I wrote earlier that we are programming a MMORPG at the university. We now use Python and Panda3D to develop it. We demoed it at our university's lobby to masses two weeks ago and it gained interest.

I'm making my own 3D engine at the moment, using C++ and OpenGL. I recently learned to use VBOs (Vertex Buffer Objects). They didn't speed the engine up much when compared to display lists, but my graphics card, especially its drivers, are crap. And I thought that Intel makes quality. My X4500HD using i915 driver doesn't have VSync, 3D is slow and there's distortion on the screen sometimes. I hope those problems are fixed in Kubuntu 9.04's software stack.

Anyway, back to my engine. When we used Panda3D I learned this nice thing called a Scene Graph and implemented it to my C++/OpenGL engine. A scene graph means that models and lights can be inserted into a graph so that their position/rotation etc. are dependent on their parents in that graph. Say, I can make a human character and put a sword to its arm. When I rotate or move the human, the sword rotates or moves also. Simple and elegant.

Xmas is coming, and it's cold and dark in this hemisphere. I have 3 exams before the holidays. They are probability math, digital image processing and digital audio processing.

I have been coding OpenGL for a few months. I have always wanted to learn it, but there've always been some other stuff going on. I started to learn it because we are developing a MMORPG using Java and OpenGL at the university. I can load .3ds objects, put a texture map onto them and light them properly. I also finally learned hierarchical transformations, yay!

Everyday, {study,code} something.

At last i set up my laptop so it can use my cell phone's (Nokia N73) Internet connection under GNU/Linux. I found some good tutorials, but there were some problems that i had to resolve. Nastiest problem was that when i plug in my phone, dmesg shows that its device file name is /dev/ttyUSB1 when in fact it is /dev/ttyUSB0. When i realized that and got things working, i'm amazed at modern mobile speeds. Several years ago i had GPRS and its speed was about 6 KiB IIRC. Now i get about 40 KiB/s! Because there isn't so much documentation on the 'net i decided to write a HOWTO:
http://users.utu.fi/tmwire/nokia_n73_linux.html

Fall is late this year, but last night i really felt it coming, when i was walking with my friends to a student party place. Party was ok, everyone was drunk. Music was average, they played Village People, Rammstein and some others i can't remember.

On the coding front, i have progressed with my 4k real time ray tracer. It can render balls and planes as usual, but i have added support for cylinders, too. Cylinders aren't rendered correctly yet, though. I don't know if it's possible or feasible to use system font in a tiny GNU/Linux SDL application, so i made my own font and a routine to scale and render it under 450 bytes.

I'm attending some interesting courses at the university. One is about artificial intelligence, which i have failed in the past, but seriously try to succeed this time. It's fun to think that we humans can learn to make better decicions if we look how an AI solves problems.

I'm also on a course about 3D modeling and animation. Subject is very interesting, but the lecturer isn't very good, and lecture slides are too full of text. The course is an overview of different techniques, and we have to render some scenes, too. I chose Blender as a tool, because it's free software. Its UI is very different from anything i have encountered so far, but with tutorials i have learned to model some average quality objects.

One exam to go and then the holidays start, yay! Finally got time to study and hack my own stuff. My aim for the rest of the year is to study hierarchial transformations and more 3D in general.

Summer vacation will soon begin so I finally have time to work on my own projects, some of which include programming.
    Today I had "Linux and System Programming" course examination which went fine except one question about sockets.
    Ohjelmointi II (Programming II) examination is on friday, emphasis on design by contract. Language in the course is Java 1.5 which is a huge improvement over previous iterations, but I still prefer C++ over Java. If I learned something valuable from this course, it must be pre- and postconditions. I also come up with more descriptive names for methods and attributes than before.
    I haven't got enough free blocks of time to work on my raytracer, but when examinations are over, I at least have a change. Of course I will convert the code to use conventions I have learned after the last modification, which also rises the question if I should start it from the scratch.

Blah, birds are singing outside of my student dorm window and i'm reading /. . Summer is coming and i should do my MySQL/PHP/XHTML project for university before New Year.