Script Kiddies

I have the following 6 scripts for the script project:

My Home Page
My home page actually serves double duty. It has both a script to manage the drop down menu and a script to manage the opening of a new window with the picture.

Poem Page
This page has a javascript that tells you when you accessed the page.

Super Secret
A php script for the Super Secret Society Login.

Links page php
A php script that builds a links page based on a flat file.

Script for Redesign proejct
This is a script that builds a gallery detail page for the Dale Helms site using the Drupal Content Management System. It's called by another page, but it does it's job. Pretty nifty.

Of Intersection Tests and Floating Point Error

XNA's Ray-Sphere Intersection test returns true with a distance of zero if the Ray originates inside the sphere.

This is great for games. Very fast. Avoids all the lengthy distance calculations and just kicks out an indication of collision.

This is not good for ray-tracers. The transmitted ray specifically looks at what happens when a ray travels through a translucent object. The requires us to spawn a ray within a spherical boundary and find the intersection on the other side.

I've tried writing a new sphere intersection test. There are a couple that I've found that I really like, and are very slick. The problem? C#'s floating point numbers aren't accurate enough to support them. Whatever XNA's BoundingSphere is doing, it's accurate enough for these calculations, whereas I can't figure out how to make mine accurate enough.

So I'm going to try to fake it. I'm going to use the XNA sphere test for external intersections, and my own for internal calculations. Once I know that I'm inside from the other one, hopefully I'll be accurate enough on my own.

Using XNA's vector class may have been a mistake here. Probably should've rolled our own using double precision numbers.

PHP Form For week 7 inclass assignment

I did my php scripted form for the in class assignment. I used the existing mail form and modified it to support the new form. Andy Zickler showed me how to mix PHP and HTML for the response page, and make it so that it links back if you go directly to the destination page.

LINK

Client site

Andy and I got the two pages for the new site done. It's looking pretty good so far. We also have our doc, but other than bringing it to class on Monday we're not sure where to turn it in.

We finished up yesterday afternoon.

Nav Networks

My AI professor told me that I was not allowed to use SM3.0 specific commands in my second AI project. So all those walk maps I generated? Useless. Had to start over from scratch.



So I have. Now I have a A* navigation network that is procedurally generated from level geometry I create in a 3d modeling package.

Midterm project

I finished up my midterm project this morning. I think it turned out ok. It's a tongue-in-cheek site about my current housing. The testamonials are clearly made up to create content, I don't think that really matters.

Andy and I are cranking on that design document for the website redesign. With any luck, we'll be done with that after class tommorrow.

Visual Studio is Microsoft's greatest product

I just used the refactoring tools for the first time in VS2005Pro. It was a minor change: I wanted to change the property

public ScreenManager ScreenManager

to

public ScreenManager Host

in my Artificial Intelligence project.

VS was able to make the change and then update ALL references. Took 30 seconds, despite the fact that the property was referenced in a couple dozen different places across about a half dozen different class files.

Things are starting to come together. The following image is a walk map, that is a map of areas that are legal to walk on in blue and illegal in white.