Assignments and Left 4 Dead
My AI assignment is done, handed in and demoed. I have no idea how I have done on it. I covered everything that was asked but who really knows how she will mark it. My C# assignment, the multi-threaded airport simulation, is almost done as well. I have already demoed it but need to finish the report and diagrams etc. and hand it in.
I quite enjoyed working on it, the code wasn’t too complicated it was more about the problem solving, protecting the resources and making sure data was securely passed between threads. I had 12 in the end I think and yet it was only about 600 lines of code. The hardest part was solving the problems to ensure thread safety, it doesn’t resolve deadlocks if there is too many planes meaning nothing can move but otherwise it works OK. The diagram is proving to be quite annoying to make. It is supposed to show the use of the semaphores and buffers for inter-thread communication, the problem is with 12 threads, 13 semaphores and 12 buffers there is a lot of elements and lines all over the diagram. Not sure if it will even be possible to make it look neat yet. I will worry about that when I have it all in place.
My third assignment this semester is for physics and AI. I have started working on it but only really got the basics in so far. We are supposed to implement quite a lot of different features in it such as swarming and tracking as well as all the physics to control the movement of each of the bodies. The basics of the physics is nearly done although the collision detection isn’t the best, it is only using bounding sphere so it is not very accurate, I was thinking of having a bounding box as well and have it only respond to a collision in both. It isn’t due until after Easter though I should have plenty of time to get it working.
On another note, I picked up Left 4 Dead for the Xbox 360 this week. I haven’t played much of it yet, only 1 1/2 of the campaigns but I am enjoying it so far. I think that it makes for a really good cooperative game, we had 4 people playing it briefly and it was a lot of fun. I haven’t tried playing the multiplayer yet though so don’t know what that is like.
I have heard some criticism about the AI for the other characters but they seemed good enough to me. Having another person will always be better but I didn’t think there was any problem with them. I also like the feature of being able to go idle for while and have the AI take over until you get back. There is as always, the console vs. PC argument particularly when it comes to an FPS. I think that the game works well with a console controller, I haven’t really been into PC games for quite a while now. It was really before I started uni that I stopped playing PC games, I still do occasionally but not anywhere near as much as I used to. I much prefer to sit in an arm chair in front of the TV than at my desk on the computer.
[...] be a lot of time and trouble on C++ issues by having a managed environment. I thought this for my physics and AI assignment back in March but ended up having problems, I can’t remember what now but I ended up using C++ [...]