OPS and SGP1 part II

So we just wrapped up this month at school and I have to say, after completing this month, i feel completely relieved. OPS was kicking my ass...lectures were boring, labs were difficult, and the final was pretty hard/ easy. Usually every final, has some sort of curve ball from our programming foundation classes back in the beginning of our education.  Our course director though he would through bit wise operators at us. Which is easy cuz i know that stuff. But it was twisted into threading and we basically had a text program where we had two gas pumps and ten cars. We had to utilize both pumps at the same time while making sure only one car was at a pump at a time. Not to difficult until the threading comes into play. Each time you add a thread to a process, you basically add another brain to calculating data. So when multiple threads are parsing through the same data, you have to watch out, because they dont care about each other, and will change the data without telling each other. Thats why threading is a pain in the ass...having to logically come up with when to lock an object from everyone else, and when to unlock it. If an object is locked, only the thread working on that data can change it.

Well enough with all the technical stuff....well i guess its all technical, but anyways on to SGP1. After a hickup in the beginning, relearning C# (C sharp) and I finally got around to completing my animation editor. In 2D games, animations are done by sprite sheets which is basically nothing more than a flip book animation. You cycle through them fast enough and the change in the image makes the character seem like they are moving. This was my job in my team, making animations for character in our game. Our whole team completed 99% of all our tasks and we pretty much aced the class. Being able to make actual games to extremely rewarding. Now we go on to SGP2 where we continue to make our game. We are in our second Sprint, which is basically a two week period of getting particular parts of the game accomplished. My primary objectives for this sprint is to get different animations for different actions implemented and sound effects to go with the actions. Ill let you guys know how that goes.

Operating Systems && Structure of Game Production 1

So starting off with Operating Systems or OPS...not really much to say about this class other than the fact that it is all about using the wrappers that the course director has given and use them have the OS start threads. So far the lectures are completely useless to what the labs cover. During lecture the course director rambles on about how hard drives work but never does he go over the code and how it works during lecture.

As far Structure of Game Production 1 or SGP1 goes, we were given the choice to pitch random games, and the whole class was divide into 2 teams to make a fully playable games. The class size was 9, so we broke up into 2 teams and we received the 5th person...That basically means that we have to have a wicked kick ass game. Along with having a kick ass game, the whole entire first 2 weeks devoted to this, has been spent documenting the game. That consists of documenting the design of the game ( how things are going to look and feel) and then the architecture of the game(how things mesh together)

 There is more to come on SGP but class has started...