4th semester...Updates every week I thought when I wrote the last post, well that was until 4th semester hit in and its first 3 weeks completely overwhelmed me with how much different and more intensive they are compared to the past 3 semesters. For the better though, We have finally stopped spending most of our time on 3D and art stuff (ahum 3rd semester ahum) and now 4 out of my 5 courses are devoted to programming.
But with this came a lot more work. Since programming teachers arn't exactly the types that tell you what to do or how things work. I find myself figuring out a lot of stuff by myself on top of studying the theory of both programming and graphics programming. Even though this is not required since there will be no theoretical exams but I do it out of interest and because my plan at the moment is to go do a master in Computer Science after this bachelor. Side effect of this is ofcourse that I have less time to finish all my weekly assignments. I found myself severely falling behind at the end of the 2nd week so during the 3rd week the alarm went off when every assignment built further on the last one. So I kicked things in overdrive and finished almost 2 weeks worth of assignments in 1. I'm glad i'm all caught up now. Programming: The course programming 4 is different from the previous 3 in that it doesn't really teach the language C++ anymore or things like SQL, unit testing, etc. It teaches the icing on the cake so to speak, that stuff should be known and trained by now. We learn handy things to use that C++ for focused on game development. Things like memory allocation, cache optimization and software design patterns have been visited these past weeks. So far I have a pretty good grasp of the theory behind all these things and even though I was a little slow my assignments like for example my stack allocator have passed the necessary unit tests. Our teacher keeps mentioning and recommending books like "effective modern C++" by Scott Meyers and "Game Programming patterns" by Bob Nystrom which I now want to read all about (My copy of the first one is already on its way) but I hope I can make the time for it cause I don't trust myself. The eventual end goal of this course will be to write a game engine to play Pacman but fully optimized and utilizing many of the desing patterns we see in class. Graphics Programming: This is the big one this semester, 9 study points spanning 6 hrs of classes a week it is obviously the class is find myself spending the most time on, so far we have been doing a lot of hlsl work. Writing pixel shaders for things like cube- normal- and opacity mapping, Phong specular lighting and fresnel falloff also geometry shader work from spikes to sprite and text rendering. To pass this course we will have to write our own geometry shader that does something interesting (exampels have ranged from furr to coral reef generation. Aswell as write a game in our schools engine. Gameplay Programming: This is a rather small course, currently focusing on the likes of AI in games. We are now doing steering behavior and by next week I have to add obstacle avoidance to my boids. But I am planning on doing a little more than just that this weekend since this course hasn't really gotten my full attention yet. Its a small course on the 2 hrs of a Monday filled with 8 hrs of classes where most of the things we do are shown in class so I just try to follow along with the teachers typing since my brain isn't really worth a lot anymore at that point. This course needs a proper theory study and a reviewing and redoing of some of the code and exercises from me to get a good grasp of it. I don't want to fall behind when we start implementing A* 3D for games 2: Rigging is boring, 3ds max is hell, fuck this course.
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AuthorFlorian Gaeremynck Archive
June 2019
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