Time to write another journal entry. What to write about hmm.... I'm not in a very ranty mood right now so while I do mean to complain about things like corporate public relations or public education or how annoying Project Fun was today (actually that's a good topic, maybe I'll just cover that), I don't have it in me to write about pet peeves right now. So I'll just write about Project Fun I guess.

For those of you reading this who don't go to Digipen, Project Fun is basically the training program that they make us work with for the first semester of school, because we can't work in raw c++ like most games use because we are still learning c++ (although it seems like most people in the class have at least played around with it before, or know the basics). So, we get to use the monstrosity that my school dubs "Project Fun" to learn the basics of making games (something that I taught myself throughout high school using flash and stuff). Frankly, it's not so fun.

First of all, to put into perspective what this program does, we have a ball and a wall. If we want the ball to fall, we click an "add gravity" box. Then we click a "collide with wall" box. They we draw lines on the ball and wall to show what the objects shape is so they can collide. Bam, movement. It seems so simple but it really isn't. The program is littered with glitches and shoddy collision detection and an overly complicated interface. Telling a ball to collide with a wall is one thing, but not having control over what happens when the ball collides is another. It does so much stuff for you that it makes customizing it to make it do what you want a real pain.

We had to make Pong today. It was so painful. We had to plop some code in about 45 different places in the file (we did get to code a little but since it was all in the editor we still didn't have much control over how we coded). This took about 2 hours to get Pong working right, after dealing with problems such as the program breaking code that it wouldn't allow me to manually fix because it was "advanced" and out of the scope of the project (had to redo that whole part) and setting up complicated state machines to control the movement of the ball (which really doesn't need a state machine).

So many times I said it would be so much easier to just code everything from scratch, because Pong does not need an advanced physics engine, accurate collision detection and complicated state machines to work properly. I know, I've done pong before. It's a lot easier than tabbing through hundreds of menus to get to the spot where you can add 4 lines of code (which are calls to weird ProjectFun specific functions that we're going to have to learn then never use again after this semester's project class is over) before searching through a maze of trees to find the spot where you get to add 3 more lines of code. It's a pain to say the least.

Anyway one of the interesting things they told us in game class is that we have to play games if we want to be able to make games. So my homework is pretty much... play video games (I laugh at my friends who have stuff like 'biology' or 'english' homework... even though this technically is english homework... whatever). School for games rocks! We get to spend countless hours programming in c and c++ giving a long set of basic commands to the computer to get it to do something more complicated, then spend hours doing math and physics to get basic movement to look right. Then in our tiny bit of free time we are forced to play video games. Oh it's so painful.

Just kidding! The workload hasn't picked up yet (except in math), so my college career has been a lot of math, programming, and super smash bros. And forced blogging in english. I'll let you know how it is in a month when we have no more time to do anything besides school (at least that's what I keep hearing).