Are we there yet?

Last week the Informatics Teaching Organisation (“ITO”), which handles the admin side of the University’s Informatics courses, sent out an email to final year students saying that our degree classifications have been posted on the notice board outside their office if we wanted to go and see how we did.

I went along there on Friday and was met by a surprise:

I’ve no idea how I managed a first (I took the picture so I could check it again later), as I’m sure I messed up a couple of assignments. The exams correspond to a much larger percentage of the final grade, so I must have done much better in those than in the assignments. I’ll get a proper marks breakdown some time in the next week or two, which will be interesting to see and I’m looking forward to that.

Part of me thinks there’s been some dreadful mix-up and the uni will soon remark my exams and dump me down a grade or two. Which would be very embarrassing indeed, as my fiancée Hazel and my mother have probably told half of Scotland by now.

To celebrate, Hazel and I went out to Brown’s in Edinburgh for a nice meal. It’s a chain, but the food and service are both really good. The restaurant is nice and open, which we like.

So anyway, hopefully just the graduation to go to now, and then I can finally close the book on the whole “going back to get my degree” thing. It’s been a long haul and I’m so very glad it’s nearly over.

Maybe I should press my boss Chris for a pay rise, now that I’m a qualified Software Engineer!

Working on Quake for iPhone

Yet again I succumbed to hand-held gadget lust and bought another device, this time an iPod touch.

I started work on a port of Quake to the device and have made a bit of progress. I’m just doing software rendering at the moment, which is then drawn to the screen using an OpenGL ES texture. That seems like a really ham-fisted way of doing it, but I couldn’t find any docs or examples on the web which just gave access to a linear frame buffer of sorts.

The way I’m accessing OpenGL ES seems to bypass the windowing system and causes some flicker when the clock and battery level display at the top of the screen is updated, but as the unofficial SDK doesn’t offer the same header files as the official one (and I have no access to a Mac to use the official SDK), I don’t really want to work on a hardware rendering version right now. I’d much rather get a frame buffer sorted out which can hopefully integrate more nicely with the windowing system.

I’m kind of busy with exam revision right now so I don’t really have the time to investigate a better solution. Hopefully I’ll get some free time this month or next to sort it out!

I was chatting a bit with Chris in work about input methods for moving, turning and shooting and we come up with some interesting ideas. Hopefully Quake will be a little more easily playable than some of the iPhone games which have a virtual controller on screen. We’ll see!

Honours project

Oh dear, a post at such a time in the morning can only mean one thing. I can’t sleep.

The summer holidays are nearly over and to be honest I’m a bit down about it. I’ve got to get back into the studying mindset and get my weekly schedule sorted out.

This week won’t be too bad, I’ve got an introductory lecture on Tuesday which I expect will outline the year to come. Then over Tuesday and Wednesday I’m to attend a bunch of little “advertisement” lectures where I’ll find out the lecturers’ spins on the courses there are to choose from. Lectures begin on Thursday.

I had a meeting with my director of studies last week where we talked about some of the courses on offer and about my honours project. She strongly advised me to start work on my project early, which I intend to do.

For my project I’ll be putting together an OpenGL ES implementation for Windows.

While reading the list of suggested project topics I couldn’t help but suspect that students were being nudged into solving the pet problems of several members of staff. I found many of the topics a bit dull and not entirely relevant to my career in games development, which pushed me to suggest my own project.

I hope that my chosen topic has enough merit to get a good grade without being dismissed by some fuddy-duddy as a toy project. The software part has a whole lot of interesting problems to solve, so as long as I can tie it together with some of the coursework I should be fine.

I’ll have a meeting with my project supervisor early this semester, in which I’m going to try and nail down my target reader. To pitch my report at a decent technical level while not skipping over incorrectly assumed knowledge will be tricky if I don’t know how knowledgeable the reader is. I really hope I don’t have to teach C++ or 3D graphics fundamentals in my report!

Exams over, for now

Yippee, that’s the 3rd year exams out of the way. I think I did okay, so hopefully I won’t have to resit anything later on this year.

For some reason, the uni decided to cram two semesters worth of revision and exams inside a few weeks. What an ordeal it’s been. I had a couple of nasty weeks with several exams in consecutive days. Some of my uni buds had it even worse, with more than one exam per day.

With the System Design Project being such an overambitious nightmare this time round, getting revision in early hasn’t been an option.

Why did I go back to uni again? Oh yes, for that bit of paper that qualifies me less than the experience I already have…

We’re getting taught so many disparate topics that a decent grounding in any of them is impossible. More importantly for the games industry though, is that we don’t get taught C++ at all. Additionally, any whiff of C has just been in passing at the arse end of a module.

Seriously, if you’re a boss, you need to set up a graduate training programme if you expect your grads to be up to the task.