Had a bunch of random dreams last night that were somewhat interconnected. In most of them, I was a hero (from Heroes of Might and Magic) going around with a bunch of troops and fighting enemies in this old abandoned warehouse. Found a bunch of people I knew there, and proposed mating with them (apparently a game mechanic whereby you get more units)… and then suddenly they were real clustarfolk, and I was propositioning them for sex (“but not really,” I said, “since this is all in a video game”). Before anything happened though, a huge bird (a la Spirited Away) flew overhead looking for us, and we all ran into a hole and hid. Then we ran around the warehouse together finding various parts to build something (I forget what it was, exactly)… and then I unfortunately woke up.
Blar.

Managed to get a surprising amount done on graphics today. God, I hate that class more than anything. It was quite satisfying filling out the FCEs for it. In any case, I had been stuck on the L-System tree generation for a while.
Talked to some people today and I finally realized why my trees weren’t rendering (it wasn’t a problem with my code at all, technically)… first off, I didn’t realize you could change the rendering depth (you have to do it while the program is running, and only through the center-click menu, and the mouse I was using didn’t have a center button), and so I was only rendering trunks of trees without branches (which is why they looked weird).
Once I had that fixed, they still weren’t working. In the code for a RotationNode, they have an enum rotation = {XAxis, YAxis, ZAxis};. Naturally, I checked the rotation and rotated about the axis as stated. That’s right, no?
…
WRONG
Due to something they’d done in another part of their code (that we weren’t supposed to modify), a rotation specified about the X-axis actually had to be done about the Y-axis (glRotated(degree,0,1,0); instead of glRotated(degree,1,0,0);), Y-axis about the Z-axis, and Z-axis about the X-axis.
If that’s not the most broken starter code I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is.
In any case, got that working, and it actually looks good (even if my custom tree file slows rendering to a crawl because of its complexity).

Then, I started tacking the task of animating BOIDs. Thanks to my complete ignorance when it comes to C++, I spent around 2 hours (with tons of help from Mark Tomczak [thank you so much!]) realizing that I was missing a ; at the end of my class declaration, that I needed to add boids.o into the makefile, that I needed to add “using namespace std”, and that I needed to #include <vector> instead of just #include <stdlib.h>. It was just so frustrating trying to create a new class and get it working with the rest of the starter code when I’d never written a C++ class before. In any case, once I had the files compiling and linking, they worked perfectly.

So yeah, now I have a program that procedurally generates both the terrain (both texture and color) and the skybox, draws L-System trees according to lsys files (with real-time-modifyable recursive depth rendering), and animates a flock of BOIDs (currently just black triangles) with flocking behavior. The BOIDs are actually quite mesmerizing to watch. They each independently fly around and avoid each other but they also move as a flock (so the flock as a whole has a distinct velocity).

I plan to work more on the Cluster TCG tonight. Hopefully I’ve have enough cards that the game is actually playable by the end of this weekend, if anyone wants to playtest it. The website for it will go up later tonight, probably (just a placeholder site).
Here’s your card, Elise:

Oh, also, today was the first snow of the year (finally). I didn’t get any pictures because I didn’t want to risk my camera dying from getting wet, but meh. I might take some tomorrow when it’s not actually snowing but still light out.

Also, I’ve noticed lately that while I’m generally more comfortable around more people, and (usually) enjoy spending time with people again, I’ve also started shutting out more and more people when I inevitably hit the point where I need to talk to someone (my form of stress relief). Perhaps this is because, more and more, I recieve hostle responses saying that my problems don’t matter and that I’m acting stupid. I mean, yes, I often get overly emotional about petty little things, but I don’t believe that my feelings are invalid. As much as I would like to be able to shrug off stuff like schoolwork stress and whatnot, I can’t… and the little things are usually what get me in a bad mood (since there’s nothing *big* going wrong in my life, which I do feel immensely grateful for).
Meh. Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not one of the people I’m referring to, but I dunno. In particular, this definetly doesn’t apply to Kellie, Ben, or Ev, since they listen to me whinge far more than anyone should be asked to.
Also, if I used to turn to you when I needed to talk but no longer do, don’t be offended. Odds are that I’ve stopped because I feel less comfortable talking to people in general, not just to you.
Just a thought.