The former, Asteroids3D, did not go as well as I expected, even thought it looked great at first and I received a positive feedback from people that saw it. The reason was that it’s my first 3D project (not counting XSnooker which is being developed in parallel and is much simpler in terms of 3D) and my main focus was to build solid 3D space in which a player could fly around. Well, I have accomplished this, but by the time I had done with the fancy 3D world, there was not much time left to finish other things necessary for a good game play. For example, lack of score and a very limited game AI made the game not much fun to play. However, it is a solid start, and if I have some free time in the future, I will definitely finish it.
The latter, XSnooker, is going well, but is behind the schedule a bit. I was struggling to find an appropriate 3D physics engine for the game at first, and even thought there are few available for ActionScript, and Away3D in particular, most of them are kind of slow for my game (i.e. they don’t work well with a lot of objects colliding simultaneously). I finally found a solution in Box2D, which is a 2D physics engine that was ported from C++. Despite having a slightly weird API, it works surprisingly well and mostly important – it looks realistic (which is absolutely crucial for a snooker game). Single player mode is almost done, and what left is multiplayer mode before the demonstration in late March. Fingers crossed.
That’s all about January, I guess.

Current projects

Currently I am working on two projects. One is XSnooker game, my final year project, and the second is Asteroids3D, an assignment for CE318 module.

Academic

Academically it was a successful year I must say.  Got a ‘first’ for my last year, and have started this year with success. All my assignments/reports/projects marks are ‘first’ (mostly 80%+with one 71% for my report), which is not bad. I know I could probably do better, but I am more personal satisfactory oriented, which not always means highest possible mark (i.e. I often research the field for too long, trying to find the best possible solution, which gives me a very satisfactory result, but often means that I run off time to complete all the required bits).

What’s left is to finish is this academic year (one more teaching term plus revision and exam term); with preferably, a first honours degree.

Personal life / Development

For the past few years my personal life was more or less the same. A bit of holidays in summer and then study, study, study over the rest of the year. Not many visible achievements so far. I invest heavily into myself all these years, and hopefully it will pay off in the near future.

For the next year there are a number of things I want to do.

• Write monthly blog posts about my achievements and plans, together with any other interesting stories (e.g. software releases).
• Read books from my reading list and write short reviews about them in this blog
• Find a job or earn some money as a freelancer. University is about to end, meaning that my student loans are about to end as well, and I need to find some income.
• Finish the XSnooker, my final year project, and make it bring some cash.
• Maybe make s game for the Xbox market (something similar to Asteroids3D assignment)
• Buy a cheap car or small CC motorbike to help me commute (I hate busses)
• Start, for the 100^th time, going to gym and take Mai Tai lessons

This year is about to be as busiest if not even more busy then my previous years. Many things to be done. I’ll probably not go holidays at all this year. Not even for a week. During the summer, once I graduate, I will be probably busy finishing XSnooker, looking for a job and maybe freelancing here and there.

In the autumn, I’ll be hopefully working at my recently found job, and going to gym/Mai Tai along as maintaining my old projects and maybe starting few small once. There is a lot of maybe. I don’t like that. But what can I do? I know where I want to be in few years time and that’ at Hawaii under the palm but it’s very hard to plan everything ahead. For that matter, I am against precise plans.  I do have plans, as described above, but they are only there to guide me. I have a general idea to were I’m heading, and general understanding on what I need to do to get there, but I will adjust according to change during my journey.

‘Planning is everything, the plan is nothing‘ - Dwight Eisenhower.

 

Hi everyone, my name is Alexios, and I am (was) a member of Frontrunners project for Open Wonderland (OW) at Essex University under the supervision of John Pisokas.

My project was to develop a module for OW that will help ‘virtual world’ designers to quickly and conveniently browse 3D objects from Google Warehouse (GW) and manipulate them in the ‘world’. Some of the functionalities of the module are:

1. Easy search and page navigation within Wonderland client.
2. Download and install 3D objects in Collada format (Google SketchUp not yet supported)
3. Save and browse 3D models locally
4. Model details available on selection
5. Search history

The interior design of the module is very simple. GW provides an RSS feed that is used inside the module to search for the models and all their info (e.g. author, description, download url, and etc.). Once this info is available, the software displays it in a nice format for the user, and allows easy manipulation (e.g. download, install) of the models.

The only major drawback of the module at the moment is that Google SketchUp models are not yet supported. This may change in the near future, when I, or someone else, may develop a ‘SketchUp to Collada’ independent (light) converter, or support to the SketchUp format directly from OW.

I am planning on uploading the source code of the module to repository in the next couple of days. I am pretty sure that the module will contain few small bugs that I missed, plus some improvements that I am planning with the next version. Please do not hesitate to let me know of any errors found, any improvements, and/or additional futures that you think will make it more useful and user friendly.