue colour/fog effects, so that objects further from the camera are tinged blue, and become transparent and fade into the distance. It was lots of fun, however shaders can be frustrating to implement, as they can be more problematic to debug, particularly when you’re used to all the whiz-bang debugging tools in Visual Studio. All done though, and I’m very happy with the results for a first attempt. Peter and Phillip that I worked on the assignment with were really good in handling all of the other engine programming and game objects. We’ve got an EXE for it, that I’ll clean up and put up soon for download.

Onto the next assignment already, and we’re looking at choosing a research topic to investigate an aspect of games technology, and generate a research study which will be due at the end of the year. I’m looking into doing something with physics applications, and was initially thinking of working on Rigid Body 3D physics, however I’m thinking a bit more on it now, and wondering if it’s better to choose something a bit more unique, that isn’t covered in most existing 3D Physics engines… Might see what kind of Aerospace-y simulation work I can do… I’ve got a couple of ideas cooking, and I want to make sure it’s interesting, and also requires lots of work! Anyways, I’ll have a chat with my tutor tomorrow, pick his brain for a couple of ideas, then we’ve got the Easter break to work on it and make my final decision.

Also, now that the graphics assignment’s done, it means I can catch up on some of the Gamebryo tutorials that I put aside while concentrating on the assignment. That will be more fodder for the easter break too, but got a good start on some of that in class. Also was working earlier this week on building a basic DirectX 10 framework so I can play around with that. Got a great book (http://www NULL.jblearning NULL.com/catalog/9781598220537/) on it with lots of info, just need to finalise a good framework to start with, so it’s easy to work with, but also easy to incorporate new things for the more advanced topics. Been ploughing through the book for the last couple of weeks on the tram to and from school, and it’s cleared up a bunch of topics that were baffling me in class, so am very keen to get stuck into it.

Speaking of tram trips, spent today’s on the netbook revising my CV… which is always a bit of a painful and tedious process. It’s particularly strange for me this time round, as I have to delete most of the details of my experience over the last 5 years, as I’m changing fields, so most of it is irrelevant. It’s reminding me of all the good experiences I had in engineering, and all the skills I picked up though, which is always a good pick-up.

Anyways, more to come soon (and I hopefully mean that this time)

Cheers,
Craig.