Adding to the week's poo: logging in to DAoC last night just in time for my guild to announce its breakup. Sigh. Tarvus (the big hulking warrior) left for Red Branch. Chentelle (the Mentalist, not literally a mentor to me but in some sense still a sebau or sensei) has gone to Oardyr ny Craeb Ruad. Ionselon (the Ranger, a recent recruit like me) and myself each have the choice of following one or the other of our elders, finding another guild, or going guildless.

Or we could remain in Shelgeyr Deiney, unable to invite anyone else to the guild, and without the social interaction that was my whole reason for joining one in the first place, and be the last proud and bitter members of a dying house... it has a certain dramatic appeal, but frankly I'd rather have a bunch of friends to interact with. :)

I haven't made any decision yet though. Some of the other guilds out there are appealing; I'm taking a look at Anam na Eireann, wondering about Meadow Green and some others as well. And of course there's the possibility of gathering enough Mentalists, or enough friends, to create a new guild... but that way may lie madness. :)

Speaking of madness... I started looking over some of the other 3D books in my pile. Scary. One of them starts off with "I am assuming that you are familiar with the concepts of elementary vector and matrix algebra... [and] the basic concepts in calculus: continuity, derivatives, and integrals." Um... hi there. I'm not. I need a "3D Graphics Concepts For Dummies."

None of these books are about practical applications of Direct3D. Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus started off well, but the book covers 2D and doesn't get into 3D at all.

Sorry Andy, these are neat books but 80-90% of the material just makes me go "huh?" at this point. I'm kind of scared that you thought of them as light reading. :)

The DirectX SDK documention? "Getting Started" tells you about the Hardware Abstraction Layer and shows you a chart of the Programmable Vertex Shader Architecture -- nevermind that my level of knowledge is barely above knowing what a vertex is. The tutorials have partial code, no explanation of concepts, and nothing you can compile and run. "Using Direct3D" jumps from Rectangles (pretty basic) to a page about quaternion composition and interpolation (WTF?). The code samples are probably okay, but I really need something more basic to get me started.

So it's back to Accelerated C++ for the moment to keep working on C++ and STL, plus the Extreme Programming book that I left on the living room sofa (oops). Graphics can wait for a bit. I'll probably hit Amazon to figure out what books to ask for, if there isn't already something more my speed floating around the office somewhere.

Nnnnnggggyyyyyaaaa!

Along with the rising temperature (I actually have the fan on in the "basement"), my stress level has gone up from frosty cool to hot under the collar. Lots of stuff going on all at once at work, when I was hoping to have time to settle down and get comfortable with the arcane lore of 3D graphics... plus this seems to be one of those Weeks of Moderately Many Crashes and it's my turn to hold the phone. I need to keep an eye on myself so I don't freak over little things (like I did today), and just try to ride out the chaos.

It was a good weekend for DAoC -- Eiteag is 20th level now, well equipped, able to wear the guild's arms on a cloak, and still seems to be on the right track rather than plowing into ever-increasing resistance like my other characters.

Monday's D&D session (run by Steph) began a Ravenloft module, and despite the players' goofy antics and sex jokes (as per usual) some of the creepy mood of the setting did touch us, and we were suitably paranoid about such things as walking through gates and stepping on grass.

In Tuesday's game (run by Jeff) the plot thickened -- a conspiracy has been partially unmasked, some of our nemesises (nemesi? nemeses?) returned, but we have a darn-tootin wily varmint to track down and we're running out of people to trust. And we got to blow stuff up and hack them to bits too. ;)

Jeff is running his other game tonight, Mike has his on Thursday and Saturday... so it's a busy week for more than just working. :)

I really dig Steph's new setup with Greymatter and all. Maybe someday I'll go that route...

Here is presented the fruit of today's labor: triangle_thing.exe. (It is indeed a dreaded executable. I know it's safe because I wrote it, but if you don't want to run it, by all means don't.)

Nothing much really... it just draws a bunch of random triangles, and you can pick from different color schemes. It's the programming equivalent of playing scales. But it's neat to me since it opens a full-screen window, handles crucial Windows messages such as WM_MOUSEMOVE ("the mouse just moved") and WM_CLOSE ("quit this stupid program"), and has a game loop with a regulated and measured frame rate. Instead of just drawing triangles, I could be tracking the physics of asteroids, ships and shots in that loop.

I could easily port good ol' Splunge to C++ right now... but I'd rather start learning DirectX rather than continue to mess around with GDI and develop habits I'm not going to use later. :)

Having this framework in place and drawing stuff on the screen goes a long way to make me feel less lost. Part of the weekend will be spent reading up on how to call DirectX, so I should be in for some more fun Monday.

