This semester

April 21, 2006 on 8:01 pm | In Computing, Life, School | 1 Comment

So I finished my schoolproject, got my 15 points (of the 60 required to finish my foundation course).
Now the fourth and last semester for this year has kicked off, and it partially bores me. This semester I’ve got two subjects: Network Administration - but so far it’s about the organisational difficulties of fusing two companies - and TAD, of which I do believe it means Technical Automation Development. Basically it’s a combination of Product Quality (Assurance) and Technical IT, where I have to program PLCs.
The latter subject is somewhat interesting, but it’s also a bit tedious because we’ve not got a lot of documentation.

An image rendered by my program
Click to Enlarge

Haven’t really worked on my map renderer as of late, although I did improve some features shortly after posting my last entry.
The biggest improvement is that the renderer now correctly renders all walls and fences. Furthermore the tiberium is rendered semi-correctly: The more tiberium surrounds a tiberium tile, the higher it’s value. I’m probably not entirely using the correct algorithm, but it’s close enough.

And I’ve been doing some experimenting with various GUI libraries. I tried OcempGUI, a toolkit for creating GUIs ‘inside’ SDL surfaces. But I was not satisfied with the look of the widgets and some widgets I did want to use (TreeViews, ComboBoxes, …) are not in it. And I wasn’t in the mood to write those widgets myself and/or restyle the other widgets, so I decided to use GTK.
I’ll have to rewrite my rendering code so it’ll render to a GdkDrawable, but I think it’ll be worth the effort, somehow.

More on the map renderer

April 9, 2006 on 11:50 am | In Computing | 1 Comment

Because my ego is large, I wanted to tell you that my map renderer is getting better every minute :)

An image rendered by my program
Click to Enlarge

As can be seen on the image to the left, buildings are now drawn, with remapped colors and everything :)
This was quite a milestone, because the used format is poorly documented. There are still a few bugs, such as SAM sites with a ‘bib’, which is the sand you see at the base of most of the buildings. Unfortunately this is mainly because it appears that structure/unit information is hardcoded and not stored in a rules.ini file as is the case with all the other C&C games to date. This makes it harder for me to implement these kinds of exceptions.
Furthermore, the program will now only render the actual level, without all the terrain that is outside of the level’s boundaries. Unless you tell it to render the entire 1536×1536 image, of course.
And as can be seen I’ve made a start with rendering tiberium, but because it uses formats which I have not yet fully implemented (SHP format40 and format20), it’s not being shown “to it’s full potential”, so to speak.

Yesterday I installed SVN on my server (if you can call it that), which makes managing the source code a lot easier :)

The last month or so

April 3, 2006 on 8:27 pm | In Computing, Life, School | 4 Comments

Wow, I didn’t blog for almost a month! And I didn’t even get a single message about it, either. I feel so unloved! People forgot about me on tt-forums after 30 minutes as well :o But more on that later.

I’ve been busy working on my project for school, an auctioning site a la eBay. Turned out pretty shite, because

  • we were forced to write it in Java Server Pages, with the administrative application created in, *shiver*, Microsoft Access
  • the people who were making the website were, well, incompetent, really.

The code is horribly inefficient, the design is terrible (I think the fact that the average page contains between 4 and 6 <html> tags says more than enough…) and the functions are anything but safe from hackers and idiots alike.
The administrative bit of the project turned out great though, regardless of the horrible tools we had to use to create it.
So I’m glad that’s over now, I just have to hold a presentation regarding the product and talk my way through the assessment. The latter will probably be quite interesting too, because one of the now-ex-team-members was so incompetent and so lazy that we gave him so much criticism that he ended up going home crying. After which we had a lot of meetings where people that were supposed to be looking at it from an unbiased point of view pretty much said it was all our fault and we would have a lot of trouble with our assessments.
Still, I think I’ll manage.

What else happened over the last month?

An image rendered by my program
Click to Enlarge

Well, I’ve been writing a program in Python that renders a command and conquer map. I’m quite proud of it and it’s proven to be extremely educational to me, so that’s nice. I made it better today, by finally making it relatively fast. The problem is that I wrote it very sequentially and never stopped to refactor, so what started as a program that just read some data from a file, became a horribly slow and inefficient renderer. Managed to cut the execution time from ~18 seconds to 8 seconds and then from 8 seconds to 2.2 seconds, so that’s nice. I mean to expand/fork the program into a map editor for C&C (and possibly Red Alert). I might even devote a page (or a scripts entry) to it one day! Kudos to Thomas for giving tips and helping me :)
(Note: All the bits on that image that look like glitches are in fact not glitches, All the stuff that looks silly is just outside the actual playing area of the map. My guess is that it was either a bit of a visual aid for the level designers or a way of making sure units could move in or out of specific areas of the map, although that makes little sense to me)

Furthermore, I recently left TT-Forums, after nearly 4 years of loyal membership and something like 2-3 years of being a fearsome moderator. I was growing more and more annoyed by some members and members I used to have respect for were starting to disappoint me, so I finally decided to leave once and for all. My intentions to write a confronting and impressing goodbye speech failed miserably. That plus the fact that a lot of people appear to be thinking that I’ll come back have made my departure a very light subject, which is not what I had expected or hoped, selfish as that might sound.
But I’ll still be in #tycoon, unless people start annoying/disappointing me there too, after which I will not have anywhere to go and lead the life of a hermit.

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