Posts by 'jtmengel'

jtmengel

Tales of Thor's Day

Alright, time for the Thor's Day Blog, also know as Thursday by some nations that don't recognize the day's pagan origins. Ahem, but anyways, today was a day of killing off the tests we started yesterday on using classes, inheriting sprite, in conjunction with dirty lists. In case I'm not making sense, we finished the tests to confirm that we could effectively speed things up by doing A) storing all the relevant information pertaining to the image for easy access B) allowing us to intelligently ...

jtmengel

Bloging blogs, everyday

Design was previously thought to be complete and implementation could begin, but wait! There's more! We had previously moved on from dirty blitting content that we fully understood the subtleties therein, full of bravado and confidence that, as you will soon learn why, quickly evaporated. As our plans were attacked by rabid weasels. I carefully chose this metaphor to perfectly illustrate where we are, or course. So today was spent reviewing tutorials on Sprites; sprites are, in essence, surfa ...

jtmengel

Incorporating what we've found

In these last two weeks, Dave and I on the front end team have made progress on outlining what we want to implement and, more importantly, what we will leave out to streamline performance; We've been bouncing between two phases of our design process, the first being fervently adding features and functionality and the second being aggressively purging what isn't absolutely necessary. After the heart-wrenching experience of going through that process more than a few times, saying goodbye to code w ...

jtmengel

Week 4

This week has been a little bit crazy; between my hours trying to get an example of DirtySprite and Sprite objects running with print outs to the terminal, I've been helping out a friend with programming a plugin to parse .pdb (Protein Database) files and process the information through some calculations specified by some unfortunately complicated-looking statistical equations. In what spare time I have, I've been drawing from an excellent workshop book on anatomy and stance. The biggest obstac ...

jtmengel

Beginning of Week 4

So last week the FOSS-Box manned a booth at the RIT Symposium of Deaf Education and Technology; we met a good number of people and showed off the XO's as well as the software we're developing for the platforms. Most of the questions and interest was directed at the XO's themselves, but such is life. Last week was more or less lost to the sake of programming though, and the work that I managed to sneak in between questions was largely focused on getting the master test program on its feet. Thursd ...

jtmengel

Thursday Mornings

Greece just scored its second ever goal in the World Cup; thanks to RIT's impressive hospitality I enjoyed watching this historical event happen on a screen taller than myself while sitting ten feet away. Today begins the production of the last test before we the art team move into animation territory; I'm running benchmarks on how quickly the system responds when loading sprites with pygame to compare the information to our tests of a similar type where we used pygame's image class. Exciting ...

jtmengel

Week 2, away we go

Last week was a good run, resulting in a functional test application for animations under controlled processor loads which I fine-tuned over the weekend. We have been seeing BMPs come out ahead so far in terms of speedy load times, so we expect to be working on scalability with those and, if we can discover some way to implement them, SVGs as well. We'll see what the week had in store for us. Also, this blog feels like the Real World or some other reality TV show that convinced me to ritualisti ...

jtmengel

Blog message, v1.0

My name's Scott JT Mengel, I'm a student at RIT enrolled in their Medical Informatics program and this project is my first studio setting game programming experience. Previously I've worked at the University of Rochester as a game programmer, making software for the treatment of amblyopia. Beyond that, I've gone to school at the Rocky Mountain School of Art and Design and RIT (for a time) for animation; my purpose in this project is to take my background with animation and programming and make t ...