Engineering is hard.

Oh hey there. I missed a week again. To be fair I didn't have too much to write about as there were a few nights these past few weeks where I'm up until midnight doing homework. Which is always fun. Add that to that hectic personal life I keep mentioning and other homework and I end up just too busy.

So let's talk about my plans. I'm applying for jobs to start this summer. Despite being of college age, I've never actually had a job which doesn't help my resume. Or my wallet. But the goal is to move out and solve 90% of my problems, so I'm really glad to be working towards that.

As far as Dev goes, I'm planning on teaching myself some intro C++ over the summer to save myself paying a university priced class. I keep having ideas for games though. Usually Indie games come up with a unique feature and base a game around that, but my idea of a game is more... ambitious. I mean indie versions of Metro 2033 or Battlefield 4.

Speaking of which, Indie games are weird to me. itch.io is probably one of the biggest indie game distribution site out there. All the games there are really... similar? I guess this could be said about indie games as a whole but there are a ton of "rogue-like", 2D, sidescrolling, pixel graphics... that sort of things. Is that type of game just really popular? Or easy to make? A majority of the games I play and all the ideas I have for games are First or third person, 3D game. Maybe it comes done to personal taste, but 2D games just don't have that much appeal to me.

So that's what's been going through my head. I'm not sure what I'll do regarding my Source mod as I have several assignments and labs to work on... and a term/research paper to get going. Aw well. I'll work on it when I can. I wish it was as easy as rambling on some private blog in some random corner of the internet.

Now with Video!

Like I mentioned last week, spring term started up again so there goes all my free time, though I did mention I wanted to make a few videos to show it off in motion. Just a quick disclaimer: I used Shadow Play to record these, and despite rendering in the game in ~300 FPS, and recording it in 60FPS 1080p, the recording for some reason has frame drops and sub par audio. I'm not sure why, I mean I'm running on the Episode 2 engine released in 2007... and I have a GTX 760... but aw well.

This first video is just a weird thing I discovered with the AI. One out of the 7 combine units will travel from one room to another to investigate gun fire while none of the others seems to really care other then going into alert mode. I'm not sure why he's doing it and why the others aren't.

The second clip is a standard walk around. I just want to reiterate that I'm still really in the world building, as you can tell by the bad lighting and low quality shadows. Other than that, I'm quite proud to have my own virtual world that I made and I'm able to walk around in.

I can't make any promises for next week. I've debated turning this into a personal journal as well but I think I'll hold off for now. I still need to finish up that area by the APC and on the other side of some of the buildings in the court yard. After that I'll have to move onto lighting and learning how to add scripted sequences, animations, models, textures.... this is a really good learning experience.