So, finally caught up on all the work that I let slide during the trip to Nationals. At the same time, I've been played 'Prey' on PC and find it an interesting bit of gaming. Especially interesting are the use they've made of the environments -- e.g., if you walk through a portal spawned by a badguy, you end up in an entirely different area of the map -- shoot a button-thing on the wall and the orientation of the world is flipped and you might find yourself standing on the ceiling with the whole game world seemingly turned upside down.

The shooting of beasties and puzzle solving gets a little tedious after a while -- and I will admit, I do wonder who started the implementations of portals where you can see the destination through the portal itself first -- Humanhead or Valve? Check out the video of Valve's upcoming title Portal that is going to ship with HL2 Episode 2 right here
Either way, Prey is definitely worth a look, if only to see what 3D Realms puts all their money into :P

On the university side of things, I've been attempting to simulate 3D using the ancient Apple Quickdraw library -- with varying degrees of success. Thankfully that stuff is out of the way, right now I'm -meant- to be working on some subdivision stuff -- namely octree implementation for OpenGL -- this I expect to be significantly more interesting than Quickdraw ! I've also drawn the short straw for my International Security class -- I have to write a ministerial submission regarding an issue of Australian National Security. The writing of which I anticipate won't take -too- long, but choosing a significant subject is proving to be difficult :/

Otherwise, I just noticed the C++ Workshop Project that Master Walsh has posted and I thought I might crank out of a bit of an implementation of the spec -- a console based game is still 100% more interesting than essay-writing and figuring out just exactly how CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) cellphones work (which is something I'm meant to be doing for Mobile and Ubiquitous computing) -- yay for rotating Walsh codes.

Wow, somebody actually managed to read this far without falling asleep? Woohoo!

More updates soon, I really need to manage my time better :)

~Shiny