It was certainly nice to have a bit of a break. I still did some homework, but I tried really hard to relax as much as possible. Worked some more on my engine and website…both are coming along nicely. Ran into somewhat of a snag with the engine, though.

Was trying to split the engine up into separate dynamic libraries (they were all static before), and it was extremely easy for the render engine and scene graph, but my custom controls made in wxWidgets was a serious pain. Essentially, I wanted to compile a library that contained all of wxWidgets functions as well as my own, but it seems the only way to do this is include all the source files of wxWidgets into my project to compile it to a library. Strangely enough, you can’t compile the static library of wxWidgets into your own dynamic library. I asked around on the wxWidgets forums, and that seems to be their conclusion as well. Seems terribly bizarre, but I’m not going to worry about it until I need to when I make an official release. Unfortunately, that whole mess pretty much killed my Friday as I worked most of the day on it….rather disappointing.

Today has been great! No class or homework to distract me, so I got to really focus on programming and designing my engine. The interface between the widgets, graphics engine, and the scene graph is now almost complete…everything is communicating nicely. Need to create an API for creating plug-ins, and then it will be mostly complete. The interface for creating new Nodes is quite clean and was inspired mostly by Maya and Houdini (as well as some XSI). All of those have really nice APIs IMO, but they all have inherent flaws, which I’m hoping to have overcome. This is not to say that the architecture is complete, but it is very far along now…you could say it has entered alpha stages.

Been really working hard on my projects these last few days…hence the lack of updates. Yesterday I spent quite some time writing scripts for Houdini using Python. What’s particularly cool about Houdini is you can imbed Python scripts (or any scripts…or any files for that matter) into an HDA. So you can still distribute just one HDA file, and all the scripts come bundled within. I plan to record some videos over how this can all be done…and also show how to create some GUIs. When scripting for Houdini in the past, I just used HScript along with some Tcl/Tk for interfaces, but using Python is usually a better approach as Python includes a host of great libraries.

News of Autodesk buying Alias was somewhat surprising to me. Although Autodesk is larger than Alias, were the sale reversed, I wouldn’t be very shocked. What does this mean for consumers and developers? From reading their FAQ, I’m guessing there won’t be any major changes (much like with Alias’ purchase of Kaydara). It’s really hard to say, though. I’m really hoping there won’t be any major changes, because I can’t help thinking Autodesk would mess it up. The purchase just doesn’t seem like that good of a business move, but I’m going to withhold judgement until more information is released about it.

Classes started out today really slow…seemed as though it would never end. But once they were done, and I returned home, I began work on the my philosophy paper. The goal is to write a paper regarding Calgary University’s class “Computer Viruses and Malware”. It essentially teaches people how to write viruses in order to teach them how to write more secure software. This is pretty old news (2003), but it is still quite an interesting topic. If anyone has any thoughts on the topic, please let me know…I’d be interested to hear what you think.

Serenity is in theaters and yet I still haven’t seen it. *sigh* Must go see it!! It’s so much harder without a car, as there isn’t any public transportation to the theater…of which there is only ONE! Just need to convince one of my friends to go watch it with me, which is harder than it sounds as none of my friends here are movie buffs or firefly fans. I will think of something…