Harry Potter and Double Dispatch for Collision

Before we begin, these two things have very little to do with each other.

I'm a huge fan of Harry Potter. I will make no apologies or hide that fact. The story is simply remarkable and contains all my favorite elements of a good tale. The characters are incredibly human and relatable, the fights are furious, the stakes are high, and the story is simple yet very deep. My love for the Potter story increased even more when I discovered the fantastically put together audio books by Jim Dale. His performance is incredible and their really is no audio book quite like it. If you don't like to read, the audio books serve as a far greater version of the books then the slowly failing movie series. I really hate the movies at this point. 1 and 2 followed fairly well and 3 was entertaining but was very devoid of important elements from the book and the 4th movie was a joke. The ending had been changed and all of the powerful tension that kept me up till four in the mornining was stripped clean. I have very low expectations for the fifth movie. The movies are in my head and they will stay there. Anyhoos, back to the point. The audio books are great way to "reread" the books while working. I've gottten into the habit of coding while listening and found it keeps me in a good mood.

Speaking of coding, I'm working on redoing much of the collision system in my code base. I'm about to start work on implementing AABB, OBB, and Circle based collision (which is odd cause you think I would of done that first :)). Right now my code pretty much supports convex hulls but this can be so much overhead for such a simple task. I am getting excited some at implementing these simpler collision methods and not relying 100% on my convex hulls to do everything. My interests in working on this system were increased when I stumbled upon the concept of Double Dispatch. Its pretty cool once you get a good example to help explain it to ya. One of these days I should post my notes to help anyone else out..but I am not to confident in my abilities as a teacher :). Anyhoos, I am excited to get these implemented into a simple platformer demo and see what happens.

Anyhoos, I would like to throw out some thx to Industry people who have been nice enough to listen to my ranting questions and give some solid guidance:

Raj Nattam
Steve Desilets
Ryan Ellis!
Jameson Dursall

Spoon and the Game of Life

Hello again to those of you so gracious to grace me with your most gracious attention..gracefully.

Things are going at a nice rate here in Orlando. Laura and I are getting settled into our pre-married living together life. Its taken some work from both of us to make things work and I am enjoying it very much. We started a new workout/diet program. Well not really much of a diet, more of a new way of eating. My friend Mike Vittiligio passed me a book called "Body for Life" by Bill Phillips and reccomended his workout/eating plan. We thumbed through it and found his plan pretty pleasing. Seeing as I am a big lover of food, one day out of the week the plan demands you eat whatever you want...thats pretty damn cool by my book. We have also been working out consitently in the mornings for a full week and I feel pretty good. Its only 2o minute aerobic workout but the book has you going through this way of doing it where you try to maximize yourself and keep pushing every visit by a bit more.

On the school front, things are going pretty well. I have a bad habit of making our excercices in programming classes more complicated then they need to be. When asked by some buds why I do this, I always reply "to challenge myself." While this may seem like a good habit for getting better at my craft, I have fears that I may do that in a work enviroment where things need to get done by any means. Will see. I'll just keep on trucking to get better at this. We had an assignment to work on the Game of Life (http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife) in class and I though we were supposed to write everything but found out that our teacher provided a ton of the code himself. I ended up writing his part myself and spent most of my lab time on that, not doing the real assignment (thought it is a very easy task). I learned a lot doing it myself (especially for another project I am working on where these lessons will come in handy) but the teachers example is by and far much better. I am going to study it some more to see if I can improve my version....actually I just stopped mid bloggin to check his code out. He has a more elegant solution then mine for the standard game of life. One thing he encouraged was making a flexible solution for different rules and mine more or less supports that but could use some improvement. Oh well. It is, as I always tried to remind myself, useful experience.

My other code base is getting along pretty well and I was able to use it for a simple pong game project. I got a couple of really nice comments from students and a few teachers which was very nice. For the first time, my collision code actually came out as a game..and it was good.

Allright time to get ready to get shopping with Laura for my last minute cruise needs. I'll definelty put some pics once we get back!

Till then, Grindhouse looks pretty frikin sweet!