We've got our snow on. I think it's let up now, but some big, heavy flakes were falling as we left work and piling up fast. Fascinating to watch it fall and settle, and the peaceful hush (of reduced traffic and acoustic dampening) is nice. :)

I am programming once more... or at least, applying a little Rustoleum to my C++ skills and also trying to pick up a tiny bit of MFC and a heapin' plateful of DirectX. No longer working on web-related things. A year ago, I'd have been overcome with joy at the chance to get out from web development. Now of course it's the familiar and safe thing, and I'm diving into a pool of unknown depths with things swimming around in it. One look at the first page of the DirectX SDK "Tutorial" and I wanted to go run back to the kiddie pool and put on my water wings again.

Now where did I leave that metaphor... oh yes. It's like I'm learning French but not fluent in it yet, I don't know biology, and I decide to try and learn genetic engineering from a book in French.

Over the past couple days I had written a little console-mode (yeah, like DOS) Battleship game. Or half of one anyway -- a one-sided affair where the program doesn't get to fire back. It has to randomly place its ships so that they fit inside the board and don't overlap, discern a hit from a miss, track hits and misses, and figure out whether any given hit happens to sink that particular ship. Even something that simple has several solutions, and CPU time vs. memory tradeoffs (though negligable ones). More importantly, it was a great reminder of the quirks and possibilities of the language, and of game logic.

Today I went through the "Scribble" MFC tutorial, which was actually less cool in a purely programming sense since I didn't get to design classes myself. :) It was a good deal less daunting than the DirectX tutorial -- I understood the concepts behind what I was doing, and knew I could figure out how to expand the program's features. Some of the source code VC++ wrote was not really clear to me; I didn't know *how* it worked, just *that* it worked and I could use it. And actually, that much is fine for what I'm doing with it. It's not making windows and their controls that I'm getting at, it's people that run around, spells that sparkle and glow and explode, trees that blow around in the wind and catch on fire, and carrot cake soup that looks like carrot cake soup. :)

The Kai-Imakhu does indeed make some damnfine West African chicken. I found myself thinking at the Thai restauraunt today, "This pineapple-chicken-cashew fried rice is really good, but it doesn't compare to yesterday's meal." And I can call it "yesterday's meal" 'cause if you don't count donuts, that was it... and it took most of the day for her to make it. She had chicken stock going when I took off for a walk in the not-yet-accumulating snow around noonish, and it was late that evening when it all came together.

Yep, it finally snowed. Not a lot, and it's half melted off by now -- no winter wonderland for us yet, just some slushy random whiteness. Not that I envy Buffalo or South Carolina this winter, but you have to have a certain volume of snow before it's worthy of more than just a passing comment, and St. Louis doesn't have it. Not to mention, Tallahassee got some flakes before we did, and there's just something unnatural about that.

Speaking of unnatural... at one point among the disquieting dreams I had Saturday night, I was writing short blurbs of wisdom/poetry/drivel on various subjects. I wrote some lines about Death in an "I'll welcome it when it comes" sort of way, and then something started whispering at me in a voice I couldn't understand. I didn't like that one little bit, and woke myself out of it... to realize that (A) my ribs were sore, and (B) the "voice" was actually a snoring roommate.

I don't remember much of Arthur C. Clarke's "2010" other than SAL, Europa, and something about an '02 Conference. It sounded really odd at the time, but I guess now that we're in this millenium the novelty has faded. As far as I know, we still don't have a name for this decade ("The Oughties?") and we're doing fine without it, thanks.

Over the holidays I tried a few different characters in DAoC. The berserker wasn't terribly frustrating, but at its best it wasn't as much fun as some of the more frustrating characters. ;) I tried another Theurgist, an all-Air specialist named Starke Blackwell, but ran into the same problem with excessive downtime that Sywy had.

I thought maybe a utility caster might be more fun than a damage caster, and Mentalists specifically seem to be gifted with abilities to reduce downtime for themselves and their groups. Originally, everyone said they were weak and pointless and no fun... but they've gotten a lot of additions and tweaks since the beginning. I found a couple of encouraging posts and a good website about them, so I decided to try it out.

I plan to stick with it. Eiteag ("small white stone," which in typical Gaelic logic is also a term for a young maiden) Baoghalach ("dangerous" or "reckless") is now level 14, part of a small but enjoyable guild, and having a great time. This is definitely a group support character, although against the right targets does decently solo as well. Not a specialist, but very versatile, from one fight to the next I don't know whether I'll be healing, dealing with "adds" (surprise allies of the creature we actually are trying to kill), helping to lay the damage on, or more likely all of the above. :)

If I do wind up trying another character -- and I don't think I will, for a while -- it'll probably be another healer type, as I'm really enjoying the group play aspect that I never got into that much with my other characters.