Carl's Notes

Current status on the CreateSimulator project:

• Editor: Fairly complete. (I just need to attach a bunch of menu items and buttons and add a bunch of icons)
• Creating projects: Close. (I just need to add the widgets to handle it and check to see if that project name already exists)
• Project loading: Complete.
• Compiling projects: Not started.
• Downloading projects to the Command Module: Not started.
• Controlling robots from the computer: Not started.
• Simulating a robot: Nowhere near started.

My target for the upcoming open house event is to be able to have the same code controlling robots in thee different ways:

1. Directly controlling an iRobot Create through the included Command Module.
2. Using a laptop to control a robot through a serial cable.
3. Simulating a virtual robot on a computer.

The last part ia going to be the hardest part, as I don't have to write my own compiler, I'm going to use variations on the GCC compiler.

Next week, I'm hoping to have two compilation paths completed (one for running on the local computer and the other for running on the Command Module's ARM processor) and the simulator at least started.
That should give me a week to finish the simulator, which ought to be enough time.

Let's hope I haven't overdone things again...

I just got home from my Grandpa's house after watching today's Canucks hockey game where I was making notes about my current Create Simulator project, and realized I needed to have my notes beside my computer while I started adding more code to the project.
(it was the first game of the official playoff series. The visitors were the Chicago Blackhawks, who we solidly defeated with two goals in the first six minutes of play, and no goals after that)

Ordinarily, this wouldn't be much of an issue, but today it got me to thinking about what I would like to see in a desk setup.

I do a fair bit of typing when working on projects, which means that I need my desk to be easy to sit at and comfortable to type at.

Some other things I'd like the desk to allow is easy access to my growing selection of CDs, small reference books, and larger reference books, as well as having a convenient place to lay the reference material out so I can read it while typing.
In this case, I've found that reference material can come in many shapes and forms, not only including large and small reference books, but also sheets of paper and my varying array of clipboards.
(I much prefer to use clipboards for writing notes in over three-ring binders as they're much thinner than binders can be and don't take up as much width either, which means I can take more clipboards with me on my excursions and separate my subject matter earlier than with binders)

I've noticed that I much prefer using lots and lots of shelves for storing things in, as items that are stacked are quite easy to nudge over, and aren't so easy to search through when you've misplaced something.
(unfortunately, due to living in a converted attic, the walls are only vertical for about the first two thirds, and are diagonal after that, so I don't get to have very tall bookcases)

My preferences for using lots of shelves also extends to my preferences for storing other items.
I once saw a picture of a Mariners' Library of some sort in England where each row of bookcases were on rails, and each bookcase was easily moved by turning one of the wheels on either end.
My thought when I saw that was that it was a relatively efficient method for storing large amounts of whatever happens to need to be stored on shelves.
(in particular, cooled pantries would be a good place to use something like this in my opinion, as my family uses the pantry a lot for storing food that needs to be kept relatively cool, such as root vegetables, fruit, flour, soft drinks, wines, sugars, etc etc)

Back on the topic of desks, I also noticed that I need to ensure that my computers are underneath the desk's surface and even behind a door to keep the noise down.
(I may need to have my ears checked when I finally have a job that provides medical coverage, at night when things are quiet my ears have strange static-like droning, the meaning of which I have little idea)

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On a slightly related topic, I'm progressing fairly well on the simulator I mentioned previously. I'm currently working on the Integrated Development Environment's interface and am getting close to being able to hook things up on that end.

However, I still don't have any code written for the simulator proper or the code compilation system, so I'm feeling a little behind.
(even though I still have at least six weeks to go)

Well, it's off to bed I go, then up to finish delivering the papers that were late in arriving, and then more code writing.
What a cycle...

Right now I'm mostly waiting for my paycheck on Thursday so I can pre-order my copy of Portal 2.
The trailers Valve has on their YouTube page are quite impressive.

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In unrelated news, I may need to nail down a mousepad to my desk's keyboard drawer.

Apparently, I lean on my mouse a bit on the hard side (not sure quite why just yet), and have rubbed a thin layer off the mouse's non-slip pads.
(yes, that was the layer with the non-slip coating)

Which means that the mouse isn't sliding around very nicely.

