After registering online this morning for 5 of my 7 summer and fall classes, I got the remaining ones taken care of today at school. I didn’t ever recall registering online before, but apparently I did it last semester also (see, this blog actually can be good for stuff!). As a result of this registration party that went on, I’m enrolled in the Japan trip class for the summer. I’ll most likely be submitting all of the forms and such on Thursday along with paying at least the first part of the money that I’ll owe UTD.
Now that this is virtually a done deal, flight reservations need to be considered. From looking at AA’s website, there are two direct flights to Japan that I could be on and then two direct flights back (although one is highly more favorable than the other due to times). If I may direct your attention to my December 11th post, I mentioned how on the return flight from Australia, the date line and flight time made it so that as far as calendar time was concerned, I’d be arriving in Dallas only about 4 hours after we left Sydney. Well, with Japan being a closer flight distance but in a similar time zone situation, I’ll actually arrive back in Dallas about 2 hours and 30 minutes on the same day before I left Japan. I don’t even want to think how messed up my body clock is going to be as a result of this trip.
Personal - Dallas
These past couple weeks have given great meaning to the definition of “perfect timing”. Not the good definition either, but if you’ve been following up with my life, you should know that. By today I was supposed to have received the code I needed to finish the combat engine for our project, but of course it would happen that last night the person responsible for that would get food poisoning and become sick. So, I’ve been doing what I could for the day, but tomorrow may just be spent making a very nice interactive demo that you can’t really do all that much in. Hey, better than nothing, right?
Another absolutely awesomely timed happening is the fact that Device Central CS3 no longer wants to work on my computer. This translates into meaning that I can develop and test my code fine on my computer, but I can’t run it in an emulator for Flash Lite and debug anything as far as the phone goes. I can still compile the movies for the phone, but then it just turns into one big great flaming ball of doom when everything fails and I have no clue why. You see this, Flash? This is me mentally thinking very bad things about you and hoping that I never have to work in you again.
Personal - Dallas
Overall, the general consensus was that the event today was very successful. There were a course a couple issues (including one including Maya which came way out of left field that no one could have saw coming), but the day ran smoothly, there were no big surprises, and we had a very good showing of people throughout the day. I know of a couple things which I’ll be doing differently next year when I’m the one primarily in charge, but this provided a very solid foundation from which to grow on. Hopefully the event will outlast those of us who were involved with it this year, and maybe after it’s been around one or two more years, we can really turn it into a Dallas area E3 or GDC.
I’m less worried about the game project now not because the work is going to be any easier, but I now feel more comfortable with thinking that I’ll still get a good grade even if the game isn’t totally awesome. Virtually all of my time at home tomorrow is still going to be spent working on it. Monday evening I once again have an exam review, so anything I can’t get done in the afternoon probably isn’t going to. As much as I want that game to be as good as it can be, I also don’t want to fail my test on Tuesday morning.
Personal - Dallas
27 programs folded, 98 more to go. I told Kinko’s that I didn’t want them to fold them when I was going to get them printed this morning, but if there’s enough money in the budget next year, I think I’ll leave this task up to them. It goes decently fast once you get into a pattern, but that isn’t going to save the edge of my fingers after I have to do almost 100 more of those. Maybe one of those things where you put the paper in and it’ll assist you with folding the document almost perfectly wouldn’t be a bad investment either.
I’m waking up at 8:00 tomorrow morning, and hopefully I’ll be home by 9:30 or so tomorrow night. Looking at where we are with the game project, this is not the best weekend for this to be occurring, but I have faith that everything will turn out alright with that. Sunday better be a day when I’m in a good Flash mood because I probably won’t be seeing too much besides the Flash CS3 interface on my computer for the vast majority of that day.
Personal - Dallas
I feel relatively comfortable that I can get a working combat engine done by the end of the weekend. What I feel much less comfortable about is getting everything integrated with each other to produce a single, semi-functional game by Tuesday. The way that we’ve been developing this has been one of everyone mainly doing their own thing, then all the assets coming together at the last minute in a way that hopefully meshes nice. It didn’t work to well for Half-Alpha, and I’m not expecting it to go over all that well this time either. Like I said, if I could go back in time to the start of this semester, I’d either change the idea that we chose for our game or maybe not even take the class at all.
Tomorrow morning will probably be spent doing more work on the game project (which I’m working on right now also), then in the afternoon I have Linear Algebra, a group meeting, and finally an HP game at HP. Nothing all that cohesive going on, but maybe the fact that it all comes in smaller chunks will help my mind not go into meltdown mode. Slightly depressing that that’s the stage I’m at now, but after just about 4 more days, I should be much better. If I’m not, make me an appointment with a therapist because I’ll probably need one.
