So close now

Yesterday i had my artificial intelligence exam which was 2 hours long. Everything was going fine in the first half hour, i was ahead of schedule until one of the questions was getting a bit too big. I discovered that i got the very begining part of the question wrong, which caused the probability calculations to have 16 combinations rather than 8. I had to put lines through 2 pages of work and start again. This obviously sent my stress levels through the roof as i should have been nearly finishing that question and onto the last one!

I got to about the same point as i was, and had to start the last question to get as many marks as possible, time was running out. This was on fuzzy logic.

What threw me off with the last question was that it was in simpler, more broken down steps than what i had revised for. This made it feel like i was doing it very wrong and i couldn't afford another mistake. I managed to finish the question, very quickly and roughly, i didnt even use the graph paper i was given, just quickly scribbled in the diagrams. I then finished off the probability question with 5 minutes to spare!

As a note to the future, i will take a few extra minutes in the early stages of a question to make sure i have it done right.

I have just one more exam left, and i can properly start OGE's refactor. The week i have off until then, i'll be finishing designs, coding guidelines, project structure and building new dependencies (VC9).

Multi-processor builds

In a gap between revision i decided to test out the multi-processor build feature of visual studio 2008 (express). I tried it out on OGRE (CVS HEAD) as its quite a large project and i need it built for the future anyway. It took me a while to work out how to enable multi-processor builds, there doesn't seem to be anything in the project settings. Adding /MP to the command line options for the source files didn't work, which later i noticed that the build output said that because minimal rebuild was enabled, it was disabling /MP.

I built OgreMain.dll (in release mode) first without /MP which took about 12 minutes. With /MP it took 4 minutes 25 seconds, which is a great improvement. I built the rest of ogre, which from what i remember, takes about 40 minutes, this took 8 minutes (not including OgreMain as it's already built). This is on a Q6600 (2.4Ghz) and 2GB of RAM.

This will be very useful when developing OGE, as a lot of my time was wasted waiting for builds. Also, the new structure of OGE that I'll be working on will allow less full rebuilds, except when altering the core lib.

Two down and more disapointment

I had my second exam today on network design and security. All i can say is that if i have passed, i think it'll only be by a tiny amount (of course, i hope its by alot more). As you can tell i'm not a huge optimist.

Recently Pandora started blocking all UK (and still blocking all other countries except the US) listeners. I used pandora alot to listen to music, i heard alot more bands/music than i would normally and most of what it played, i liked. Other sites that i've tried seem mediocre, although the one that i did like, last.fm which even has its own software but doesn't have a pause button!?

I also watch Robot Chicken episodes each week. I Came home from my exam, got a pot noodle, sat down to watch the newest episodes and i get this message:

Hello International Buddy,

You've reached this page because we are currently not allowed to share our videos across Unitied States borders. It sucks. We Know.

Yes and a huge understatement, and following that:

In the meantime, why not play a game...

Oh joy! that makes it all better....
Ugh, i better get revising for my next exam.

One down, Four to go

Well, i've just had my first exam which was on VHDL for design and testability. I think it went ok, although im never sure with open ended questions (such as Dicuss/Describe/Compare and Contrast etc) if i've answered them correctly and fully.

Just four more exams to do with the next one on friday. I have still have alot of revision to do.. yay!

Weight Lifted

The overall pressure and stress i was under due to coursework deadlines and exams has been greatly reduced now that we've handed in our distributed web systems coursework and have been assessed on our vhdl generator/detector system.

I still have to hand in the last part of the vhdl coursework on monday and exams are closer than ever, but i feel a great weight has been lifted.

Ive had time to begin installing and setting up a new forum for OGE using phpbb3. Our old forum was constantly being spammed and i didnt have any time to try to solve it. I'm hoping the new forum will keep spammers away at least for a while until i can check out any mods for it. I'm hoping to have the new forum usable later today, as i've set the old forum to read only.

Uni Coursework/Exams

I've been very busy lately with uni coursework, namely Distributed Web Systems, where we are building a (fairly simple) distributed file sharing system, in small groups. The aim is to have a group of storage servers that store a consistent list of files, and any number of clients (web based front ends) can connect to any of the servers. The system should be able to handle server crashes.

I'm working on the server and the part of the client that interacts with them. I'm almost there, but like most projects i work on, every time i get a bit closer, the end gets a bit further away. It's a shame that the deadline doesn't follow suit. I have only a week left to finish off my part, integrate it with my team mates work, full test it and submit a report. My exams start the week after and go on for three weeks. I haven't really started revising yet because of coursework.

I'm looking forward to after the exams, i can begin work on OGE again. A big refactor is being planned, with the aim being to make it more modular and easy to develop with. I will go into more detail later...

First Blog

This is my first blog on blogger. I had a blog previous to this one, which i never really used. This time, it will be different.

I will be writing mainly about my life, games and game development with occasional opinions and technology related news.

Alot of blogs will be about the game engine that Steven and i are working on, the Open Game Engine. It is still in very early development. It will eventually incorporate modern 3d graphics, physics, audio, input and networking in a fully multithreaded environment able to scale to any number of threads/cores/processors.

Anyway, off to bed, it's the first day back to university after christmas tomorrow (today now).