Because my keyboard drawer isn't very wide, there's just barely enough room for the keyboard and the mousepad, so it would be best to somehow affix the pad to the drawer itself so it won't slide around.
(I may need to use a larger mouse than what I'm currently using. My hands are a little on the large side)

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As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm in the process of applying for graduation.

I need to scrape up around $85 to pay for a late fee, then they'll actually look at my application.
(what bugs me is there was no indication that there were periods to apply in when applying to avoid incurring fees. It even claimed that there would be no fees for applying. Yes, I'm quite annoyed, in case you didn't notice...)

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The next open house for my local campus if near the end of May this year instead of mid March, to allow the latest expansion to be completed in time to be shown off.

Again, I've offered my services to the Computing Science department.

This time I'm going to be showing off an integrated development environment for the iRobot Create.
(the educational version of the Roomba)

It's quite an ambitious project, as I'm essentially writing it from almost scratch in Java to run on multiple platforms, with at least three options for running your code.
(directly on a plug-in brain for the Create called the Command Module, running on the PC controlling the robot via a serial cable, or running in a simulated environment)

Much of the interface code that wraps the actual code written by the users has already been written, I just have to adapt it a little bit for the various other modes of use, while the biggest part is going to be the IDE itself.

I've never written quite this much code in Java without working on a team, but that's never stopped me before.
So far, I've found a library that allows me to provide syntax-highlighting, figured out what in-general needs to be done, but have yet to actually get somewhere useful with it.
(I have less than two months, so time is ticking away as I type this)

If I do manage to pull this off, it'll provide an excellent platform for future instructors to teach programming to first-year students.
(one day, I hope I'll be among them, but for now, I must wait and satisfy myself with finding a decent job, with coding projects like this as a hobby)

I've fixed the issue I'd been having with Tetris-Power's old font engine (it was as simple as an array being too small to fit the information necessary), as well as managing to fix a bug where the current block disappearing due to some values becoming NaNs.

It's been a good evening for bug-fixing.

Now I need to figure out how to approach writing the new font engine.

The old engine made it fairly easy to parse in a long, thin image with a single row of characters as long as necessary, but I can't do the same thing with the new engine.
With the old engine, I chopped up the image into a single character's worth of bits for each symbol and stored each one in the computer's memory.
With the new engine, I'll need to store the image, unprocessed, in the graphics card's memory, which means that the images have to be square and a power of 2 wide and high.
(ie, 128x128 pixels or 256x256 pixels, or larger)

This new engine with allow me to rotate characters as I wish, without getting limited by the screen resolution.

I don't think it's going to be an easy thing to write...

I recently stumbled across a DOS program I wrote a long time ago that simulated the Cellular Automata called Wire World and wondered if I could write all over again to run with a graphical interface.
(the most famous cellular automaton is Conway's Game of Life)

So far I've started writing the back-end, the part that internally stores and processes the states, as well as saves and loads the information to files, which is taking a bit more time than I'd like, as I also have to remember how to build the project from the ground up again.
(it's not too big a deal, though, all I have to do is go back to another project and check the applicable file from that to see what I'd done last time)

Wire World is a rather simple idea, it simulates almost any digital circuit and uses only four states, Substrate (the "background", which does not interact with the wires and signals), Wire (what passes the signals along), Pulse Head (the beginning of a pulse), and Pulse Tail (the ending of a pulse).
(without the two ends to a pulse, the wire wouldn't know which way the signal should be going)

At each step of the iteration, the substrate stays the same (otherwise it wouldn't insulate the wires), pulse heads fade to pulse tails, pulse tails fade to wire, and wire remains wire unless only one or two of the surrounding eight cells (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) are pulse heads.
(note that this means that if there are no pulses anywhere on the grid, nothing happens at all)

If I'm writing this software correctly, I should be able to compile it to run under Windows as well as my primary target of Linux, but that'll probably take some doing.
(and so is not very high on my todo list)

I'll post more as this project progresses, and may even upload this project to a public hosting service later, after it's completed enough for others to see.

