Exciting times here at AltSci. I wasn't able to do either Particle Works, polygon reduction in Terrain Works, or Collision detection this five day weekend, but the things that I did accomplish were quite enough. Today I was able to finish the tar and gzip support for AltSci3D. I got it to run using a data.tar.gz file. What was cool was the way I went about it. I wrote a very short testing program using my cpp_arg class and a TarFile class. int main() simply grabbed a tar, parsed it, and gave you the contents of the file you asked for. When I finished, I renamed it tcat. Why tcat? Have you used Linux before? There's a command called cat. It opens a file and returns the contents to the console. It's very useful, especially with the Linux console which is so mighty and powerful (specifically pipelines and in/output redirection). Well, there's also a program called zcat. It takes a file.gz and decompresses it outputting the contents to the console. It's very useful when you are using gzipped files. Why do you use gzipped files? That is the lesson for today, but not yet. Before I release it, I am going to get support for all files in the data.tar.gz file. That way the AS3D data is self-contained. What use is that? Say you want to show your AS3D manga to a colleague? Send him/her this one .tar.gz and then they can just drop it onto AS3D and it will show up. Currently it's kinda weird and stuff. Everything is relative path and it doesn't work unless you run it from the console in the directory above the data directory. Ugh, huh? Well, this will allow easy access to good directory structure. And since I still have support for files as it was in old, I think it will be good. Backup is good.
Update 2002-02-13: I decided to not post this twice because I have been working far too hard on AltSci3D Manga Director. It's at a point right now where I can actually finish Scene 1 if I just get my act together and do the animations. It's quite amazing, I assure you. I have a 5 day weekend ahead of me, so I'm using it to my full advantage. I have five (count them, 5) projects related to AltSci3D that I'm going to work on this weekend. The first is of course JF. I want to do Scene 1, so I can start on Scene 6, so I can start on Scene 7 which will be the pinnacle of my hopefully long life. The second project is AltSci3D Manga Director. I have some serious work to get done on it, so I'll be bashing it with a spoon from time to time. Then there's AltSci3D Engine which MD is now finally based on. My most recent news is that I actually seperated Manga Director from the Engine it relies on, so now the engine is a real engine. What is a 3D engine? It is a bunch of code that allows a person to make a 3d program by using it. So say you want to make a video game. You want a video game engine. If you're making a 3d game, you need some sort of 3D Engine, whether you build it yourself or someone like me does it for you. So my fourth AS3D project is writing Terrain Works using the AS3D Engine. The first reason is so that I can do terrain modelling (vital for Scene 7-24). The second reason is to see how fast I can prototype a program using the AS3D Engine. The fifth and last project is Particle Works. I wrote a program a year ago that demonstrated billiard-level 3D particle physics which tested the second iteration of my AS3D Engine (Windows, C++, DirectX 8.1). It was a smashing success for Humanities 200 the class I was doing it for. But now I am past that stage of programming and would like it to better reflect my programming ability.
A few of my friends asked me the other night, what do you need to get into UW? I told them, "You need to live in Washington." While that isn't all you need, it's the main factor sadly. The probability charts say that with the same grades/SAT scores in-state has a 90% chance and out-of-state has a 40% chance. I then added, "You also need above 3.0 and 1100 on the SAT to have a 90% chance of getting in." I had a 3.4 and 1210 on SAT (most of which was math, btw), for example. The difference between getting into the UW and going to community college after high school is about $10k per year (the difference between middle/upper and upper class), so it's nothing to scoff at for most people. Most middle/upper class students find that trading two years of their life is quite worth it. But what if you could trade four years for a decrease in pay by about $40k per year? Would you do it? If you'd give up two years to higher education for $10k, you would certainly not give up four years _and_ $40k. But I am. The technicalities are important, but the fact remains: I am throwing $40k per year and four years of my young life. Not exactly throwing away, though -- I am refusing it and instead living my own path. Instead of programming right out of high school at $60k per year, I've decided to go to the UW and make average $3k per year in my spare time and will be making ~20k per year when I graduate this June with a Bachelor's in Physics. Why? I graduated high school and got my AA degree in 1999 (age 17), the year of the dot coms, Y2k panics, and Monica Lewinsky. When I was 13, I worked for my father doing programs. I made $100 in one day and decided that year that I would not program for a living. That's right, I, who currently makes a living programming decided that I would not do what my father did. I would not work all day to make inane amounts of money and spend it on junk. I would not use computers to make programs for businesses. I would become a scientist and use my talents for the betterment of humanity. My dream has changed and I've even programmed for a businesses against my morals so that I could fund my physics education. I've even thought of programming computer games for a living. But I cannot and will not spend everyday working for money. Just the thought of 9-5 makes me physically ill. 7AM-6PM is no worse or better in my view. And the truth is that I do not need to work 9-5 or 7-6. Being single, without a car, and without massive entertainment budget, I can and have been living on $600 per month, something completely unknown to Gen-X Americans. If you do the calculations, it's $7,200 per year, well below the poverty line of $8,860 for a single adult. Of course, I don't buy clothes, I don't drive, and I am not counting my very expensive education which is going onto loans. Hopefully, you can see a bit of logic in my picture. A computer that does economic calculations would say "Illogical, cannot compute!" But I think that my computer understands. "If computers could scream, would we be so callous as to turn them off at night? We might, if they screamed all the time for no good reason." ^_^
I missed the last few days of Making of JF because I'm just being busy. What so busy? Huge changes to AltSci3D Manga Director and the errors that it generates. Did you notice that this page is the 256th Making of Javantea's Fate Page? To celebrate my overflow into the 16-bit unsigned integers, I'm opening up the source to the beta of AltSci3D Manga Director. Open Source people should be happy about that. In fact, I'm opening it up in this very page!
