And now for something completely different

So how are things in Florida and whats it like living the in a city where the average IQ of a person drops from 120 to.... I-dunno about 2 when they slide behind the wheel of their brand new Chevy Bumper Car, or Dodge Ram-the-guy-in-front-of-you-cause-he-looks-funny-and-waited-two-seconds-to-long-after-the-green-light-and-man-that-pisses-me-off-i-have-no-patience-for-people-maybe-I'm-Cuban-i-don't-know-all-i-know-is-I'm-totally-$*%&#-nuts-when-I-get-in-a-car

So in case you didn't catch the subtleties of my hints that elude to that fact that there may be something in the water here and it maybe turn people into totally insane, rude, unethical dare devils on the highway let me say it again. The drivers in Orlando SUUUUUCKKKK! And I truly mean that from depths of my heart, with great passion and vigor. Now I'm used to bad traffic, bumper to bumper sitting around for 30 minutes to an hour, but where I'm from (Austin, Texas) people are generally considerate and mindful of other people, at the very least they grasp the concept that there in fact ARE other people. Now you may be thinking, he is exaggerating its really not that bad, and I will tell you; no its actually worse words just fail to describe. I digress... what I was going to say was: the traffic is not bad here its just the drivers. Example: there was an intersection, 4 lanes for both intersecting roads, they light at the road started flashing red. In "normal people land" this means 4-way stop, stop, look make sure there is not, I dunno, a huge car in front of you before you proceed into the intersection. However, in "crazy people land aka Orlando Florida" this means everyone stop at the same time, so far so good, and then everybody go at the same time (nooooooo!) get to the middle and stop because there is no more road left to drive on that isn't occupied :( and somewhere in that pea brain is a little voice that says.... no not really it doesn't say anything.

Ok so that's my rant about the drivers here, and it truly is a singular experience driving the roads of Orlando, its probably the most talked about topic at Full Sail (about 95% of students there are not from Florida)

Next rant - the weather: HOLY COW the weather here sucks, all it does is rain - maybe that's cause there is a hurricane - pssshhh - like that would cause a lot of rain. At first the rain is nice, I generally like the rain but seriously 2 weeks of straight rain? My dog is going nuts from being inside all the time. Now that we got one hurricane done another is forming, ughhhh, the joys of living on the southern Atlantic coast, I can't wait to move. Everything gets so wet, then the water sits and huge swarms of mosquitoes as thick as molasses chase you down and try to suck you dry. After while the water starts to stink, a thick miasma hangs in the air, smells like pooh and sulfur - I know - pleasant. But everybody says the winter months are great - if you can make it!

So I have been asked for pictures and stuff, no pictures of Full Sail yet - and not much to see of hurricane Fay just lots of rain but I did take this one picture on my phone that I think is pretty comical

In other news...

Tammy started brushing Charlies teethe with an electric tooth brush check out this little video

Data Structures - this one will keep you busy

Data structures is nothing to sneeze at, this is first class that has really made me work, and by work I mean 20 hour days, staying up till 3AM creating little console based games that uses really awesome data structures, then studying for a midterm, or quiz, or trying to read up on the next days topic so you don't get left in the dust.

We covered a lot of data structures, these are structures you will not get in a normal data structs class. I think that goes for just about every class here, they are geared toward game development and games are made to be fun but there are tons of very advanced programming techniques and mathematics that come together to create that game.

Sooo the topics we covered

• singly linked lists
• doubly linked lists
• dynamic arrays
• hash tables
• Binary Search trees - (do yourself a favor and learn this one before you get here)
• Insertion sort and Binary Search
• Graphs and finite state machines
• Huffman Compression

Each of these topics was introduced, then in 4 hours we had to build the entire workings on the data structure from scratch, most days we used the entire 4 hours. Some days, like Binary Search Tree day, we couldn't get it completed in lab. And since you a graded on your lab work in this class that's not something you want to do. So read and ahead, and you should be ok.

This was a great class overall, the data structures we learned are the bread and butter of video game development, they are very interesting to learn about, and really cool to program from scratch, definitely challenging, but that's a good thing right?

So we had 3 projects in this class, a data driven menu system, a dictionary Word Scramble game, and a turn based strategy game. All DOS based games, the focus is on the data structures here not the interface (that's next month: Windows Programming 1). I enjoyed them all thoroughly I tried to build in as much polish and pizazz as possible in a short amount of time (short being 3 - 5 days). I ended up getting a 100 on all of these but I had a lot of sleepless nights, I may have gone a tad bit overboard on some things which caused those sleepless nights, but in the end I think it was worth it.

Ethics and Psychology

This was another gen-ed it was easy and it was entertaining, we go over typical psychology stuff like Freud and Jung, we had a whole day of the MBTI (Myers Brigs Type Indicator) personality test, which was a lot of fun. The actual class work consisted of developing a personality of a character for a game, movie, book, etc. We focused on using techniques born from Jungian psychology, Freudian, behaviorism, different types of ethics, existentialism and humanistic psychology. And I think it worked, its pretty cool to be able to walk away from a course and know how to create a fully developed character with beliefs and ethics, shortcomings, and disorders. And be able to put that into a game or movie and know how they will respond to different situations based on the ethics you gave them and what not.

Overall an easy class, entertaining and insightful.

Physics - long over due

Ok, last month was really tough ( I took data structures and "ethics and psychology" ) so I have not had much time to sleep or breath let alone post anything on the blog; but I will try to catch up.

So physics, physics was much more advanced than I had thought it would be, we covered the basics first off: velocity, acceleration and friction. We used Euler method for simple velocity and acceleration calculations, then the Verlet Method for a good balance of accuracy and computational speed, then Runge Kutta 4 or just RK4 for the most precise calculation of velocity and acceleration. The rest of the class was filled mostly with calculating the impulsive forces after a collision, and calculating the angular velocity and acceleration taking the impulse and inertia of the object into consideration.

We did several labs in this class to demonstrate the techniques and they were a bit more challenging the Linear algebra but overall the class is fairly easy to pass. However, there is a ton, I mean a whole exact English measurement of a ton, of notes that you "could" take if you are so inclined (which not many are) on how to put some awesome physics in your game. We got into some really advanced topics some of which you would not get to till graduate level courses in a typical university. All of what we learned is geared to 3D real time "discrete" physics, which, according to our instructor and math guru Bahin, you will not find any courses for in more than a hand full of places across the globe. We learned physics but not the typical physics, we learned physics and how to implement it in real time. Not something a normal physics major would ever have to concern themselves with.

So the overall the class is very valuable, but you have to do more than just the course work to get everything out of this class.

Ok on to Data Structures and Psychology