Today has been pretty successful but there has been one big issue. So basically I have been working on getting all of the basic functionality of our animated objects in place so testing can be run to make sure they work. I finished that up, started testing, and found a huge problem with the way I have been rotating images. So basically when an image is rotated by a number of degrees that is not divisible by 90, such as 10 or 15 or 45, you are creating an image that is not a square or a rectangle ...

So last week was pretty eventful. We visited OLPC headquarters for the Hackfest and did some very cool stuff while we were there. JT and I really got to work on figuring out how the animation system would work and are now at a great point. Basically we are starting building the first iteration of the animation system this week and should have it feature complete by the end of this week or beginning of next week. We will probably still have little bugs to work out within the system at that point ...

So it is the beginning of week 5 which means we are almost halfway done with the summer and with this research. So this week is pretty eventful for us at the Fossbox. First we got off yesterday because it was the day after the 4th of July. Then today we have a normal day of work and then tomorrow we are all going to Boston for a Hackfest at OLPC headquarters on Thursday. We will be commuting to the Hackfest on Wednesday and coming home from it on Friday so both of those days are pretty much shot ...

So I am finally finished with my Sprite Sheet testing environment and it works great. Basically what I have done, is make a test program that runs the same basic test we have been doing in all the other situations on multiple different types of sprite sheets. By doing this test we have the ability to see what style of sprite sheet will give us the best frame rate in our animation system. So ideally next week when we are planning our animation system we will not only know the best image formats t ...

So yesterday was hands down the most productive day I have had all summer. I got a large portion of my test environment for the sprite sheets done and I learned a whole bunch of stuff that pertains to how JT and I will do our final animation system. On top of this we had our first real discussion with JLew about how the final animation system will work. The conversation was mostly productive but at the beginning we were definitely just talking at each other because neither of us really knew wha ...

So my blog post is a little late today but better late than never right? Anyway so I have been working on my test environment for the different Sprite Sheet styles and I just got it displaying one of the types perfectly. So now I am just working towards getting the implementation of the other types. Once they are all implemented I will begin doing tests on them to make sure they work as intended. Once they all work, I will setup the main test so that (hopefully) tomorrow I can start actual bench ...

So this week my plan is to finish up the test program for sprite sheets and to begin running the actual tests. I have not actually run any tests yet but by the end of the day I should have run a preliminary test just to make sure everything I have done so far works. Once I am confident I am on the right track things will get much easier. JT is in a similar situation with his test program and our goal is to be able to start developing our final animation system b y the middle of next week at the ...

So here i am blogging away after almost a week without blogging at all. man I need to do this more often. Anyway so these past couple days we've been attending all of these special events here at RIT., The first was on Saturday and that was FOSSCON. We had a booth there and we basically just spent the day hanging out and manning the booth. We talked to some people from other universities and such and it was overall pretty cool. Then on Monday, NTID held a symposium on teaching to deaf and hard o ...

So as I said with previous entries, JT is working on making an all encompassing test for file types. Essentially the test will allow us to run all of our previous tests from one executable file. While he does that, I am moving on to trying to create a test that will allow us to test various different animation styles. What I mean by this, is we will be comparing having each frame as a separate image, multiple different types of sprite sheets, etc. Our goal is to know not only which image format ...

So today's Image Scaling test is complete and it gave us a whole lot of really good data. Basically we found out that scaling images within the code is definitely not a viable option. This means that if a developer wanted to make their program function in multiple resolutions, they would most likely need multiple image sets. With that in mind JT and I are currently thinking that GIFs are the most viable, all around, option. It has the smallest file size and has a very capable frame rate that is ...