User talk:Patrick
From NetRace
This is where I will put stuff about me.
| Table of contents |
Patrick
First to get this out of the away, here is what I look like.
This is me at one of the coolest places on the earth. This is Meter Crater in Arizona. A big thing hit a long time ago, didn't wipe out the dinosaurs, maybe a few rabbits and ants, but it did create quite a site and probably put a bit of dust up into the air. They have a cool asteroid impact game where you can set the size of the meteor, velocity, angle of attack, speed and bunch of other things and then run a simulation. Some bounce off of the atmosphere and some, well, wipe out the earth..
Interests
I like to talk to anyone, especially girls, about nano technology, science, computers, cool things to do with Virtual Reality and Virtual Humans. Or just about anything, I have opinions on everything.
Games I am playing
The Matrix Online – Lvl 42 Hacker called RUR. Yea could be 50, but taking my time..
Half-Life 2: Day of Defeat (Also called Source) – Love the source engine.. Half-Life 2: Counterstrike
Battlefield 2 and still love 1942 – ranked here also..
America’s Army – Yes I have qualified in all professions thank you.
GTA San Andreas
Doom3, just want to finish the damn game…
Roller Coaster Tycoon3 – need to play that a bit more.
The Sims2 – Need to play that some more also..
Dungeon Siege 2 – playing the Beta, when I have time, need to get the final product.. Loved the first one, and this one fixed some of the issues with the first one.
Ground Control II – haven’t played for awhile, but it’s on my computer.
Was Playing Star Wars Galaxies, now that SOW took over The Matrix Online, I guess I should get a station access pass to lay them both, stopped playing SWG when my account expired.. There is no death in virtuosity…
Sid Meier’s Pirates – love pirates, game is good, but a bit repetitive, and I hate sharing all my booty with the skally wags… let them eat dirt..
Oh yea, I am probably the only person on the planet to not Play World of Warcraft. I want to, but there is this thing called Time, that I have a hard time finding more of it. Maybe in the Future I will get more time in the past...
Who am I
more about me later..
I work at the Institute for Creative Technologies (http://www.ict.usc.edu). I am project lead on the virtual humans project, working with researchs and programmers to bring it all together, not as simple as it sounds.
What Am I doing for this Game Project
Well I am a good programmer, but not as good as Ed and Paul. Eddie is a hacker extraordinaire.
Anyways right now I am working on some of the Network code, Paul did a first pass, now I am doing a second, then we will all add to it. I did the sound with DirectMusic and DirectSound, and DirectInput. Going to work on the game play after the network stuff.
10/5/05
What did I do this week blog
Well this week I re-wrote some network code, partially to understand it, partially to make it more of a class.
Well this has turned out to be not al ot of fun. Ok the converting part is ok, learned all about sockets, asynchronous sockets and winsock. (I knew some of it before, but it was awhile ago I did network programming)
Anyways so the way we were sending data before was basically as a string and then looking at the string to see what was in it. Well the new way we are sending the data is a bunch of structures that are our packets. Well trying to convert those to strings and read them out properly has been a big pain in the ass. Also why can't everyone just use one string class, why are there so many different types and no proper ways to convert from one to another...
Well hopefully I can get this done for tomorrow, otherwise my team mates will have a big snarl on their faces… like the ones their characters have in WOW.. I'm going in you guys.... If we don't have a good demo tomorrow it's cause I have been taking so long on this part..
10/6/05
Ok I got betten over the head with the socket protocol and am going to re-work that with the team.
Had a good lecture in class today about game design, didn't take notes will get it from the audio. But I am going to add more to our page to put more detail into the game design. Don't know if we will implement all of that, but it's good to have it up there.
10/26/05 Yea I need to update this and what I've been doing. Worked on the low level network stuff, got that working, the packets are cast and sending them works. Then was working on creating some new maps, while ed worked on the physics. The map and physics go together. I am using Photoshop to create height maps in greay scale, then loading those into Bryce. Bryce is a terrain generation program. Once in Bryce, play around with the terrain and smooth some area, bump up others. Next select the terrain image that Bryce will render the terrain with. Set the sun angle, lighting conditions, etc. Render it, save it out as a Direct X .x format file. Create a high def image that get's overlayed onto the terrain when it is rendered in the game. Also need to adjust some of the amient light levels as they are set too low, you can't control that through Bryce. I'll put some pictures of the maps up here soon. The next thing I am working on is getting the sound to play across the network, so you can hear other cars, radios, crashes, weapons etc...Need to clean this up a bit also. I am also working on putting objects into the game that we can hit, drive around etc.. Ed is attaching physics to those so we can push them, knock them over etc... Then I will be working on adding weapons and some game play issues, make it look more pertty...
