Tuesday, March 27, 2012

A successful weekend

A year has passed and we have visited our capital city to participate in the programming tournament again.

The tournament was held on Saturday in Ljubljana at the institute of Jožef Štefan (IJS). Our school organized the trip and we arrived there sometime in the morning. The competition started at 10 AM till 1 PM. There ware 4 groups as always: 3 difficulty stages where you had to solve tasks with programming and 1 group where you had to build a website.

I joined the 2nd group of programmers. It isn’t the hardest one but we didn’t have any real preparations for the tournament so it was better that I went into the 2nd group. We had to solve 5 problems using any of the more known languages (C,C++, Python, Java, C#, …). The website team had to build a pong game out of basic HTML using divs and JavaScript.

After the competition ended we had to wait till later for the results. A few talks were held to shorten the wait time.

The results (Slovenian link) were in and I was 4th with 86 points out of 100. I’m really happy with that. I won an 60 GB SSD drive and I plan to switch my OS drive today. A friend of mine (Vito Meznarič (Slovenian blog)) was 1st in website development.

I would call that a successful day.

In other news: I made a new video log few days ago and haven’t posted it here yet. Sometime it takes some days for me to post…

 

For those who are not in the mood to watch the video, here is a picture of the current state of my small Box2D framework.

boxtest

I added collision sensors, filtering and ignoring into it. Most of the framework is done I only have to fix some rendering things and maybe add joins but I don’t think that I will need them so I probably won’t add them yet.

And that is all for this post.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Working on the new project

Hello, I haven’t posted for quite some time now so I think it’s time that I update the situation.

First let’s go through what I have been working on for the past 2 weeks. Well one of the bigger changes is that I started learning playing the guitar. Yeah, I got myself a guitar and now I spend at least an hour a day practicing. When I started last week I was practicing even more so I didn’t put much time into other things. But now I just settled on a “fixed” schedule so I can work on other things. I hope I’ll stick with it because I really want to learn it.

I also finished my school project “School Jumper”. I released it for my school class for testing and already made a new version fixing some bugs. I also found a mistake that I was doing from the day I started with OpenGL. I thought that using images for textures with a resolution different than the power of 2 was totally OK. But as testing showed it was not. Some graphics cards did not support those texture resolution and the result was that the users only saw white squares. This is a problem that appeared already in Squared Shooter and every other game that came after it. Back then I thought that it was a driver problem but now I know that it isn’t. So from now on I’ll only stick to the default (16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, …) resolutions.

“School Jumper” isn’t really interesting. I was getting bored with it early but it had to be done. But it’s a small little time waster. I’ll wait some time before I release it here because some changes might happen but it probably won’t take long. I’ll also make a Linux port when I will find the time. I will release the source code after my project it graded so it will be free to use. Expect the source code around end of May or something like that.

blog

The main focus currently is on the “documentation” of the game/project. I have to write it and post it till April 14th and I still have a lot to do. It’s a pain to write it but it has to be done.

The other big thing currently is working on the new project. I’m learning Box2D for it and I’m writing myself a really small framework for easy creation and handling of complex shapes and things like that. I still have to look up some things but Box2D is really an awesome framework. But it also changes the way you handle moving, collision and rendering so it takes some time to getting used to it. I also switched from orthographic OpenGL to normal OpenGL so everything is a little different now and takes time to properly understand it.

And that is all for now. I also haven’t made any new videos so I will try to make an interesting test with Box2D and make a video with it so that you can see what it looks like. Maybe even today, but who knows.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Video log #3

No fancy post names. It is what it is: a new video log!

Well it does look like I missed the Wednesday upload date but now it’s here. I’m kind of lazy these days and don’t work that much. Who knows why. I’m probably in some creative block state or in super lazy mode. I’ll try to change that as soon as possible.

I just show the projects I have been working on these days. The game is almost finished. I implemented the instructions screen while the video was uploading which leaves just the levels. I’ll try to make the game at least 20-30 levels long so that it has some play time (more than 10 minutes). The OpenGL demo might seam silly for some, but I never really got into true 3D with perspectives, triangles only, no orthos and some silly lighting. Also as I said don’t expect 3D games.

Now that the game is almost finished and I’ll start writing the documentation. I hope that won’t kill me because I hate writing it. I’ll also start recording new videos for the course so that I can get it public in a month or so.

And that is all for this post.