It’s been almost a year since my last update, and since then I’ve been fairly negligent.

School, finals, standardized tests, and college searching have all occupied my time up until a few weeks ago.

That isn’t to say that I’ve been completely idle since Ragdoll Animator. In January I’ve had a lot of fun making a rigid body physics engine. I got it working, implemented sliding friction and bounce preservation, and after that, I lacked motivation needed to clean it up for release.

More recently I’ve set up a new theme for bluethen.com. I chose MxS2 and made a few minor changes of my own. The old theme got really old for me, and seeing a few other blogs with the exact same theme made it seem banal.

So far visitors have called this current theme as “generic” but also minimalistic. I didn’t want the theme itself to distract from the content here. To me, “generic” fit that criteria pretty well. Some preferred the older theme over this one, and told me that it better fits the applets I make. What do you think?

In the future I’d like to clean up the physics engine and make something fun with it. I’d also like to experiment with some other algorithms (ray tracing, path finding, AI, oh my!), and hopefully write about my endeavors and discoveries. Stay tuned.

For quick updates and thoughts, I’ll be posting on Twitter: @BlueThen
Thanks!

Hi again. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I made some changes to the sidebar. I felt that the apps I had on here were kind of hidden (take note of the bold “apps” in the upper left right hand corner). Feel free to mess around with those apps.

Anyways, it’s looking like I’ll be changing hosts again soon. My host/provider (Eric) has gotten slightly ill lately, and won’t be able to renew the host. Already though, I’ve got another person whose willing to provide. So I’ll be moving over to there (I’m such a leecher. ). It’s proven difficult though, since I can’t really just “copy and paste” all the files over there. Installing WordPress and simply importing the files doesn’t completely work either. That’s probably what I get for doing all this modifying to the themes and what-not here.

Problems aside, I should get this done within the week if I’m persistent enough. I can’t really guarantee that this server will be any faster, but that’s probably not an issue as of yet since I don’t really get many visitors. I’ll keep you guys updated on any more apps or developments once the new host actually works.

Nevermind! Seems that I solved my problems a lot faster than I guessed.

It’s been over a month since my last post. I apologize for the lack of updates. I truly wish I could keep up with Chase at the moment, but I’ve been getting some other things done lately. For a month I’ve been training to get into track. My primary reason for training is for health though. I find that running for 3 miles can have the same effect on me as a cup of coffee, except longer lasting. This, hopefully, will help me productivity-wise in the long run. I have been getting into the habit of running a mile before school on week days, which hopefully will keep me in top conditions.

Not much has happened on Chase, or any other of my projects. I re-organized some of the files in Chase, and made some progress in the Scene classes. I also started on a data importer and exporter (a function that can save and load models and other junk). I’ll likely not get much done on Chase in the next week or so due to some after-school classes I’m taking, and me training for the last week before track starts. But after that, I’ll hopefully be able to get a good pace going, and start making progress again.

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Good day! Over the winter break, I began working on Chase’s conversion over to C++. Today, I’ve had the convenience of a snow day, so I took advantage of it and proceeded to work on Chase’s Engine. Note, however, I haven’t really made any *real* progress. I will count this as a day though, since a lot has been done in the conversion.

The conversion isn’t done yet. I’ve got all the coordinate, polygon, and model classes converted (although certainly not finished in terms of features), as well as the transformation functions. If tomorrow also provides the convenience of a snow day, I’ll take advantage of that as well, and hopefully get Chase’s C++ engine up to an equivalent of Chase’s Processing (the API for Java!) engine.

I’ve uploaded a picture of my colorfully written rough draft for how my .h and .cpp files should work out. My compiler (Dev-C++) has an awfully convenient feature which allows me to place individual files in their own folders unlike the Processing IDE, as far as I’m aware of. You can check out the picture by clicking the image to the left/top of this post’s text. Feel free to give me any feedback or comments.

I’ve managed to get a host, and have transfered the blog over to the server. This means that the blog should run a lot faster, and I’ll have a lot more freedoms. I’ll be able to host files on here that wordpress doesn’t allow (like java files) and make modifications to the web software.

That being said, I’ve created a directory of Processing Apps, which runs a lot faster and smoother than the apps OpenProcessing. I’ve also changed the blog theme to a modified version of Pixel. Hopefully we’ll be able to settle in and gain some actual momentum in content and visitors.

Happy New Years!

No significant additions today. Mostly optimizing and polishing of the graphics engine. I also did a lot of commenting for easier referencing. I’ve been experimenting around, trying to find the most efficient and clean way of rendering and handling 3D graphical data.

Christmas was fun. I got some sketchpads, so now I can keep all my notes and junk all in one place, instead of scattered all over my desk (I should probably clean this up). I’m using one sketchpad for the notes, and the other for all my formulas and algorithms. I also bought myself some pretty nice pens, of different colors, so labeling shouldn’t be a problem.