Words from the null.

It has been a while since I posted last, and figured now was a good time for an update.

Life has been insanely busy. School is crazy, but I'm glad I'm here. DigiPen really is a challenge, but this semester is really pretty calm, all said and told. We're nearly done with week eight, and it's flying by. It'll be time for finals before I realize it. The point of this post isn't really school related, but since we're on that topic, here's a quick run-down of whats happened in the last eight weeks. School started and the first couple weeks were kind of slow. Not a whole lot got done in any class. However, that changed fairly quickly, started getting homework and lots of stuff to do. One of our classes is GAM100 which is a game design and production class. So far, we've had to implement our own versions of Pong, MoonLander, Galaga (vertical scroller), Defender (horizontal scroller), and a platformer (think old school duke nukem or mario brothers). Now, for the last half of the semester, we get to make our own, all using a wonderful tool built by DigiPen refered to as the FunEditor. Let me assure you, 'Fun' has developed a much different definition on campus as a result...

Anyways, enough of that. It's been a blast, and I enjoy every bleeding moment of it. Moving on, earlier today, there were two talks by students on campus, one dealing with using Fuzzy State Machines and some interesting use of fuzzy logic for use in A.I., and the other dealing with ordering of fuzzy sets. I won't go into detail in them, but the first talk got me thinking. As I've mentioned before, A.I. is a topic that I really want to pursue and want to work with in the future. Thinking about it now, game development is research is probably one of the best ways to dive into that kind of stuff. In the long run, much more research in other areas will be needed as well, but creating good A.I. in games is a huge challenge, mostly because you're constrained by resources, and as such, you really have to put a lot of time and thought into your design to ensure that the results of your game play are realistic enough, and that you're not taxing the system too much just doing A.I. computations.

I'll devote more time to this topic later, I just really needed to get some thoughts down in some tangible fashion so that I can return to it later and actually work on something worth while.

As an aside, if anyone is interested in seeing what the FunEditor allows one to do with little work and little programming knowledge, I can post my FunEditor games. I plan on doing this anyways, I just haven't spent the time to do it yet. If you're interested though, just let me know.

--nullpuppy(out)