What good is a game if it doesn't move?
For that matter, what kind of game doesn't have at least some kind of background imagery?

Now, if your backgrounds have lots of bushes, trees, waterfalls and the like, and they kind of slide or swing into place, wouldn't it make sense for them to wobble back and forth a little bit?

There will need to be more than one animation type, as one type is terribly easy to do and another that I know I'll need will be a bit more difficult.

The easy one will be used for swaying objects, such as trees and bushes, and is accomplished by a simple and oft-used 3D transformation called "shear".
(shearing is like pushing a stack of CD cases over so they form a stair-like structure, with each case offset the same distance from the one previous. This means I have no need to modify the actual model, and can change it very easily on the fly)

The hard one I haven't quite figured out yet.
It'll be used for stuff like the water in waterfalls, and will depend on what the waterfalls look like when I finally design them.
(at least, the specific usage will highly depend on it, the implementation behind it just might be generic enough for more uses than that)

So, the upshot of all this is that I am still thinking about Tetris-Power, the only issue is managing to have spare time for other things, most notably all the homework I have, as well as playing some games.
(currently, LEGO Indiana Jones 2 with my brother and Team Fortress 2)

I thought it might be interesting for people to see how I'm going to specify fonts.

In the previous font engine (which was essentially sprite-based), each font was a long, thin image with characters running horizontally in alphabetical order from the exclamation point ('!') to the 127th ASCII character ('}', as it turns out), with the top line of pixels indicating where each character stopped and started.

The font engine would run through this top line, looking for the spaces between the dots or dashes and extract each character, putting each into its own sprite.

This worked very well up until I needed to put a line of characters in front of a row of Tetris blocks, as the sprites were positioned based on screen pixels, and the Tetris rows were based on 3D space coordinates.
(granted, I did figure out how to do a rough conversion, but that wasn't a very good method, and it wouldn't let me do any rotations or scaling, which would be rather handy for extra effects)

However, the line of pixels indicating the extents of each character was something I could readily add, and I really liked how everything that specified a font was in one file.
(unlike some font engines I found...)

So, my next font engine will again use that row of pixels to specify character extents, but as I will use only one image texture for all the characters at the same time (no more texture splitting for now), I'll need to do "character wrapping", which also means that the line of character extents indicating pixels will also need to wrap.
(for some reason, graphics cards happen to like square images instead of long, thin ones)

I've started some work on the new font engine, which also means I've broken all the current font code, which then means the project won't even compile now.
Good incentive to get the new engine done quickly, eh? =^.^=

The one thing I'm not quite sure about, however, is generating the new fonts.
So far I've used The Gimp to create a 256x256 pixel image and paste in all the appropriate characters, tweaking the font sizes and stuff until almost all the space in the image is taken up without having anything overlap anything else, then laboriously putting in all the alignment pixels.

I'm thinking I should write a font generator in Java...

Edit: Just so people have an idea of what I mean, here is a possible font descriptor image for the new font engine:

Note that the strip of pixels indicates how wide each character is by indicating where the spaces are.

So, I was reminded today that the biggest contributor to a mess is half-completed projects, and that is certainly true in my case, both physically and virtually.

Physically, my room is a mess, and most of my attempts to tidy it up merely shift the mess to some other corner that I don't use often.
(also, getting more furniture doesn't always help either, especially when it's a non-computer type chair)

Virtually, I have several projects "on the go" that have kind of been "temporarily" dropped, kind of like all the webcomics you find on the Internet that went on indefinite hiatus.

I'm not proud of failing to complete projects, but like so many other people, my mind wanders pretty quickly some days and I run out of effort, motivation, and time to complete all of them.

I have an entire folder on each of at least three, maybe four machines dedicated to my Blender scenes, the vast majority of which can really not be called complete, in any sense of the word.
(if you look at my galleries on DA or FA you'll noticed that most of my submissions have "WIP" somewhere in the title)

Programming projects I'm not short of either, what with AniMidi, Tetris-Power, Sphereority 2, "Obsidian", and others I'm sure I've forgotten.

