Some Random Pictures

I unearthed some more old stuff I thought I lost forever. These are drawings I made back when I was still studying. They were basically drawn on paper, scanned, and then coloured in with GIMP (a paint program that is similar to Adobe Photoshop). The whole process took about one whole day each. Including a bit of time spent surfing the 'net finding drawing and colouring/shading tutorials. I think they're nice attempts for a programmer. :)

Old Project - Testing Steering Behaviours with PyGame

This was done awhile ago. But it was something I quickly put together in a few hours to test out some basic vehicle steering behaviours and also learn the Python programming language game library, PyGame.

From this brief impression, I found PyGame fairly pleasant to use. The library has a straight-forward and simple interface. It is fairly thin, but is not merely a wrapper around the Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL). There are a number of additional utility functions provided that I would normally need to code by hand myself if I was using C/C++ with SDL.

Python is a great prototyping language though. It only took about an hour to get this up and running. The number of lines of code I needed to write to get a basic vehicle simulation and visualised on a screen was surprisingly small.

I still prefer Ruby as a programming language, but Python wins overall because it is so well-supported everywhere. You can find Python bindings for almost every C/C++ library out there.

Download: http://www.zensaki.com/steering.zip

Old Project - Learning OpenGL and SDL

Thought I would just put the code of this up. It was just a small demo I wrote a few years ago while playing with OpenGL. If I remember correctly, it uses vertex buffers... and per-vertex lighting. Man, that's embarassing.
The transparency was interesting to implement, since it required rendering the surfaces from back to front. I just put in something simple (and slow) to do that for me, but in any future projects, I will definitely look into the design of a proper scene management system.
Download: http://www.zensaki.com/glassy.zip