On to the Big Ships!

Logging on, I realized how log it's been since I've last written in this blog. I have three blogs to keep for my classes so I keep on bouncing back and forth between all of them, but it's easy to forget which one is updated and which isn't. After being out of commission last week due to being sick, I jumped back on the train but really focused my efforts on my Independent Study. I missed the deadline for PA4 Data Driven and kind of left it on the back burner, knowing that I would get to it when I had to progress on my final project. I normally don't miss deadlines, in fact this is the first in a very long time, but with everything crashing down on my head after falling behind a little, I needed to prioritize and pick my battles. Fortunately though, PA4 is now complete. 


To be honest, it was significantly easier than I expected. At first, I was really confused by the instructions in the PDF. The first issue that I had was in terms of doWork(). Initially, I thought that Keenan wanted us to implement a generic type function, like a template, to take in any data type. However, I did not see how I could call the necessary methods for that data if I didn't know what types I could be dealing with. After speaking to a classmate, I realized that we were meant to know the type we were using, the caveat was just that it had to be user defined. This cleared things up and really made things easier. 


As for Interleaved, the confusion arose when I compared the instructions to the function calls made in Tests.cs which didn't quite match up. I really did not understand why and how there were two separate queues that were then congealed into one. After reading forums though, I learned that it was not necessary to implement it exactly that way-- so long as the data was processed in the same way. Perhaps Keenan knows something about C# queues that I don't and has a better reasoning for using them the way he did but the way I implemented it is much easier for me to understand. 


I went back to the way I had done it last year for my Capstone game, creating a single Object queue since all of the objects go back to the Object base type. I then looped through the queue, dequeuing object by object, checking its type, casting it to that type, and calling the necessary methods on it.  


Now, I can start working on the final project. This is going to be a busy weekend with my hours spread out between the final project for this class, my Independent Study, and the animation converter for Engine. Time for another day (or lots of days) of hard work!