So I've officially finished the math system this evening with my final revisions. all 101 tests are passing, which is great news. When we first started to talk about the math system I figured it would be a bit of a breeze. I had some difficult math classes back at Marquette and this was a walk in the park comparatively. It still ended up taking me a couple of nights to work out all of the kinks. the biggest trouble I ran into was on Matrix Inverse. It's essentially a matter of plugging in the numbers that follow the equation given to us, so there wasn't a ton of thinking it through required. I mostly ran into trouble of translating the numbers correctly. I had to triple check my translation before I got it right. It was only then that I realized I was also calling the wrong determinant. As soon as I had that figured out it was smooth sailing. the unary operators was all that was left and they took a matter of minutes to crank out.
My only other concern on this project is the use of const. It was stressed in class that we should use it wherever we can and in all honesty I didn't give it a whole lot of thought. I really just wanted to pass the tests and then If I have time before the due date I'll go back through and const the heck out of my functions. they aren't completely missing, but I'm sure I can add a few more.
A more important priority will be finishing the Memory and File systems. I have a large amount of code written for both systems, but I just don't have any idea if what I'm doing is right. Having those unit tests to help me check it all out would be fantastic. I'm planning to re watch last night class this weekend for some big help on the mem system. The pictures and the concepts of what we are trying to achieve have all been clear with me for most of the class. Getting that concept coded onto the screen has been the problem. I feel like I understand it much better now that I've seen some better examples.
I'm almost considering ditching what I have (not completely, but likely a lot of it) now that we've gone over the concepts again. We'll see how I feel about that after I re-watch class with my code in front of me. I hope I can find some good time to work on all of it this weekend.
bottom line at this point: I can't wait to be done with this section.
On a related note I was excited by our discussion at the end of class last night about how to get our code pushed into a library so that we can use it all again later on with other projects. I would like to think it'll make a very nice piece of code, not only to use with my own projects but to include in my portfolio when I go to apply for jobs later on. This is all a lot of complicated stuff, and as Keenan continues to drive home we're cramming years of experience into a couple of months. Being able to show that with a little help but essentially from scratch I can code my own game engine gives me a confidence I've been searching for. I could never have applied for a gaming job with the knowledge set I had before I started DePaul, and after this class alone (assuming I make it alive through to the end, ha ha) I already feel much more prepared to baby step through any challenge. It's a great feeling, and I'm excited to complete that thought by the end of this course.
-A
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