Tuesday, January 10, 2012

1-10-2012 Captain's Log

Ok so this is my captains log on starship ridiculous.

I'm living with my brother for awhile.  Like I said, family having some problems with my wife and step daughter.

But he's a great programmer so I'm learning all about the heap, the stack, the cache, etc.

Sounds like he wants to help me optomize some of my code.  And I guess I was using way too many object-access-lookups when I was iterating over the map to draw things. and I understand now that's not a processer but a memory problem. And also I used my line of sight function more than was necessary and that I needed some kind of ray-casting for LOS not just the bresenham line algorithm anymore.  And really I shouldn't be having to write this weird funky graphics bullshit that only updates the current and affected squares of things. that's going to give me hell down the road. what i need is just a simple elegant drawing method that uses ray casting.

So I'm going to overhaul the code somewhat and go back to my old function "drawsurroundingswave" which uses a wavefront, and somehow add consciousness of wavefront direction to the function.. Luke explained, i guess, each square somehow remembers the slope of the line that intersects it and the players square, and it checks the next squares out for being "within a deviation of that line"... Only my brother will help me turn it into a ray-casting sort of thing.  Someday?

Right now I'm starting school and I signed up for a Women's Studies course.  It's exactly what I need.  The textbook is entitled Women: A multicultural perspective.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

1-2-2012 Day after new years

Starting classes soon, dealing with family issues, programming on hold.