Summer Internship Secure

Well its been a long time since my last post, schools been hectic as always, and I'm pressing ever closer to the perilous finals. Thankfully things are looking up, I have a summer internship now at the ATMC (Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center). The ATMC is an incubator for high tech start up companies, and is owned and operated as a nonprofit organization by the University for that purpose. The project I will be quite interesting, apparently involving AUVs, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. Apparently these AUVs are used to do all sorts of measurements of costal waterways etc. Should be really interesting to get involved in something like this. Even more advantageous with this position is that it can basically become a Research Assistantship when I hit my masters year, almost completely killing off the cost of grad school, and might even be involved with my thesis.

The disadvantage here however is my pay as an intern is less then I would have had working directly in the commercial sector, and on top of this I will need to pay for summer housing on campus, and have a bit more of a commute to go to Karate each week. I guess you can't win them all. I will likely be making plans for my Dynamic development around the time finals end once I'm settled in with my new housing.

Back to studying, but at least thats one less thing to worry about.

-Toraux

Tags: Internship, Engineering, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Rough Week

It's been a rough week. Last weekend I was out of town to train, so I wasn't exactly internet accessible. The rest of the week has been pretty rough too, no free time to be found here. At this point I really wouldn't expect daily, and potentially not even weekly posts until I'm out for the summer. Too many projects and assignments on my back right now to really get everything done that I want to. I would definately recommend going back into the archives though, theres a lot of ideas etc in there.

Later,
-Toraux

Tags: Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming

Graph Algorithms

In algorithms today we started learning about graph algorithms, for example things like finding the shortest path etc. This is good news, hopefully by the end of the semester I will have enough ability in this area to make designing the AI for Dynamic MUD more efficiently. One of the biggest problems with AI in games is that it takes up a lot of memory and CPU time. Being that the game world in my case is basically a large grid of vertices connected by edges, it would be quite simple to treat the world as a graph and use these same practices to quickly find the fastest path between two points. I guess there was some value taking this class after all :)

-Toraux

Tags: Algorithms, Engineering, Game, Games, MUDS, Multi User Dungeon, Online Games, Game Design, Programming