Personal - Dallas
I haven’t worked as much today on the game project as I would have liked to, but part of that comes from dealing with yet more emails pertaining to the game event after my last class was over. I have a (fairly important) goal set for myself before I go to sleep tonight, and since I’m making this post now, I have nothing left to interrupt me between finishing it and actually going to bed. If I can get it working, it’ll be a big step towards the overall combat framework. If I can’t, we’re all in pretty big trouble.
I’ve also drafted up a schedule for both the summer and fall that meets all of my time requirements (the fall one especially), so I now at least have a base to work from while I create some alternative schedules. One of the issues I need to be careful with over the summer is making sure that I do enough either classes or work to keep my parents happy, but I also don’t want to kill myself by doing too much work. It is summer, I think I deserve some time off, and I wouldn’t mind a slightly less demanding schedule than I had last year. If I do work with Mr. McDonald and HP, that probably won’t be an issue. I may look into the possibility of doing a more formal internship that has a schedule that could deal with my classes, but that is all something that I don’t need to occupy my mind with at the moment. Flash, combat engine, game project. Due this upcoming Tuesday. Go.
Personal - Dallas
I now feel fairly comfortable that I can conceptually design what is needed for the game project; the primary obstacle remaining in my way is just finding the time needed in order to get it all done. I basically have three large chunks of time that I can devote to the project: tomorrow afternoon, Thursday evening, and then Sunday afternoon. The rest of the time I’m involved with various projects, events, or working. I took a binder and paper with me to Greenville tonight (where we won, 14-0) so that I could continue to design everything on paper, and I have a pretty good outline to follow once I am able to sit down and get some real work done.
Aside from just getting all the work done that I need to, the rest of my week (until Saturday) is pretty boring. One more baseball game at home, but I’ll maybe get a tiny bit of time to recover my sanity. I do have an internship interview over the phone tomorrow morning, but with the Japan trip likely happening, it’ll probably be an interview for the sake of just having one.
Personal - Dallas
After getting some information on it today and running the idea past my parents (who were both very in favor of it), it seems that unless I get an absolutely awesome internship offer that I can’t refuse, I’ll be doing a mini-study abroad trip this June in Japan. One of the courses UTD is offering during the summer semester is a 2 week class/2 week trip focused on Japanese language and culture. One of my friends is doing a trip this entire semester over in France/Europe, and that’s one of the things that prompted me to go find out more about this program.
My afternoon was spent pretty much entirely reading and answering emails, so I got very little done in the way of work. Some other awesome news from today though is that the due date for my OS project is being pushed back about two weeks, and the last project is becoming a bonus one (which, as the teacher so aptly pointed out, I would not be doing). This drastically cuts down on the work I have left in the final 5 weeks between now and the end of school (yes, it’s really only 5 week from today until the last day of class) which make me a very happy person. Now if we could only have 48 hour days for the rest of this week (or just genetically modify me so that I don’t need to sleep), I’d be even better.
Personal - Dallas
I have no combat engine yet, but I’ve started to make some very significant and helpful progress towards being able to do so. This progress came in the form of getting the basic framework for being able to use server-side extensions working, so I will now be able to (hopefully) offload a lot of the attack processing to the server and just worry about user input on the phones. Chances are that there’ won’t be anything to really show off this week at our meeting, but just knowing that I’m now on a path that is leading me towards a solution should make everyone happy. The only remaining obstacle is time since this upcoming week isn’t exactly wide open for me.
I went ahead and spent all of my HW devoted time today working on the game project, so I still have some work to do for the OS one. Seeing as how I would still have needed to finish it up anyway, I’ll just do that tomorrow once I’ve gotten an answer on the part not included in the spec. I also need to remember to get the bus time from someone tomorrow, and since HP doesn’t have school, it’s not like there’s a known time for me to call.
Personal - Dallas
I had (have) three big assignments for this weekend: my Automata homework due on Monday, my OS project due on Wednesday, and the Alpha of the game project due a week from Tuesday. Today I finished up my Automata homework and got approximately halfway done with my OS project. None of these things is necessarily more important than any of the others, so technically I guess it’s a good thing that I didn’t spend all day on the game project and then need to rush tomorrow and Monday to finish up what’s actually due this week. Tomorrow I’ll almost be able to finish up the OS project (there’s one feature which was left out of the spec, so I have to ask the teacher about it on Monday), and any remaining time left will be dedicated solely towards Flash, Actionscript, and designing a working version of a multiplayer combat engine.
If our due date had not been pushed back a week, the Alpha version would be due this Tuesday, and I probably would be going insane right about now. It’s going to be bad enough with baseball on Tuesday and Friday and then the game event all day next Saturday, but I just have to keep reminding myself that it only needs to work, it doesn’t have to be perfect. If I could go back in time, I’d definitely push for a massive scaling back of this project, but that’s the beauty of hindsight.
Personal - Dallas