Mon 27 May 2002
May 27, 2002
Had another exam today, this time in Knowledge Representation. I think it went okay, but not brilliant. Another one that will probably be ‘okay, but not brilliant’ is Expert Systems, due tomorrow. Will be very glad when I’m finished with that module; it has been the most boring one on the course so far.
On a different note, I’ve updated my Pacman clone a bit again. The only visible change is that Pacman now visually changes orientation when he changes direction. Also, instead of redrawing the whole screen layout for each iteration, we now just redraw the part that was previously cowered by a ghost/Pacman. Also cleaned up some code in the process. Check it out, it also has a ChangeLog worth reading. Go get your fix.
Sun 26 May 2002
May 26, 2002
Updated my pacman clone a bit. Mostly internal updates that the user will not notice, but a small external one is that we now shows how many lives are left all the time. Go get your fix.
Thu 23 May 2002
May 23, 2002
Just had my first exam of the year. I’ll definitely pass, but I’m still kicking myself for not reading over the material fully at least once… I am sooo stupid when it comes to exams…
Thought a bit about project for next year, seems that Christian’s suggestion to do a AI library of some sort is the best suggestion I’ve had so far. I can even implement one or two simple games to show that it works.
Started playing with the classic ‘8 queens’ problem. For those that don’t know it, is the problem of placing 8 queens on a standard chess board such that none of them threaten each other. It was easy to solve the N-queens in a N*N board for values up to 8, but 8 I have not been able to solve yet. Oh well.
UPDATE: Heh, speak of the Devil ;) I decided to give the 8 queens problem ‘one more try’ just after I wrote the above paragraph, and lo and behold, after just 10 restarts I made it! :)
Mon 20 May 2002
May 20, 2002
My claim to fame seems to be that Richard Heathfield, of comp.lang.c and “C Unleashed” fame, have included a couple of my solutions to the exercises in K&R2 on his website :) I am so proud!
Here’s one of them.
Went to the Linux install fest yesterday, and saw Linux running on the PS2. Afterwards we went to the pub (big surprise) and even later we ended up in a Japanese restaurant, where the portions and the beers were large and the prices were small. An excellent combination! Especially since the quality of the food was absolutely superb :)
Sat 18 May 2002
May 18, 2002
Just went to Harrow with Dave to pay the water bill(s) and buy cardboard boxes for when we’re going to move out. We ended up not getting any boxes, but getting fed at KFC instead.
Thu 16 May 2002, just past midnight
May 16, 2002
Done quite a lot of work today on my pacman clone. Yep, that’s the game I’m going to show off tomorrow morning… Didn’t get quite as far as I hoped for when I chose to do the game, but I am pretty happy with the overall thing. The main feature is that it reads the layout of the board from a text file, and dynamically sets up stuff from there. That means that all you have to do to create different boards is edit this file in a plain-text editor — no recompile necessary :) The game currently relies on the curses library (all functions that need to access the curses library are collected in one file, gui.c). Apart from that, only one line of code is non-ansi C, so it should be easy to port as well. Enough bragging, you can get it here!
The above have taken a lot of my resources, so now I look forward to a few days of rest…
Wed 15 May 2002, around 4 in the morning…
May 15, 2002
The changelog for a game I need to demonstrate on Thursday…
2002-05-15 03:15 stig
o Makefile, ghost.c, ghost.h, gui.c, gui.h, main.c, main.h, misc.c, misc.h, move.c, move.h:
Now almost back up where I was two days ago, with the difference that I have a much nicer design. I can look at this and say "mm, that's not so bad" where I wanted to barf at the previous code.
Most notably: no global variables! Yay ;) I am so screwed ;)
Sun 12 May 2002
May 12, 2002
Today I finished another coursework, the next-to-last one this semester. I am very happy to be finished with this module, as it is probably the most boring I’ve had on this course yet (maybe apart from the database module I so foolishly took in the first year).
Bought some food as well, so I will not starve the rest of the weekend…
Sun 05 May 2002
May 5, 2002
Just put the finishing touch on a coursework for one of my modules. I didn’t have a clue as to how to do the coursework until Friday, when it suddenly clicked as I talked to the teacher about it. After this, I had a working first draft of the code in about half an hour. Saturday was spent writing up a report for it, and also optimising the code a bit.
Slightly reduced form today, although not as much as one would think considering I was at an ‘all expences paid’ party last night, curtesy of The Positive Internet Company.
