Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Programming in the Classroom
Last week those of us who've never had any computer programming experience were paired up with those who had some or a lot of experince. There wasn't any real agenda, just a chance for people to scratch the surface of the vast world of programming. While I was familiar with having to type lines and commands from my earlier days as a child with MS DOS, I was not prepared at all for the incredible difficulty of having to type every single command for the computer to follow.
One thing that Jerry (the guy I had to pair up with) showed us was called a program of his called a raytracer that created some pretty nice visuals with cool optical effects, etc, all created by some mathematical formulas. Also, he showed us the code for a basic game (I think it was pretty similar to asteroids where you have a triangular vehicle and you just try to shoot down asteroids, spaceships and whatever else you might run across in space) and showed how manipulating the code could affect the performance of the game. For example, he removed a part of the code that erased the pixels of the spaceship's previous location...this in turn caused the spaceship to leave a 'footprint' of its previous location that never went away. Eventually, the whole screen was covered in the white trail left behind by the spaceship's pixels not being cleared and we had to start over. I never even thought that a person would have to think of all of these little things to make a simple game to run...can't imagine how difficult it would be to get a game like Age of Empires, etc to work! Oh well, that's all for now, will post later!
One thing that Jerry (the guy I had to pair up with) showed us was called a program of his called a raytracer that created some pretty nice visuals with cool optical effects, etc, all created by some mathematical formulas. Also, he showed us the code for a basic game (I think it was pretty similar to asteroids where you have a triangular vehicle and you just try to shoot down asteroids, spaceships and whatever else you might run across in space) and showed how manipulating the code could affect the performance of the game. For example, he removed a part of the code that erased the pixels of the spaceship's previous location...this in turn caused the spaceship to leave a 'footprint' of its previous location that never went away. Eventually, the whole screen was covered in the white trail left behind by the spaceship's pixels not being cleared and we had to start over. I never even thought that a person would have to think of all of these little things to make a simple game to run...can't imagine how difficult it would be to get a game like Age of Empires, etc to work! Oh well, that's all for now, will post later!
# posted by David Duncan @ 6:38 AM 
