Round 2 over, Bring on Round 3

I finished my DeVry GSP finals for GSP-220, Math for Game Programming and GSP-240, Practical Game Design with Lab course this week. I have a lot of opinions about the courses, but I'll keep it brief.

GSP-22, the math course, was really easy for me, but that's because I've had it all before with my engineering degree. It was still nice to have a refresher, but I didn't apply myself very well. I still learned some things which is good. I paid special attention to the uses of dot product and cross product as it pertains to many things I do in my professional life.

GSP-240 though was a disappointment. I wish I could say the class was a good one, as it has potential. I think it is way better than its predecessor GSP-110, but the two classes are so similar that its a waste of time to take both, though both are required. My team experience was plagued with inactivity, which cost me what I think could have been most valuable: working with others. The online nature of this degree just didn't work well for group projects in this class, at least not for me. I dislike setups where organizing and coordinating take more effort than just doing. I know part of my issues really stem from my concept of time being demented, I never think I have enough. Here's a tip to anyone out there taking this class, the iLab assignments for the Torque programming is just the Torque tutorials in disguise.

I've registered for my next classes, the first session of the Summer semester starts July 7th (2008). I'm taking the next math course, GSP-320, Math for Game Programming II and one of the more core game classes (I hope), GSP-260, Visual and Audio Design Fundamentals with Lab. I've already registered For session 2 courses too, which start in Sept. I'll be taking the next and final math course required for the degree: Math-233, Discrete Mathematics, and another core game class that sounds pretty interesting, GSP-290, Data Structures and Artificial Intelligence with Lab.

I'm So Busy Entertaining Myself

I feel like I've been really busy lately but I know I really haven't been. I feel this way because almost every night I've been playing video games. The wife talked me into Rock Band, so that and GTA IV have really sapped my free time.

Tonight marks my first online multiplayer console experience and I was super creeped out by it. I had never really thought about it, thinking only that it would be so much fun, but when I got there and started hearing other people talking and we started playing, it just felt so odd. I can't explain it, but I almost felt shy and vulnerable, really out of place. Maybe like standing at a cliff, your body resisting the height like your instincts taking over. It was weird. Then I killed a rockstar and felt better.

360 Hoy!

I couldn't stop thinking about it so I finally broke down... I own a 360 now and GTAIV! Look at me, I'm out bowling on a date. What game is this again?

W00t!

This is Hard

Big John Games is the developer and Destineer is the distributor of a couple Nintendo DS games, both these companies are MN local. Big John Games seems like a group of people I'd like to support, so I bought Plushee's for my 9 yr. old niece and Spitfire Heroes for myself.

My niece was very excited about Plushees. She played some and was very positive about it, picking out a couple animals as pets or whatever. I didn't get much chance to see it in action, other than her getting to level nine of Whack-A-Troll. Point is she liked it.

As for Spitfire Heroes, that game is hard! I decided to try it on Veteran, the medium difficulty. I finally got to mission 4, and my ass got handed to me again and again so I started over on very easy and breezed through the first 3 missions. The fourth was trouble again, but I kicked serious ass and beat it. All that struggle taught me a thing or two about the game. I beat it on the very easy setting. The boat/destroyer mission was the toughest since there's bullets coming in from everywhere. Luckily the plane you fly is a tank with wings!

I'm Big in Minnesota

When I arrived at work late today, 9:30 am, I was greeted by my co-worker Chris. He had a strange grin and a WTF look. I was feeling sorta sheepish since I was so late. Been having a hard time sleeping lately since I've been up playing Final Fantasy XII. (Makes me think of the drinking problem joke in Airplane.) Anyway, Chris says he has to show me something and he pulls out Minnesota Monthly magazine.
Here's a better image from the Solstice Film Festival slide show. That's me second from the left.
Bill's Big Pumpkins red carpet at the June 2007 Solstice Film Festival at the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul. Pictured right to left: Gail Foss, Ryan Foss, Stephanie Nagel, Bill Nagel

Team Woes at DeVry Online

My team for my GSP 240 Practical Game Design class was a lemon. It really sucked. Luckily there was one person who really helped finish our assignments, and other helped a little. It was still tough because we had 2.5 people doing 6 peoples work.

I wrote the prof as asked him what the deal was, if the team's non-functioning members had dropped out or what. His response was good, that he noticed we were having problems. Then he took our group and pushed us into other groups, breaking up the me and the other guy that started working well together. This makes sense of course, since he divided the groups functioning members up. Still sucks though.

Hail to the Ice From the Sky

Don't need to say much here. We had a storm. Biggest hail I've ever seen.

Trouble in Polygon Optimization Town

Apparently my Inventions and Great Ideas post stirred some mud. I've gotten a few comments and some e-mails. E-mails from people conveying their experiences and also one from an engineer at Right Hemisphere, with a marketing director's e-mail as a CC no less. Hmm...? Turns out some competitor to Right Hemisphere read into my post a little to deeply and wrote a blog post of their own, claiming that I allege my ideas were "stolen". This isn't true. The point of my post wasn't to scream foul or claim theft, it was that I learned a valuable lesson, a lesson regarding my "ideas". I freely gave my idea, a single idea not ideas as the blog suggests, to an engineer at Right Hemisphere and they listened. Is that so bad? No, in fact its good business. And when they came back, they pitched the idea back at me because of my unique problem and its unique solution. The point I was trying to make was that I hadn't thought out the situation thoroughly and I gave up my idea to someone who could use it to their advantage, potentially with no traceback to me. The idea was anything but stolen.

In fact, I contend that the idea still hasn't been implemented. I know of no tool or plug-in, for Right Hemisphere's Deep Exploration or any other, that does polygon reduction the way I explained it. One person responded suggesting my idea was nothing new, as its just a "Hierarchical Z-Buffer". However, what they failed to realize is I'm working in the modeling side of things, not the pipeline. I "concepted" a way a tool could analyze geometry and throw out useless polygons, similar to a runtime cull, but applied to the polygons in the geometry. My intent is to reduce and remove polygons from the geometry before it enters the pipe.

I feel I should mention some details about the second meeting since the situation was somewhat dynamic and beyond the scope of my original post. Really it is beside the point entirely but I feel that I should elaborate given the amount of attention I've received. I mentioned that the original man I explained my idea to didn't work there anymore (presumably onto greener pastures) and I did so because it is truth, but also because it limited my options and perceptions at the time. Since he left the company, their was no option for me to contact him about the details of the tool/idea implementation, which was partially why I described the situation the way I did. Essentially though, the sales-engineers were listening to me when I explained what I do and how I foresee using their products. One of them was astute enough to recognize my situation and realize that something they had in development (or whatever phrase is appropriate) would apply to me directly in a positive way.