Today was much more productive than yesterday. After getting back from shopping (needed some food desperately), I started work on the engine. Previously, my engine only supported TGA format for textures, which was fine before, but as this is more generic, it needed more format support. Therefore, looked around a bit and decided to use DevIL. It’s open source and under the Lesser GPL (a necessity since the engine might be used commercially). Plus, it supports a host of different formats: JPG, TGA, TIFF, etc etc…all packaged into a nice library. So, got that implemented into my engine and it’s working beautifully. The loading code is now very small thanks to the library. I did, however, run into a bit of a hitch when implementing it. For some reason, all textures on the models I tested were completely messed up. Turns out I had to call:

Today started out bright and early with a trip to the driving class, which lasted all the way to 4pm. It was quite awful. The class was filled with mostly teenagers, and some people from other countries that had never driven a car before. All that to say I was a bit out of place…college student seeking cheaper insurance…weird. We spent most of the time watching cheesy videos on how people can die from being stupid on the road. It was…special. But it’s over, so all is good.

Did some more work on the game engine today. Over the last few days I’ve been examining the source code for a number of engines: OGRE, Quake 3, irrlicht, and Unreal. So far, I’m really liking the structure of OGRE and will most probably adopt some if its design decisions. Having worked with Unreal so much, my design will definitely be influenced, but that’s alright since Tim (and the rest of the Epic guys) did a great job with the engine.

Recently, there’s been a massive trend towards blogging, and being a computer scientist I feel the inexplicable need to jump on the bandwagon. So this is the beginning.

I suppose a good start would be to give an overview of the type of things I’ll be talking about. As I’m an avid programmer and software engineer, a frequent topic will be my adventures and discoveries in my most recent projects. Right now I have two big projects: an Artificial Intelligence application (code-named “Agents”) and a game engine for a Privateer remake. Both are big projects, and since I’m the only coder for both, there are lots of design and management decisions, which I’ll talk about.