F1rst

Hey! Another blog! This one for networking of games.  This is going to be an exciting class, I can't wait!  Finally have Ed Keenan as a professor and I get to learn all about networking!  And add this to David and I's Xna engine!

The first lecture  I was scrambling to get all of the notes I could possibly manage to scribble down while he was talking.  It's old hat stuff to most people, but new to me, and the class finally wasn't being handled with kid gloves.  I've had too many classes whose skills and experiences were so mixed that the classes had no choice but to repeatedly go over the basics for some and leave others who wanted more information high and dry.  It's a necessity, I understand, I've had these conversations with a number of professors, but it doesn't make it any less fulfilling for me.  Now this is a class where I'm going to get in deep to things I don't know, I don't understand, and are quite frightening!  I can't wait.

Funny story, actually, I never wanted to be a programmer.  Never, I was adamant about being a Game Designer (Which I still am, that's my career goal!) One of the professors that arranged to meet with me during my tour of DePaul when I was still looking at schools was none other than Ed Keenan.  I highly doubt he remembers me from our meeting, it was only for an hour or so almost a year and a half ago.  But I remember him. He really impressed me with his description of the degree here at DePaul, and put a lot of confidence behind the program which instilled a lot of confidence in me.  If I remember correctly he laughed when I said I was applying for the Game Design track, he said I should take the programming concentration instead.

Well Professor Keenan, here I am.  Throw your worst at me, I want to be the best I can be, I'm willing to learn if you are willing to teach.

That story being told, this is really supposed to focus on my difficulties with the first assignment.  The only difficulty I'm having right now is getting Professor Keenan to accept me on the Google Group for our class..  I've emailed him once or twice, to no avail.  This blog will never get read if I can't get into the group and link it to my name, so that is a big issue right now.

As for the programming assignments, if you can call them that, I breezed through them with no problem.  In small projects I really enjoy working with pointers, even c-strings, they are fun to toy around with.  I'm crazy because I like pointers, I like having the control of C++, not relying on things such as garbage collectors and such.  C++ has it's downsides, of course, lack of intelisense in VS 2010 is one thing, not language-dependent but IDE-dependent.  And then there's the case in big projects managing your memory gets to be a daunting and confusing task.  Then there's the fact that new and delete/free seems to cost a pretty penny in terms of memory, more than you'd think at first, anyway.  It's no different in a managed language, it's just not a lighting-fast allocation and de-allocation as I would like to believe.  I hope somebody can teach me about memory pools in the near future.

Anyway, the C-string assignment was a walk through a very  short park, a very light slice of cake, or what will you.  Compiling and running spacewar was like shooting a particularly large catfish in a pitifully tiny barrel with an M-60 and several hundred rounds.  I've been working in XNA and VS2010 since I first got to DePaul.

It was just a "see if everybody's stuff works" homework assignment, so I'm not disappointed.  I look forward to the rest of this class!

-Kevin