Month: September 2008

It’s a game my friend (by the name of William Song) and I made for our Programming 12 class while we were still in high school (yeap… distant past =D).

We got the inspiration from the very popular helicopter game (at least in our class), but added in a few elements, and made it under water.

He did the hard work – graphics design, googling, and editing. I did the easy part – coding =D.

The objective of the game is to dodge all the icebergs floating around, as well as the scary-looking icicles, while eating as many fishees as you can (gives you HP).

It’s open ended, the the rate of score increase (dscore/dt) is quadratic to the speed (controlled by the horizontal position of your cursor), and of course, by the fundamental theorem of calculus, that means your score as a function of time is cubic to the speed.

Contrarily to popular belief, there is no hidden final boss at the end. We thought about adding a shark… but yeah… sharks generally don’t chase penguins around… I hope =).

Enjoy! (the horizontal of cursor location determines speed. hold down the left mouse button to elevate)

Open in new window/tab

Yes, the background music is from The Little Mermaid =P. Didn’t have the budget to hire a composer haha.

I was going to port it to the PSP during the summer… but eventually gave up. I tried to implement anti-aliasing in C, but the CPU in the PSP is just too slow. And apparently I need to learn the assembly of whatever CPU the PSP uses (MIPS I think) if I want to use the graphics hardware, or even SIMD (single-instruction-multiple-data, aka vector math) instructions, so yeah… screw that.

3.29PM, “Silent study spaces”, Irving. K. Barber Learning Centre @ UBC, I am enjoying the last bit of my wonderful first week of UBC 🙂

Actually, it’s more like my first 4/5 of a week.

Tuesday was this orientation thing, which is basically a campus tour + some very loud events. It WAS a beautiful and sunny morning, until it began to rain at 10AMish. Still beautiful, just no longer sunny =P. The campus is really beautiful and leafy. I actually don’t remember much about the tour, due to the hunger (wasn’t fed until 3PM…), except this story about a clock tower that a tour group leader told us =P

There was one time, when an animal rights activist group decided to protest ON TOP OF the tower. They grabbed a cow, and made it go all the way up the stairs to the top. And then, the police came, telling them to get back down. They tried, but the cow just wouldn’t go down the stairs. Apparently it’s easy to get a cow UP stairs, but impossible to make them go DOWN stairs. They ended up having to make the cow into beef to take it down. UBC’s got a bloody history =P.

The rest of the week went fine. Very busy, though. Giant line-ups at the bookstore to get the legendary Upass (yup, got mine =D), and all the textbooks ($590… for one term…).

The rest of the time I spent creeping around and exploring the campus. It was just today that I can finally go around without a map. The campus is just big fat and huge. Casually walking, it takes about 40 mins to go from the north of the campus to the south (only the exciting part, not the huge grassland).

So yeah, my feet were hurting pretty badly after two days of walking two hours each. And then you see those girls in heels. Makes you wonder what are they doing here instead of going to the Olympics.

Will check out all the clubs and stuff next week, as well as the swimming pool that we can use for pseudo-free (included in tuition) at certain times of the day.

Lectures have been okay. Funny profs. There’s this one old physics prof with a very thick accent (from either Austria or Australia… didn’t get that part), though, and I could only understand ~50% of what he was saying. I am getting better at it though =P. He told us about how Fahrenheit added salt to iced water, and called it 0F, and stuck a thermometer up his rear end, and called it 100F… Yeah, that part I did understand… Hopefully not all of it is true, though =P.

I am beginning to feel the urge to go pee now… and I don’t think leaving my laptop here is a good idea =P guess I will have to put it to sleep and bring it with me…

BTW, I see 3 MacBook Airs around me, right now. For those that don’t know, MacBook Airs are the $4000 laptops… At least they make my $900 laptop safe from theives =P.

I’m also taking MUSC 103 online… a no pre-requisite music course. yay I will learn to read scores =D

(no… not slacking off… just free credits to get my elective requirements out of the way =P)

APSC 122 – Introduction to Engineering
APSC 150 – Engineering Case Studies
APSC 160 – Introduction to Computation in Engineering Design
MATH 101 – Integral Calculus with Applications to Physical Sciences and Engineering
MATH 152 – Linear Systems
PHYS 153 – Elements of Physics
PHYS 170 – Mechanics I
ENGL 112 – Strategies for University Writing
MUSC 103 – Introduction to the Theory of Music