Friday 22 October 2010

Update

It has been a while since I started back at Derby Uni, and I have been quite busy going over what is being said and the tutorial work that is being set for us, making sure that this time I truly understand what is being said and how/why something works the way that it does.
Firstly in my Intro to 3D graphics programming I have understood it a lot better this time around, and it has has quite a big impact on the way that my renderer is laid out this time. For example, instead of making all of my variable public, having them private and calling gets and sets depending on what is needed, which I was going to do last time, but just never got round to doing :P so, learning from that mistake now makes the program a lot more solid and easier to understand.
In Console Development we have been working with the MIPS assembly (MARS) to create a small sound engine as it were. At the moment I have loaded into memory a set of notes stored in a "word" and another of duration, calling them and getting back music, in this case Zelda's Lullaby. This was then revealed to be part of our first assignment, where we would need to be able to read notes from a file and then play them that way, rather than hard-coding them right into the program. I plan on changing a few things about the way that in receives the notes though, and at the moment I have been looking into ways to convert a MIDI file so that my program is able to read it.
Just as a side note, I will hopefully still be adding a Japanese translation to these posts, but due to the technical language and the limits of my knowledge at the present time I might have to come back to that, I have been constantly learning more and more though, including writing hiragana, listening to podcasts, watching Japanese drama/films, and trying to learn sentence structures.

Friday 6 August 2010

My Return from the Abyss

It's been a long time since I updated this blog due to personal issues which also effected my ability to work unfortunately... But I haven't given up! I am going to redo my second year at Derby uni and this time do it right :)
To add to this, I have decided to write my new blog posts in two parts; first in English, and the other in Japanese. I am currently teaching myself Japanese with the aid of Smart.fm and watching Japanese films/dramas/anime and I thought that this would be a good way to expand my grammar and vocabulary fairly easily.

Thursday 31 December 2009

Famous Five On A Treasure Island

This was a project I had to do for my Game Development Techniques module on my Computer Games Programming course at Derby University, the aim of this project was to create a game without any weapons using the UT2004 Engine.

My end demo still had a few glitches in it, but there was only a few people who managed to implement a point and click game. I decided to use a kind of World of Warcraft approach and use both the keyboard and mouse.

Overall I'm very pleased with the end result :)
Enjoy!


Wednesday 14 October 2009

MARS MIPS Assembly Simulator

Homepage: http://courses.missouristate.edu/KenVollmar/MARS/index.htm

Features:
• GUI with point-and-click control and integrated WYSIWYG text editor
• Easy set/removal of breakpoints using check boxes
• Easily editable register and memory values, similar to a spreadsheet
• Display values in hexadecimal or decimal
• Variable-speed execution
• Single-step backwards

(Click on pictures for a larger view)

1. Edit display is indicated by highlighted tab.
2, 3. Typical edit and execute operations are available through
icons and menus, dimmed-out when unavailable or
not applicable.
4. WYSIWYG editor for MIPS assembly language code.

1. Execute display is indicated by highlighted tab.
2. Assembly code is displayed with its address, machine code, assembly code, and the corresponding
line from the source code file. (Source code and assembly code will differ when pseudoinstructions have been used.)
3. The values stored in Memory are directly editable (similar to a spreadsheet).
4. The window onto the Memory display is controlled in several ways: previous/next arrows and a menu of
common locations (e.g., top of stack).
5. The numeric base used for the display of data values and addresses (memory and registers) is selectable between
decimal and hexadecimal.
6. Addresses of labels and data declarations are available. Typically, these are used only when single-stepping to
verify that an address is as expected.
7. The values stored in Registers are directly editable (similar to a spreadsheet).
8. Breakpoints are set by a checkbox for each assembly instruction. These checkboxes are always displayed and available.
9. Selectable speed of execution allows the user to “watch the action” instead of the assembly program finishing directly.

Source: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~cse220/Handouts/MARS.pdf (Accessed: 14/10/09)