Web Poetry

I did my poem page for the week 4 in class exercise.

My choice of poem was Robert Frost's Mending Wall, for the simple purpose that it leads to easy imagery: a wall. So I went out to the web, and found a tileable stone wall texture on TurboSquid for use as a video game texture. Since it's tiling, it makes a good background texture.

This is the first time I've manipulated an image to blend into the background color, I've never done that before. It's also the first time I've layered text over a background image. It's a simple page, but it's at least somewhat interesting looking. I guess you could say that's what I learned. I'm starting to get better at positioning: the use of that global #container div really simplifies page construction.

What colors?

I went back and updated my home page so that it wasn't using the default colors from the style sheet I obtained.

I used the Web Color Wheel to help me pick colors. I think they came out alright.

In other class news, my neural net for my AI class only sort of works. It nails a few of the mouse gestures it's supposed to recognize, gets s a few completely wrong, and gets a few backwards. It will, for instance, identify a down-right corner as a left-up corner, which is close but not correct. (Technically, they are the same image, but the order the segments are drawn does matter in this case.)

On the other side of things, my ray-tracer project in CG2 is going perfectly. I've implemented a new finite plane allows us to test against arbitrary polygons in a way that's less risky than the cheap triangle mesh I had previously written. For instance, the seam between the two triangles in our checkpoint 2 images does not appear under the new implementation. A side effect of this was identifying the cause of some wacky planar behavior, mostly that our planes were appearing reflected opposite the origin of where they were supposed to be.

In addition, I worked in generalized super sampling. I wrote a really quick and dirty super sampler for checkpoint 2, and rendered an image with it for the bonus grade. I have now gone back and taken the very specific case that was used to make that image, and generalized it. Now, when super sampling, you specify the number of samples you want and a radius around the camera origin, and it calculates the ray origins regardless of camera direction. It works no matter what. This is much better than the last one we had, which was locked to 4 samples, and only worked properly when looking up or down the z-axis.

Zen Garden Best and Worst

Andy Zickler and I looked at some of the styles on Zen Garden. We disagreed on what our favorite styles were, but we agreed that the 'Retro Theatre' style was particularily awful. Retro Theatre is my first screen shot above.

Retro Theatre is constricting, and difficult to read. All content is constricted down to that small box in the centre of the screen, and many columns are reduced to one word per line in many instances. It's terrible for usability.

The second screenshot is 'Elegance in Simplicity'. I liked this one, it's clean, fairly nice looking. The color choices are consistent, bright and nice. Navigation down the right side is nice. It might be better with a little more contrast, but in general it's pretty good.

In addition, we put together a simple form. Mine is located at http://people.rit.edu/~mfe9164/409/mailform.html

Maybe later I'll add some styles to it.

Water

I'm not technically sure it's alright to be posting non-IT409 related things here, but I'm going to brashly go ahead anyways.

I've been working terrain rendering in XNA for months now as a side project. I've gone from really bad implementations using patches and quadtrees to the most cutting edge techniques my hardware supports. (IE, Vertex Texture Fetch in Shader Model 3.0)

I'm trying to implement a water model to go with it, so in addition to cheaply textured mountains and valleys I can have poorly textured water. I just got the first 'visually interesting' iteration done. It is on it's way to a lot of improvements, but you test as you go.

The image shows the current progress. I'm unhappy with the transparency effect right now, the visibility should fall off the further you look through the water, and right now it doesn't depend on that at all. I know how to fix it, requiring a look up of the depth values, but I need to see if I can get that data directly, or if I need to render the depth values to a texture to get the information. I'll figure it out.

The in class assignment not done in class

Here are the links to my two pages:

html recipe
xhtml recipe

I started by downloading and installing TextPad to do my HTML editing. It works ok, but I remember BBEdit being better. It had templates that would put the boiler plate code on a new document. I then dug up some of my work from IMM and grabbed the boilerplate code from them. We didn't actually do HTML 4.01 in that class, so I actually wrote it in XHTML transitional first. I then had to spend some time with the validation site before I got it validated for 4.01, changing stuff to match the older standard.

After that, I reversed my changes, saved it as the xhtml version, and validated it. I slapped it up on Gibson via WinSCP, and called it a day.

EDIT:

On Wednesday, we continued editing the page and added some CSS. The I ran into some problems with positioning, but eventually figured out which commands were interfering with one another and worked it out.

My page is still pretty plain, but it's got some stuff there now.

First Post/Purpose

This blog is a required assignment in my IT409 Website Design and Implementation class at RIT. I might stick other things, such as side projects or screen shots from other class work here as well if that turns out to be alright.