Lots of Stuff

So I got Fallout 3 the other day and it's pretty awesome. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something new to play. I played for 6 hours today and completely lost track of time. It's been a while since I've played a game that did that to me. There are plenty of reviews out there for the game, so I'm not going in depth, but I will say that it's an amazing game and it should be played at least once. I'm about 8 hours into the game and I haven't even finished the second main quest yet. I've been busy doing a bunch of side quests and just exploring the game world (which is absolutely huge).

For our MOD project, we switched engines again. This time, over to Unreal 3. Vincent and a few other members of our team met with some of my school's alumni who worked on the COR MOD project. They gave us a bunch of tips on how to organize the team to succeed and they were the ones who said we should be going with a different engine. The advantages of U3 are that it's a more active community for modding. Not only that, but you have a bigger audience once the game is done, too. Anyway, I'm going to have to start learning UnrealScript sooner rather than later now. Not really looking forward to that, but once I have it down, the MOD should start rolling along fairly well (on the programming side, anyway).

As for my other C++ programming, it's coming along pretty well. I still want to do my own programming projects instead of these assignments, but I'm as motivated as I can be while having to work on this stuff. I want to write another entry soon on some cool stuff I learned in my class recently, but I'm probably going to change my blog theme first so I can actually use black text. Getting code samples to show up in a blogger post isn't all that easy. So look for that post coming up soon.

Puff is going fairly well, too. We had our weekly meeting last night. Unfortunately, we didn't get as good of a turn out as we have been this semester so far, but it was still pretty fun. In the next few weeks, I want to do some kind of event. Josh brought up an interesting idea to have a cook out at Galleria one day and all sit outside, smoke, and eat some BBQ. Sounds like a good time to me. If we don't go with that one, I'm still all for going to Cafe Istanbul's new hookah lounge upstairs. I haven't smoked there yet and it looks pretty nice. Not only that, I think it'd be good for a lot of the club members to go to an actual hookah bar to smoke.

Well, that's about all I have for tonight. I'm pretty damn tired. All this programming lately and trying to meet a deadline has taken its toll on me. I haven't slept much in the past few days. It's not a huge deal...I'm pretty used to all nighters and long days of work like this, but now that I can relax a bit, I'm definitely going to take advantage of it. I'll post again soon.

Happy Halloween!

Programming, and more Programming

I'm glad that I've been getting back into the programming mood lately.  I still find it hard to get any work done at the house, but I don't really see that as a lack of drive as much as there are just too many distractions around here.  I managed to solve a couple problems with some of my code for C++ and progress a bit with my work, which has made me a bit happier, but I'm still stressed since my Oct. 31st deadline is fast approaching.

Last night, I was reading up on the STL (Standard Template Library) for C++.  That's one area I haven't had much experience yet.  Using vectors isn't very hard, but learning the meaning behind them and how to use them properly is a good thing to know.  Today in my C++ class, we went over some of that same stuff.  We got a nice little crash course in iterators, vectors, and some of the algorithm header functions from the STL.  It was a great class.  One thing I found particuarly interesting was function pointers.  You can pass a function to another function as an argument and use it within that function.  An example that uses this is "algorithm"'s for_each function.  To use this function, you pass it two iterators and a function to execute.  So if I had a function called "printIt" that is implemented as so:


void printIt(int i)
{
    cout << i << " ";
}

All this does is print the value passed to it with a space after it. Once you had this implemented, you need to create a vector object and pass the values you want to iterate through to the for_each function:


vector<int> vec;
for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
    v.push_back(i);
}

for_each(v.begin(), v.end(), printIt);

This would print out all of the values in the vector using my printIt function.  This works because functions are really just pointers to machine instructions for that function.  By passing "printIt" to the for_each function, you're telling it where in memory the instructions for that function are so it can use the function.  If you want to see the implementation for the for_each function, you can look it up online.  It's actually pretty simple, but you need to know templates for it.  We actually made our own implementation of it in class both with templates and without.

Anyway, I have to get back to some more programming.  I hope this was insightful for someone.  I thought it was really interesting.  Once I get more done, I'll make another post and share some more.

EDIT: Sorry about the formatting. This was my first try at putting source code in a blog post and I had to edit HTML to do so. In the process, I accidently deleted some of the post. Let me know if something doesn't make sense and I'll clarify!

Baseball and Programming

So today I missed my programming class due to a few things, but I've really got an itch to do some more progamming.  Hopefully I can get a project done in the next day or two and get this incomplete from last semester out of the way so I can work on the MOD project as my main priority.  

Speaking of the MOD project, it's going fairly well.  I'm going to be working on the technical document for the project in the next few days and then get together with Cullen to get the programming doc done so we can get down to business.  Vincent has been doing most of the design doc and other documentation himself as the project lead.  Things seem to be coming along quite nicely - even if we've lost a couple members already.

Game 4 of the ALCS is today.  Hopefully my Red Sox will make a comeback and tie the series at 2-2.  They need some wins if their postseason hopes are to remain alive.  I love the post season in baseball.  It's always a fun time.  I've been watching all season long and it's fun to see everything play out in the final games of the year.  I'm a huge Red Sox fan, but really as long as they do better than the Yankees by the end of the season, I'm pretty happy.

I know this was another fairly short post.  Hopefully I'll have a bit to say later today or tomorrow once I dive into some programming again.  I'm really looking forward to it.  The project I'm working on now is a custom time/date class (without using the ones built into C++).  After that, I have a vector class to write.  Fun times ahead!

New Day

So it has been a while since I've kept a blog.  The last one kind of died off after only a couple posts because I made it too focused, I think.  I tried to keep it on video game news and such and I realized that's not really what I want to do anymore.  I figured a place to keep my thoughts would help as of late because I've been more stressed lately between make up programming work, auditing a class, looking for an internship, Puff,  and working as the lead programming for the Asylum MOD project.

With Nicole back in Alabama for a couple weeks and not being sick anymore (I just got over strep throat this past week), I've had some time to do more programming.  I had planned on doing some last week, but the strep throat just took all my energy and concentration out of me.  

 

Besides all of this, I've been thinking of some fun events to do for Puff.  There haven't been many lately, and I think it would be nice to meet up and do something fun with the club outside the regular club meetings once a week.  It's actually one of the main things I plan to bring up at the next Puff meeting this Wed. night (be there!).  We've had a pretty good turn out, though.  I've always felt Puff was a great place to relax and unwind from the stress of classes, work, and project and I hope others feel that way when they attend, too.

I know this was a pretty short post, but I just wanted to get something up while I had some things fresh on my mind for the first blog post.  Once I get back into the swing of things with all this work, I should have quite a bit more to say.