To help me remember to work on them, I'll list some of my projects with a description so you guys can find out what they are and I can try to remember about them myself:

• AniMidi:
  A project for taking in "note-sampled" music files such as MIDI and creating virtual instruments to play them
• Tetris-Power:
  Tetris with power-ups.
• Sphereority 2:
  Balls versus Spheres, a third-person multiplayer game over a network.
• "Obsidian:"
  A puzzle-adventure game I've been thinking about for almost five years now.
• Game Engine:
  While not a game, per se, it would provide a mechanism for writing puzzle-adventure games more easily, kind of like the Plasma engine that Cyan Worlds is using for Myst Online: Uru Live (again) and some of its other games. So far, it's only in the planning stage, but even then it doesn't adequately cover all aspects of how the game will work (ie, it would work very well for playing the game, but does nothing for providing a UI for settings, saving and loading games, etc.), probably as I have no real idea as to how those parts should work.

Most of these are much harder to complete than they are to describe (in particular, Tetris-Power is a very good example), which makes them even harder to complete than I think they should be.
(some of this might be helped if I could find a reliable person to partner with to help keep me on track, but so far I haven't found anyone who might be suitable, though I am still kind of looking)

So I was browsing through the dollar store last week and found these nice notebooks, good quality pages, nice covers, three different colours, all for a dollar each.
(only sixty pages, but I don't usually use all that much in a notebook)

I've started taking one with me specifically for writing notes on the adventure/puzzle game I'm working on.
So far, I've got some concepts down for several islands, transportation between islands, a communication device, and some of the background story.

To make some sense of things, I'm going to reference some of the history of Cyan World's D'ni culture (which you can find on the DRC's website):

The D'ni are refugees of a great disaster that affected their home Age and are really only one of a number of small groups that fractioned off from the population.
They managed to escape their dying Age by what they call "The Art" (the art of writing Linking Books), which essentially created portals to other realities or Ages.
(D'ni actually means "New Start")
ames
As the D'ni aren't the only refugees from the great disaster, there are other groups that stories could be told of, and it is one of these that I'm thinking of choosing to base my game's story on.
Though, unlike the D'ni that link with books, my aliens use strange machines to link between Ages.
(and the majority of my game will only happen in one Age, the one we live in, and even on our planet Earth)

Anyway, with that out of the way, I've decided that it might be a good idea for my refugees to escape to a separate Age from ours, and have the final action of the player be linking back to that other Age to report on what happened to this other expedition to Earth.
It gives it a great ending point, and even leads very easily into a possible sequel.

Is there nothing a man with a pencil, a pad of paper and an imagination can't do?

So, I've started thinking about my AniMidi project again, primarily about the MIDI import library.

Right now, I'm looking for a free, cross-platform library for reading MIDI files into an internal representation so I can grab the relevant music info at run-time.

So far, I've no ideas of what library to use, though I'm more interested in C++ based libraries at the moment.

For those of you who need a refresher on what my AniMidi project is, it's intended to be a free MIDI file visualization program that you give a MIDI file (or almost any other kind of note-based music file, though my first target is MIDI) and it will create virtual, 3D instruments that will appear to play the music as specified by the given file.

I was inspired by seeing Animusic's videos of virtual 3D rendered instruments playing music.
(you should still be able to find one or two of their clips on YouTube, for a quick preview)

How my project differs from Animusic's approach is that theirs is a commercial plugin to existing 3D tools (not sure which they use right now, last I checked I think it was 3D Studio Max) and is specifically intended to create rendered animations, while my AniMidi project is intended to be an interactive stand-alone program for end-users.
(as I'm planning on using C++, I'll be able to borrow a fair amount of code from my Tetris-Power project, so I won't have to rewrite too much code)

I'd started this project as a final project for a multimedia course I'd taken about a year ago, originally written in Java, but didn't have a good enough grasp of the MIDI import part, which left the rest of the project without much to go on.
My current attempt is to write it in C++, which I've had more experience in now, especially with 3D graphics with OpenGL and the SDL.