Weeks 3-6 – Sizing things up
Well i haven't exactly been posting weekly as i have supposed to have been, but project work has been delayed and disrupted, though lost memory sticks (and found) and a new laptop. However in the past week i have started work again on Saga of Sol and have done the base classes that will manage all of the planets and have so far added functions to control their position in their orbit, and blit them to a minimap.
This is a view of our solar system loaded into the program, everything is relatively to scale, well kind of, the planets sizes are correct relative to each other using a quadratic scale, the same is true wit their orbital distances.
In doing the work I have so far I have realized that I may have to reduce the scale of my game to either only the inner solar system, or to skimp more on the physics and accuracy side of things. I have decided this because of the vast differences in orbital periods and distances of the outer and inner planets. Another way to account for this would be to think up another mechanic that allows faster traveling between more distant planets.
Last of all I have created a page (see menu) that I will use to keep track of and display all the things I need to get done in the game, all the things I would like to get done and other ideas that I haven't yet decided upon.
I have also done a draft logo that can be found on the saga of sol page
Week 1 – Choosing a Project
At school we are just into our first weeks of year 12, subjects continue much the same as usual, but in Design and Technology (D&T) and Software design and development (SDD) we are required to do a major project. While I am really keen to get started on my projects for both of these im getting stuck trying to decided upon one idea (for each).
For software design and development we need to design and document a video game and have been pointed at python and pygame to create it. As part of the project brief for our SDD major project we need to make weekly posts on the status of our project and what we have been up to.
With a bit of free time is made a little game prototype to warm up my knowledge of pygame and test the basic concept for a simple idea.
The aim of the game is to get to the green circle, this is done using the arrow keys and climbing on boxes, the boxes are dropped from the ceiling, and darker boxes crush lighter boxes.
For those interested it can be downloaded below
[download id="23"]
If i developed this into a full game it would include other puzzle aspects such as blocks of differing sizes, and perhaps different properties. As well as this i would probably have a mode where you can see the order of all the blocks to be dropped.
The other main ideas that i am deciding between is an RTS revolving around interplanetary warfare, and a version of lemmings where the aim is to kill all of them.
By next week's post I hope to have decided upon a final project and started programming it, I will also include a summary of results from a survey that we needed to carry out as part of the project.
And So Ends NCSS 2010
The past weekend has been a large on in programming for me, having both the finals for Progcomp (Run by the university of NSW) and the last week of the NCSS programming challenge.
In Progcomp my team managed to soar up the ladder from last in the finals to second last (that's still 6th place out of 13o teams or so overall) and was utterly flattened by James Ruse who finished all the challenges in an amazing 1:40. We Still had an awesome time going up to Sydney and having a look around the university on its open day and we look forwards to hopefully being back next year.
Last week was also the final week of the NCSS challenge where you are given 5 problems to solve for 5 weeks. The beginners division of this competition is a great way it get into learning programming/python if you are interested. This year i entered the advanced division and managed to place 11th on 188 points solving all the questions except for the last and rather evil Peg Solitaire question (worth 20 points instead of the usual 10) . I am reasonably happy with this and hopefully i am able to move up the board a bit more next year and so ends NCSS 2010.
Almost Gigapixel – Robertson’s Lookout
I took another mega panorama last weekend from Robertson's Lookout (Between Mt Keira and Mt Kembla) and spent the rest of the weekend trying to process it.
I am getting close to my goal of taking a gigapixel image, this time it was taken on a tripod with a more powerful lense. It was made from joining around 300 photos and I managed to avoid missing any bits out this time.
For this one I managed to use a latter version of photoshop at school to crop it a bit and remove most of the jagged edges.
Check it out HERE
Pointless to have a thumbnail of the whole thing, so here is a thumbnail at 1/4 zoom at the steel works
Slouching around taking a few hundred photos on the edge of a cliff
I hope you enjoy it, and find some interesting spots, I plan on making my own version of the zoomify viewer where you can mark locations, so it makes it a big game of i-spy.
Arapilies 2010 Panoramas
A collection of panoramas from our easter trip to Mount Arapilies
Click for a larger version
A view from the large belay shelf on the bard
A view of the camp site, just after ali barbers cave
A different than normal perspective, looking towards Arapilies from Miter rock
Bard buttress and Tiger wall