Gregness
12-07-2015, 08:52 PM
Okay, so I normally don't really post these really long blurbs, but that's mostly for lack of stuff I think would be interesting to the majority of you. Today, though? Today, I need to tell you about why I am the GREATEST PROGRAMMER KNOWN TO MAN!
So, my graduation was on Saturday, and though I'm incredibly happy to be nearly done, I had a hard time letting myself take the victory lap because I still had a full week of assignments and tests coming up. One of those assignments was due this morning, in fact.
It was a pair project for a graphics class where we were making a version of Labyrinth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(game)), the game where you use the little knobs on the side of the board to tilt the maze in order to guide a ball through it.
Anyway, my partner was working on the physics engine, and I was going to handle the lighting. So, after lunch with the family after the ceremony on Saturday, I picked up my progress where I'd left off and got to work.
Progress is slow, but steady. I used one of my previous assignments as a kind of test bed to make sure I had the broad strokes under control, then I copy-pasted my work-in-progress stuff to the new folder, and got to work integrating it with the stuff my partner had done. It ended up being more involved than I'd thought it would be at first (ain't it always...), but by last night I could see the end in sight and I thought I MIGHT even get some sleep.
I'm a poor, naive soul sometimes.
It's around midnight, and it's time for the moment of truth. There's a not-so-dramatic beat as I start my program compiling and- oh, errors, wonderful. It's the problem with doing the assignment the way I had, while I had a good feel for the big picture, trying to get everything worked into what my partner already had running had more in common with yanking threads and hoping the whole shirt didn't come undone at some points.
Okay, 2am this time and I think I finally have everything accounted for. Compiling... done. Sweet! I go to run it and... Huh, that's weird, it's saying it's not finding that variable I added to my shader hours ago.
Fast forward five hours, two forum posts, a few dozen Google searches, and more 'god dammit, this should WORK! Why isn't it WORKING!' than I care to count. The demo is at 9am, and I finally accept that I need to just let this go and get our documentation typed up, because it's worth far more points than trying figure out whatever the hell is going on with the project itself.
So, I get to the lab where we're doing our demo feeling like shit because I've basically got nothing to show for my contribution to the project. Honestly? It went fine. My partner did a phenomenal job on our physics engine, and most of the other groups didn't really get the lighting working properly either. That said, they DID get a lot of other flashy bits added onto their programs (One group had theirs hooked up to a Google Cardboard 3-D thing if you're familiar with it). Battered pride aside, we scored fine and I came home.
I got home about ten after ten and, just to satisfy my own curiosity (and
probably spite), I opened up one of the forums I'd posted on earlier, and one of the replies there had asked what version of my graphics software I was using. Now, that's actually a surprisingly hard thing to find just with Google because I was running all this on a virtual machine because we were required to have it running on Linux, and I've only got a windows machine. Still, I looked through the OpenGL documentation and I found a command that would actually just print the answer out to the command line. So, I went back to that first assignment I had because I knew that one worked, and it'd be just a few lines of code to have it spit out the version number my virtual machine was using.
So, I fire it up and, oh that's weird, that cube is supposed to be getting
shaded in whites and greys, not black...
Wait.
No.
No, no.
No, fuck you, NO!
I pull up today's project to confirm it.
Way back, when I copy-pasted my work-in-progress from the old project to the new one, I never re-opened the file in the program I was using, so all the work, all the frustration, was going to the OLD files, not the new ones. I copied those files to the new project again, and wouldn't you know it? The lighting worked on the first try. The lights were in the wrong place naturally, because I would need to adjust those basically by hand, but the damn thing worked!
Just, y'know, an hour and a half too late.
Honestly, this is the kind of thing so stupid I can't even really bring myself to be mad about it. I can't wait for that victory lap. ::V:
So, my graduation was on Saturday, and though I'm incredibly happy to be nearly done, I had a hard time letting myself take the victory lap because I still had a full week of assignments and tests coming up. One of those assignments was due this morning, in fact.
It was a pair project for a graphics class where we were making a version of Labyrinth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(game)), the game where you use the little knobs on the side of the board to tilt the maze in order to guide a ball through it.
Anyway, my partner was working on the physics engine, and I was going to handle the lighting. So, after lunch with the family after the ceremony on Saturday, I picked up my progress where I'd left off and got to work.
Progress is slow, but steady. I used one of my previous assignments as a kind of test bed to make sure I had the broad strokes under control, then I copy-pasted my work-in-progress stuff to the new folder, and got to work integrating it with the stuff my partner had done. It ended up being more involved than I'd thought it would be at first (ain't it always...), but by last night I could see the end in sight and I thought I MIGHT even get some sleep.
I'm a poor, naive soul sometimes.
It's around midnight, and it's time for the moment of truth. There's a not-so-dramatic beat as I start my program compiling and- oh, errors, wonderful. It's the problem with doing the assignment the way I had, while I had a good feel for the big picture, trying to get everything worked into what my partner already had running had more in common with yanking threads and hoping the whole shirt didn't come undone at some points.
Okay, 2am this time and I think I finally have everything accounted for. Compiling... done. Sweet! I go to run it and... Huh, that's weird, it's saying it's not finding that variable I added to my shader hours ago.
Fast forward five hours, two forum posts, a few dozen Google searches, and more 'god dammit, this should WORK! Why isn't it WORKING!' than I care to count. The demo is at 9am, and I finally accept that I need to just let this go and get our documentation typed up, because it's worth far more points than trying figure out whatever the hell is going on with the project itself.
So, I get to the lab where we're doing our demo feeling like shit because I've basically got nothing to show for my contribution to the project. Honestly? It went fine. My partner did a phenomenal job on our physics engine, and most of the other groups didn't really get the lighting working properly either. That said, they DID get a lot of other flashy bits added onto their programs (One group had theirs hooked up to a Google Cardboard 3-D thing if you're familiar with it). Battered pride aside, we scored fine and I came home.
I got home about ten after ten and, just to satisfy my own curiosity (and
probably spite), I opened up one of the forums I'd posted on earlier, and one of the replies there had asked what version of my graphics software I was using. Now, that's actually a surprisingly hard thing to find just with Google because I was running all this on a virtual machine because we were required to have it running on Linux, and I've only got a windows machine. Still, I looked through the OpenGL documentation and I found a command that would actually just print the answer out to the command line. So, I went back to that first assignment I had because I knew that one worked, and it'd be just a few lines of code to have it spit out the version number my virtual machine was using.
So, I fire it up and, oh that's weird, that cube is supposed to be getting
shaded in whites and greys, not black...
Wait.
No.
No, no.
No, fuck you, NO!
I pull up today's project to confirm it.
Way back, when I copy-pasted my work-in-progress from the old project to the new one, I never re-opened the file in the program I was using, so all the work, all the frustration, was going to the OLD files, not the new ones. I copied those files to the new project again, and wouldn't you know it? The lighting worked on the first try. The lights were in the wrong place naturally, because I would need to adjust those basically by hand, but the damn thing worked!
Just, y'know, an hour and a half too late.
Honestly, this is the kind of thing so stupid I can't even really bring myself to be mad about it. I can't wait for that victory lap. ::V: