Gearing Up For My Final Year

After doing very well (even if I do say so myself) on my work placement helping develop public security software in .NET. I am nearing the end of my time at the job. I have received great feedback from my team leaders at work and I am proud of the contribution I gave to the products I worked on. I have learnt a lot that will help me in the future and the experience has been extremely beneficial.
As I come to the end of my year (and a bit) in industry I see the final year of my degree getting closer. In order to prepare for my final year I have started to set up a source control server on a mini-atx box I have build and I have start reading papers in the area of research I have chosen to base my applied research project on.
Each paper I read makes the task I have chosen seem more complex and far bigger than I could have imagined so I am putting my efforts into narrowing down the key areas I am interested in for my proposed dissertation title.

Busy busy busy

All my assignments have been officially set and time is flying by so fast that before you know it, it is Sunday again. I have been working hard since my last update, wrestling with unreal and coding away my own graphics API.

Its all very well me telling you what I have done but what you really want to see is the all important end product of the work. I will start with my 3D renderer. This is the project that I am most enjoying right now because it is very challenging and when something renders correctly it is incredibly rewarding.

Here is a wire frame render of a 3D cube with back face culling active. With the menu that I worked on this week you can turn on and off features from within the software.

This is the renderer with the GDI+ API filling in the polygons.

This is with directional light.

Another feature in the software is the ability to switch between different predefined models. This is a model of Starscream from transformers with directional light.

This is Starscream with point lighting. In addition to this I have been coding my own rasteriser so that I don't have to use GDI+ for my solid shading.

Now I have shown you my 3D renderer progress I will show you something more game-like. Here are some screenshots of my unreal engine game "Famous Five: Five Run Away Together".

Progress

Time seems to be moving very fast lately. I have been practising my MIPS assembly in console development and I was thrilled to hear that in two weeks time we will be putting all our hard work into practice on the PSP development kits.

In Games Development techniques my game is coming along nicely, I have a mini game in place in my level where you must collect mushroom in the forest on my map.

In Introduction to 3D I have written a camera class and a rendering pipeline and my program now renders 3D wire frames of .md2 files. I felt this was a large achievement and I put a lot of time and effort into the program to get it to this point.

Enter The Matrix

In Introduction to 3D graphics programming last week I was playing with the matrix. Ok, so its not as fun as it sounds. A matrix is a array of numbers used in maths to denote objects or transformations.

Last Tuesday I programmed a matrix class that will be used in my 3D rendering program. It is built to use 4 dimensional matrices. As the third dimension is perpendicular to the second , the forth dimension is perpendicular to the third.

Here is a two dimensional representation of a 4 dimensional object, the so called "Hypercube".

In graphics programming you use matrices called "Transformation" matrices to move and change the shape and size of 3D objects.

This week we will be learning about the virtual camera, the way you view the 3D world and the way it is represented as a 2 dimensional image on your screen.

Project Managed

For Game Development Technique this week I managed a 22 person project to recreate "The Hive from the first resident evil film. To manage the team I split them into 5 groups and assigned a group leader for each group. In a meeting at the start of the project we then split The Hive into 5 main sections and then those sections were to be split up and distributed between the group members. We had several meetings over the week and a wiki was created so we could share ideas and resources. To get the final deliverable me and a few of the more hardcore members of the team spent a day in labs making sure everyone's levels worked and fit together.

I presented the final project to John Sear, course leader, this morning with the team looking on. It was a exciting moment because very few members of the team had seen the map all put together.

The project was a success and John seemed to have nothing but praise for the people who put the most work in.

In my time as project manager I learnt a huge amount. The first thing I found out is that lectures are right to not add their students on Facebook. It is fairly discouraging when you set a meeting for 9am and you see people on Facebook saying things like "I'm not going into uni on may day off at 9am!". I feel like I have also gained a grasp of who on the module will succeed and who will fail based on their attitude to work. While most people on the team pulled their weight and offered to help me in any way they could (including going to buy me lunch when I was hungry and busy working) others I had to constantly chase up and pester to get anything out of them at all.

While the week was hard work I do feel enriched by the activity and I am very proud of the team.

Here are some of my favourite parts of the level.

Project Penguin

Here is a video of my Imagine Cup game.
It has been very good to work on, and I have enjoyed working with Craig (the artist) and the other guys loads, even if we don't make it to the next round I have gained so much from the process. I am glad I have had a chance to take part.

To find out more about Microsoft's Imagine Cup. Go here >> www.imaginecup.com