A week of parting and partying

This week was a week of say goodbye, because all the students that are here on Erasmus scholarships are going home. So we had a goodbye party for Peter a Polish friend of mine on Tuesday, which actually turned out to be a good party.
Friday was the birthday of another friend of mine, which we celebrated in Spiders, the only metal club in town here. And they were actually playing good music this time not too much gothic and more metal. We all got very drunk there, price for shots and cocktails there are ridiculously cheap.
And last night there was a major house party, it was organized to celebrate the end of exams, which we did in style. Good party we came in and after a few minutes a couple of guys were already dragging in a Christmas tree to burn it in the back yard.

This week I'll put my game up for download, i still have to figure out how to run it on other pcs. So when that is done I'll put it up for download with some description of the controls.

So we'r back

I have been in the UK for a week and a half again, I just couldn't find time to post earlier. Preparing for an exam i had took up most of my time.
About the exam I am not so sure if I passed it I hope I will because it was kind of a strange exam. The problem is in how i wrote stuff down, it's kinda hard to structure your answers in a different language when you have a time constraint for writing it.
Ice hockey has started again, today was the first practice and it was a good one. I was kinda dreading on going there but I had a really good time so I am glad I joined the team. We are going to enter a league here so that means I am going to play competitions in a lot of places in the UK. Finally I am going to see something from the UK, without having to do too much effort for it.
Last night was the first party like night, drank too much vodka there but that's what you get when you go drinking with Polish people. Tomorrow is the first house party of the year and I am looking forward to it.
Now I only have to write two reports, do a presentation and design a poster and next semester will begin again. Which will probably mean I'll be talking about coding again and party's, oh I will also keep track of how we do in the league here.

It's done

Finally i am about to hand in my coursework and have vacation. I really need a vacation at the moment, i have never in my life worked so hard.
Last two days were spend coding and cleaning up my code. I am really glad it's is done tomorrow or the day after I will put up the executables and resource files so you all can play it. It will be about 50Megs.

Controller

Since I have my laptop I had to walk around my game with the keyboard. This is not easy when your used to using a game pad for this for 2 months, so I went out and bought a game pad today. I ended up buying an xbox 360 pad for windows, chose this because I kinda like the xbox controller anyway. The only thing is that the xbox controllers need a massive dead zone, and you can't calibrate it out with the windows controller options. So I had to code this out, although the main code is the same as a normal controller the buttons and axis on a xbox controller are different, so that required a new class. Only I made some stupid mistakes like returning the value for moving left or right on the left thumb stick instead of the up down value. That cost me two hours of work to figure out. Well I finally have it working.
It beats the shit out of moving around with the keyboard it's a lot easier and smother you will probably notice that in the next movie I put up. If i got time to make another movie because the deadline to hand it in is Friday next week, and i still have a lot to do.

Mini map screen dumps

As promised here are the screen dumps for the mini map.

And here is the you tube movie. You can get the file here http://paul.walterheck.com/

Mini map

Today the plan was to make a working mini map, and so it does here is a screen dump of it.(will be up tomorrow dial-up doesn't allow me to upload images.)
My first notion was to just redraw the whole map in wire frame and draw it into a new view port. This didn't work of course because I tessellate my planes in the map quite heavily. It look really bad.
Second try was to redraw only the outline of each face, this is the good approach only I tried it in the wrong class. This effectively took me back to the problems I had when I first drew the map. Then I remembered that I had already transformed all the vertices in the map, so I just had to take the first and the last vertex of a tessellated face.
The first and again wring approach in this version was that i copied the whole array over to the class were i needed it. This dramatically dropped my frame rate, which was around 5-7 fps on my new laptop. As you can imagine it was copying a lot of unnecessary data, but at least the mini map was drawn.
The final approach was to just copy the first and last element of the array and this speeded the rendering back up to acceptable frame rates.
I'll put the screen dumps of it up tomorrow it's now bedtime here so I say goodnight to you all.

Laptop

Finally my new Asus G1S has arrived today, so I did absolutely no work on my project today. I spend the day installing the new laptop so i could work on my project on that. I am now installing Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite, I knew there were some problems with the compatibility with vista. What I didn't expect was that these would start in the install. Some times it can't find a cab file on the iso file while I know it's there. For now the only option seems to mount another cd image and that just failed as well. Apparently one of the cab files was corrupted, well lets see if the the pro version will install. I'll get back to this tomorrow.