Underground Fun

Today has been fairly productive. I fixed the mp3 player, and I'm lead to believe it works now. The problem was that I was only stopping and resetting the song if it was playing. So what would happen is: I would call Update() to loop the songs, Update() would call IsMP3Playing(), IsMP3Playing() would get the current play status and set the status to false if the song had reached the end, IsMP3Playing() would return false (at the end of a song), Update() would then call Reset(), Reset() would call IsMP3Playing(), IsMP3Playing() would return false again, Reset() would then not reset the song to the beginning, Reset() would then Play() the song, Play() would do nothing since the song cursor was at the end of the file, Reset() would return true, Update() would continue checking all the songs and return. So ... I got rid of the call to IsMP3Playing() in the Reset() function. And now it appears to be working.

I then worked on some camera control to make the demo look better. Granted, any work on the demo now won't do us any good, unless it actually pertains to the further development of the project. So ... the camera control should do us good, and I think I implemented it nicely. It should probably be contained in the camera class instead of the game class ... but whatever. I'll modify that later.

I implemented the cheat input. It wasn't too hard; we just hadn't gotten around to it. I'd say we didn't have enough time, but that's not a valid excuse considering I spent nine hours watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy last week. I'd have to say it was worth it. So cheat input works, it's now a matter of getting cheats. The input itself works, though I may want to add the underscore (_) to the character set. As it is now, an underscore shows up as a space. So for the cheat placement holder, we have "xxxyxxxyxxxy" instead of "_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _". It would probably take me half an hour to do, but I don't feel up to it right now.

I also implemented our high score lists. I had to first create the high score tables, and since they're to be in binary, I also had to create a high score table creator. Yup, lots o' work. (Binary files have added security because they are not exactly editable in Wordpad.) So I made the table creator for MS-DOS console. Which reminds me ... I need to take out an override function I put in to create the tables ... and done. Depending on how thoroughly the teacher is going through our projects, we might be losing quite a bit of points on my projects. For the most part, I name my variables properly and comment my functions well. But some code slipped through the cracks. We were so stressed for time, I didn't get around to double-checking all the code. I mostly skimmed the files looking for green. (Visual Studio will color comments green by default.) But whatever. The high score tables aren't quite complete though. I'm not too sure how all the scores will be tracked. For instance, the goal of the "Avoid Observation" minigame is to outlast the other players. Thus the highest score would be the best time. The "Cow Tipping" minigame, on the other hand, tracks the number of cows tipped in the alotted time. Thus the highest score would be the highest number of cows. Time would be displayed differently than cows, so we may have to make changes. Else, we award points for the number of seconds remaining; thus creating a neutral medium for all games. Which is better for me, since my team will expect me to alter any code in my projects.

The one thing I haven't finished is the video player. A few lines of code would actually get a video playing, but I'd rather develop it into a class so it could be used elsewhere. I'll probably do that tomorrow if I have time.

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In SGP, the teacher has a "Wheel of Misfortune" to simulate corporate experiences. Upon submission of a milestone, each group spins the wheel. So we were supposed to get our first turn on Saturday, but with class truncated the way it was, we must wait 'til Tuesday. I'm a bit nervous, because I don't trust our teacher. Not everything is bad; some spins allow for extended deadlines or bonus points. Others are just minor inconveniences; such as a team dress code. Some misfortunes I've heard of: swapping a teammate with another group, multi-lingual support, and hard drive audits. Since the laptops are owned by the school, there are certain files we are not allowed to possess on our hard drives, and other files that the school may view unnecessary. So an audit would purge the hard drive of all unacceptable content. Which might be bad. I have a lot of "unnecessary" programs that I would like to keep (CoH, CoV, WoW, etc). I've been told that the hard drive audit was removed from the wheel, but I'm not certain. We'll find out Tuesday.

Also, we must submit our weekly schedule tomorrow by noon ... I don't know how that's going to work out. I doubt I'll get my team's response before the storm, and I'm not sure what'll happen after it. I'm quite certain the teacher won't accept the storm as an excuse for not turning in the schedule early, but right now, I don't quite care. I'll just email all my teammates.

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Regardless of its supposed severity, I'm going to secure some of my belongings against the storm. I have a tv sitting right in front of a window that ought to be moved. I'll probably clean off my desk too. *sigh* So much work.

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McDS.