it’s 1am and i can’t sleep

i happened to doze off for a few minutes around 10:30 but I woke up wide awake. We had pizza from Numero Uno for dinner and I have a slight hint of heartburn right now.

I’ve taken a new approach at work. Instead of trying to pick up the operations side of everything, I’m doing my best to immerse myself in the development. I’m asking all sorts of questions about all sorts of things. I downloaded our graphics engine, Panda3D, and started playing around. I found a 3D model of a cube so I wrote a program to build a 3D menger sponge. It builds a level 3 sponge nicely, but you can tell my system is a little bogged down. A level 4 takes almost two minutes to load and maxes out my RAM.

In addition to the sponge, I started tinkering with building a graphical user interface/heads up display. The nice thing about 3D programs is that they support alpha blended png images….unlike internet explorer. Internet explorer does support them, but it can’t cope with overlapping alpha-blended pngs.

Back to my HUD/GUI…I need to figure out how to put numbers and stuff on the display. I can load the image files so that’s not a problem, but I need to figure out how to update the numbers. For example, I can easily display your score when it is 0 (the initial state), but I need to figure out how to update the gui as your score changes. I’m sure it’s easy, I just don’t have the time at the moment to work on it.

I’ve been really procrastinating a lot on a variety of stuff…I have to get my benefits paperwork in, i need to get my taxes done, i need to change my oil, etc.

One of the developers gave me hope today that I might be able to make the transition eventually. He was walking past my desk when he noticed me reading the panda3d documentation.

I don’t have a good handle yet on textures, collisions, lighting, or shading yet, so I’m pretty much SOL for the moment. The UCLA extension is offering a class in python game development and Disney will pay for it. It starts next saturday, but I can’t go because my Dad’s coming up to go shooting that day. I don’t think the class would work out right now anyways since I’d have to miss 3 of the 10 sessions (one for shooting, two for the wedding). I’m going to see if they offer it this summer and try to get into that if they do.

Now I’m tired. Goodnight.