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.