It's been about 3 weeks since I started to intern at a game company. I wasn't planning on starting any internship until summer comes, but I was offered the position early and I really didn't want to lose the opportunity to see how things are done in a professional environment. So far, it's been a great learning experience and it's pretty fun.
It's kinda tough to work on a game while having school projects to deal with though. I should really focus on my school projects more ...
School's closed since it's GDC week. It's supposed to be spring break ... but it's kinda not. Still have to work on projects everyday. Been trying to understand how to implement water. It's kinda difficult to do something realistic. I've done something with displacement mapping that looks ok. I think I'll just leave it at that and move on to rendering fire.
Been really busy as usual. I've been reading things on water simulation. Physically based simulation is definitely not easy to do. I've seen some simulations using displacement mapping, which looks o.k. when simulating turbulent waves. But, I really don't like how it looks when it's used to simulate calmer body of water. nvidia has a vertex fetch demo simulating a pond that looks pretty cool. Anyway ... more stuff to read.
Just posting this 'cause I think it's kinda cute. It's just the same flocking behavior I was working on, but with ships (model came with the directx sdk.) The camera is basically looking back at the little ships following the leader ship.
Seems to be updating this less and less often ... juuuuust updating the project page :p Oh, Nathan has 3 new teeth, yay.
Been really busy lately. Last week I had to give a 90 minutes long presentation on multi-pass rendering. Took me a week to get it all together. While preparing for it, I read a lot of stuff. The more I read about what people are doing, the more I feel I don't know enough. There's so much to learn. I wonder if it's even possible for one person to know everything.
Been working on my projects every day. Just finished a little project on modeling and animating. Gonna add a little section to the project page later. Next project is due soon too, and I have to change my renderer to use deferred shading for another class. So much to do!
Been trying to get shadow working. Shadow map seems to be working, but will have to figure out how to deal with the aliasing problem ... it's kinda blocky.
Last day of summer break!
I've decided to work on the next game on my own. Working in a team has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that a team can do way more than one person. A lot of award-winning indy games are made by teams of four or more. However, in a team, I can't do the things I want to do, which is everything. I think doing everything at least once is the best way to learn. So, today I started working on the next game, or rather the next game engine. It'll be a DirectX-based engine this time. After getting the engine working I'll move on to making the game ... although I still don't have a game idea. Need to think of a simple idea that's fun ... I've noticed that a lot of award-winning games are actually very simple.
Oh yay, school year is over, and we have a new home on the web. I only wish we had a new home on the planet Earth as well lol. Ah well, in time. Anyway ....
After turning in a project tonight, I'm done. Hmm, onto making the next game. What'd be a fun game to make ... hmm
Oh wow ... it's 2007 ... it's been almost a year since I've updated this thing ... hahaha. I should update this more often, but it's tough. I don't know how people find time updating web pages.
This school year is almost over. The year's been pretty tough. I've learned quite a bit though. For the most part, this year is about learning graphics. Mostly just working through the graphics pipeline. Implementing things like the scanline algorithm, Sutherland-Hodgman clipping algorithm , hierarchical modeling, Phong lighting and shading, MIP mapping, bump mapping, BSP tree, and culling with hierarchical occlusion map. It's interesting to actually implement these things in software. Although, I doubt anyone actually does that since most of these things are done in hardware, and OpenGL provides an interface to do most of them. But, actually implementing these things in software does help in understanding graphics. Like a year ago, I would pick up an OpenGL book and read it, and I would have a hard time understanding what the book is talking about (it's like reading these things: glFrustum, model view matrix, projection matrix ... and goes like ... what?) Now when I read the same book it makes sense. Without understanding all the transformations that take place in the pipeline, it's actually quite difficult to understand what an API like OpenGL does.
So, we went to Nathan's school today to have a little birthday party with him. It's not quite his birthday yet, but we wanted him to have a party with all his little friends at the school. Well, it didn't really go so well. Nathan was being stuborn and didn't want to play. So, we just took some pictures and let the class continue. Mom wasn't too happy about that ... oh well we'll have our own birthday party for Nathan on the 15th. Hey, Nathan's aunt, where's Nathan's present?!
-EC
