Welcome to suburbia

Yesterday I moved from 79 Cranbrook Avenue to 500 Inglemire lane to live for the next 3 months.
The packing of my old room actaully went swift in 3 hours I had everything boxed up and out of the place. It always boggles me that when you think you don't have that much stuff in a room how much it actually is. And this is just basic stuff and the stuff I collected here over a year.
I moved in now for a day and it's a bit adjusting because the walks to uni are a bit longer but also to the pubs. I now need to walk for about 15 minutes to get a pint instead of 5. So I kinda am getting a bit more of movement then I had before. The other thing is the house I am living in now is a lot smaller so that's gonna be a big adjustment as well.
The the nice thing though is that this neighborhood will be a bit more secure than the last one I lived in. This house is smack in the middle of a suburb.

Dissertation progress update

After another ten days the dissertation is finally looking like the end product should. The application now loads an .x file on command and we can change the mesh at run time. The collision detection for the mesh is implemented and the vertex color is changed when the mouse moves over the mesh.
The next tasks to do is to actually render the pen color in to a texture and display that instead of using vertex colors.
Here is a screenshot:

Projection errors

OK the error I had in the previous post has a very easy solution the projection matrix was setup wrong.
Instead of setting it in "OnD3D9CreateDevice" part of DXUT it needs to be set in "OnD3D9ResetDevice".
It now looks as following:

X files rendering

After a week wrestling with DX 9 again I got an x file to render. When I tried this last Christmas it wouldn't render for the world of me. Apparently the tutorial in the DX sdk are a bit out of date. When I started looking at the function calls involved I found that I wasn't supplying everything. It now renders although I have minor camera problem with the rendering so thats the next step to figure out.
Remeber in the following screenshot light is on in the first and off in the second to show that textures are also working:

Resurrection

Today we finished the team project which this time has an installer so you all can try it out at home.
Do read the readme though as this installer needs to install OpenAll first if it isn't present on the machine and if it has to you need to run it again to install the game.
Link is here. And link for the redistributable msvcrt.dll is here. Copy the contents of the folder in the second zip over to the installation directory.

AI

I finally found the bug in my AI ACW last night after 3 solid days of working on it, as I fixed it I am now at a winning rate of 5/5 for no, 1 and 2 ghost 4/5 for 3 ghost and now testing 4 ghosts. At least is can win now it didn't do that for the last couple of days.
The first version I had could complete the no ghost one, but the next versions couldn't even do that. And i think i still have a minor bug in the path finding when it can't find a path with a value now it always goes to the left bottom corner instead of searching the full grid to see if it can find a path with a dot in it. I also think I need to decrease the value for the bonus when there aren't that many dots left. It will now almost always go for the bonus. I definitely have a problem in the full search as you can see from a the screen shots.
Ah well here is a screen shot:

Applying

Today I applied for a job at Bizarre Creations and Blackrock Studios (formerly Climax). Now it's hope and wait until I get an answer. Later this week I will also be applying at Rebellion, Codemasters, Ninja Theory(although they dont have an opening they do however understand the importance of cake) and Frontier.
Tomorrow I have to go to a Game Republic event and a showcase in the morning. I have to go to this showcase because my professor couldn't find any volunteers to go. So he figured while Sam and me have to be at the event in the evening anyway why not make them go, Sam is a fellow student who like me has gotten a Game Republic Bursary. The showcase isn't all bad luckily there are cash prizes involved for the winners and it's a good way to show game studios that are there what you can do. Lets see if I can do some shameless self promotion there and score some interviews with some other companies.

On a side note I finally handed in my Shaders project for some more screenshots go to this website. And go to the shaders thing, as of now that are the only screens online later this week I'll put some more up that so the final product.