Into the projects

Google Analytics indicates a few people are reading this blog. Nice to know it's read by someone. I read somewhere that 95% of all blogs have exactly one reader. I maintain two right now, one for teaching and the other for a hobby project and both are getting up to 10 readers a day.

CSE 473 is into the first project. I always try to mix the projects up; giving something unique each year. I decided to give the first project a theme for each group. The five themes are frogs, rats, locusts, bats, and bees. I think you get the picture. I though I would have all of the models in some model libraries I have, but only found the locust (actually a grasshopper, but we'll just keep that to ourselves). I found a nice frog online that someone had done, but had to buy the other three. Hope students appreciate my spending my own money on these models.

Of course, just buying a model does not mean it's even remotely usable in XNA, particularly if you're doing procedural animation. I figure it averaged around four hours for each model working them into shape. Some of that time was spent writing a nice program to test the models and some was spent trying to get 3DS Max to do something I wanted it to do. It's definitely quirky and I had a lot of problems with crashing on one of the models. But, they are all done and I think they look very cool. The bee is pretty high poly, but the rest are more reasonable. They can probably get away with swarming if they want to try it.

Finally got Visual Studio 2008 working everywhere

I finally figured out all of the Visual Studio 2008 issues. There was a problem with the deployment last week that killed the new application wizard. Adam fixed that last week. Then I started to get questions about missing dsound.h. It's been two years since the last time I taught CSE 471. At that time we were using Visual Studio 2005 and the Platform SDK. The Platform SDK comes with a program to configure it's paths in Visual Studio, but it doesn't seem to do anything, so I had created a page on how to configure the paths manually. I thought this issue was resolved in the latest version (now the Windows SDK) and Visual Studio 2008, since it installed properly on my machine. However, now it does something even more strange. Not only does it not install itself, but it seems to uninstall he paths for DirectX. And, it doesn't always do so. Sometimes it all works just great. Other times it fails. It fails for the lab machines. So, I created a new page on setting the paths and posted it this morning. This seems to have resolved all of the lab issues and should fix a per personal machine issues as well.

Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio 2008 has been quite my nemesis this semester. Students are having difficulty getting it downloaded for their computers because it's gigabytes of data. The system admins are having trouble getting it working right on the lab machines since they have to be able to deploy it. A security update removed an important macro breaking their own header files. The only real fix was the add the macro to your header files. Then they fixed that and you have to remove the macro because it is now doubly defined. The multimedia functions DirectSound and DirectShow are now in the Windows SDK, which installs massive amounts of stuff even if you only need those components. But, I think it have it all working now everywhere.

XNA 3.1 has been a pleasant experience so far. There's not a lot of updates other than in the sound support compared to 2.0, but they did fix some annoying bugs. It was nice to remove the bug fixes from the step assignments so we can use them this year.

Hopefully everything will settle down this week and we can get on with the semester.

New CSE 471 lecture format

I'll be updating the CSE 471 lecture format to the newer format I started using last year in CSE 473 (then CSE 491). For many years I have used the traditional bullet slide format that everyone seems to recommend. But, then I read some research that argues that that's not a good choice, that slides should have more complete information on them including blocks of readable text and that a slide should contain a balance of content on each side rather than the left-to-right reading format of bullet points. So, I've adopted a new slide format that I think is better and I rarely use bullets anymore in new content, though it may take a few years to flush many of them out of the older material. I do think the bright white background and minimalist look works pretty well. It's especially important that the slides be more complete, since there's no textbook in this course.

The semester will soon begin...

It's almost that time again, when the trees start to turn and the students all arrive in droves. I'm experimenting this fall with the use of a facebook group and a blog as new ways to communicate with students. Hopefully it will be useful. I find it handy to have a place to drop the occasional suggestion. We'll see how useful it turned out to be.