Well I’ve been busy, ain’t I!
This is exactly the reply I gave to somebody who asked me recently why I haven’t blogged lately. 
Anyway, life at Swinburne is going well. I’ve just finished my third week of classes, and it’s all good so far. Algorithmic Problem Solving is excellent, since it looks like we can develop some really good stuff. We’re not limited in what we can do, which is a good thing. Some people are experimenting with using TCP/IP sockets in Pascal (and connecting to MSN Messenger, which for Pascal is somewhat amazing), and also things like OpenGL for 3D Graphics. Here’s a screenshot of what I made last week:
It’s a clone of Breakout, one of the most addictive games ever created. It uses SDL for its graphics and input, and is fully functional, right down to a voice that says "PWNED!" when you lose all of your lives. The best part of it is that it took me a whole three hours in total to implement the whole game. Why did it take so little time? It’s because of SwinGame.
SwinGame is a game SDK created by the faculty and staff at Swinburne. It makes it very easy, and fun, to build your own 2D games in Pascal, VB.NET, or C#, by creating a layer which abstracts you from all of the difficult code for drawing with SDL and collision detection and such. This means that instead of a few pages to load a bitmap and create a sprite object, which reacts when it is hit by another sprite, it is only a few lines of code.
Since a lot of the hard stuff is abstracted, you can focus your attention on the game logic and the overall experience. My Breakout game was under 300 lines of code, which both highlights how simple the logic in Breakout really is, but also how easy SwinGame makes it.
I’m in the middle of writing a tutorial for the SwinGame Wiki on how to build Breakout, so if you’re interested in looking at how a SwinGame is put together, you might want to check it out. However if you want to get your hands dirty, don’t wait for me to post my tutorial, there’s already some tutorials in the SwinGame Wiki to help you get started. 
My other classes have been allright … Computer Logic Essentials is not bad, it has a bit of math in it but it’s otherwise pretty good. Enterprise Technologies and Architectures does suck a bit, mainly because I’m not all that interested in how businesses are structured. However in the last lecture we moved past that and started getting into computer hardware, so it’s getting better.
Database Analysis and Design is going fairly well too. We’ve finished with SQL already (that was fast) and started on ER diagrams, which is not bad stuff. The only problem is my Databases lab runs from 7.30 till 9.30, which is terrible considering I have to get up extra early for a lecture on the same day at 8.30am, then spend from 11.30am till 7.30pm waiting for the next lecture. However I suppose that in a few weeks I’m going to have so much work that I’ll be completely busy for that eight hours.
On an unrelated note, I recently purchased a digital piano, a Yamaha DGX-620. It’s a very nice piece of hardware. I’m going to post a comprehensive review of it a bit later, but what I will say now is that the sounds are really quite good, and it has excellent USB connectivity.
Also, next week I’m going back home to spend Easter with my family. This should be fun. An interesting thing I found out today was that I can get from Melbourne to Mildura for only $23.60, which is quite awesome. The only problem is since it’s on a train then bus, it takes quite a long time. I leave at about 6pm and arrive about 2am. That kinda sucks, but for that price I’m not complaining.
The other thing that sucks is that Connex and VLine fail at customer service. Connex have these "Premium Stations" around Melbourne, meaning these are the stations where you can order VLine tickets. The Glenferrie station, which is about 100M away, is one of these so-called Premium Stations. I went to the station during an off-peak time, hoping that they could arrange my ticket for me. They said it would be fine, if I was willing to stand around and wait for 15 MINUTES while they did it. Why? It’s because VLine doesn’t have computerised ordering in any of the Premium Stations, excluding the Southern Cross and a few other metropolitan stations. Instead, the Connex employee behind the counter of our Premium Station has to ring up somebody at the VLine office and get the ticket. So much for "Premium" service.
Oh well, I’ve got my ticket now, so it’s all good, except for one thing: I bet that I’m going to have a heap of work to do over the Easter break. But I suppose that’s to be expected.
–Ben
Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized