Peter Lewis’ Portfolio

This will not be a long post as I’m quite tired.

Today I have worked like a crazy man on Tong: I have managed to get Barycentric collision detection working, and furthering that I combined my functional texture sampler class with the Barycentric weights to give some decent texturing using bilinear sampling. I have also managed to get a render context with various (currently untested) test and write modes. The results of all this early work can be found here. I am quite ahead when it comes to AGA, I think, though Dr. Holton did say, “no showing off”, which is a command that every neuron in my mind wants to violate.

On the AVS front I have created a suitable plugins framework. I can now cheaply and quickly add new filters and effects to the framework that are based around the internal video buffer. These plugins can be invoked from a command interface, which can be seen in the lower left of this screenshot. The most notable effect so far is the Diffusion Limited Aggregation (DLA) effect, which produces funky results. However, one thing I have noticed is that it tends to diffuse down and to the left, though at this point this is dismissable. I also had a stab at procedural texture generation using a simple stochastic model. I think that could be a carpet. I don’t really know.

I really need to crack on with my AI project. I haven’t made much progress and it’s due on Tuesday. I also have to dedicate a little more time to my scripting language. Time management is something that I can do, but unfortunately “cool raytracing stuff” vs. “everything else” means that time management gets ignored.

These days I am never sure what I want to do after University. I have known what I wanted to do for some time now and I have always considered myself lucky for it. My plan was: graduate, start a games company, and as a bonus, get rich. However, these days I am torn between that and going into the film industry. I am sure that by the end of the year I will have decided: I am glad I have this year as time to reflect on my achievements.

For this year, my current assignments are that I have to write:

• a raytracer
• a visual simulation specification
• an AI demonstration
• a physics demonstration
• a scripting language including VM, bytecode, assembly equivalent and higher-level language

To squeeze the maximum efficiency from this, I will be combining various modules: the raytracer with the visual simulation, the scripting language with the AI demonstration and the physics is the odd one out. The work I have done on the SCL over the summer, while not complete, is hopefully enough to get me kick started.

It’s going to be an interesting year. And a tough one.

Here I am, back at University and with my own Internet connection. Apparently they have wireless in the library now, which is awesome and sustained me during the period where I lacked a connection of my own.

It should be an interesting year. I’m looking forward to my modules, but possibly not all of them. I will need to pull some enthusiasm from within myself somewhere, but I think the reason I am not looking forward to these modules is because I have no idea what to expect from them. I know that I’m doing a raytracer this year and I can’t wait.

I’ve also made some headway with my scripting language. I have currently got a decent lexer going now that I can - handily - plug into anything. It’s only a primitive version, but it can parse pretty much anything. You can even define your own symbols and operators and it will parse those just fine. It is based of the SCL, so I doubt many people will ever use it except me as the SCL is so far removed from traditional C++ that it puts most people off.

I will post the library and header on the downloads page and if anyone wants it they can have it. It’s useful, I swear.