Pug’s Place

One of my two classes this summer is actually doing “research” with Dr. Fishwick. In reality, what I’m supposed to do is put together a 3D library, a Physics library and maybe a networking library to get a collection of tools for making 3D simulations. He wants this so that he can give it to students in his undergraduate Computer Simulation class next fall and let them create more interesting 3D projects than what is possible with Processing, the current tool they use.

I’ve got until the second week of August to put together two things:

1. A cross-platform tool-kit consisting of at least a 3D library and a physics library with class-tailored usage instructions and examples
2. and a version of SCHUA remade with this tool-kit as a “large” example.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been spending enough time on this yet. I originally intended to be done with all of the serious coding by the first of June and, hell, I haven’t even started. After spending all morning and some of this afternoon working on remedying this I have rediscovered my problem from late April: I can’t even get demo applications for my candidate 3D and Physics libraries to compile (e.g., turn from source code into executable binary code).

You know, I’m not all that inexperienced with programming. I’ve written a few applications, held a few jobs, captained the UF Programming Team, etc. I’m not all the unfamiliar with Linux, either, but ye gods, getting [OGRE and GangstaWrapper] or [Ogre and OgreNewt] or [Yake] to compile together is driving me batty.

For my own sanity I’m going to vent for a moment. Don’t take any of this as gospel, these are opinions with possibly nothing but an emotional foundation:

• OGRE compiles very easily.
• GangstaWrapper sounds like a great OGRE physics middle-ware. Too bad you have to read 16 pages of forum posts to find out that no one has touched it in over a year so it doesn’t compile cleanly.
• OgreNewt sounds like a great Newton Game Dynamics Library. Too bad it doesn’t compile cleanly in Linux. Oh wait, there’s a specific out-of-date source distribution for Linux the main author won’t host. Too bad its server is flaky and generally down. Including now.
• The Newton Game Dynamics Library is a professionally-packaged product produced by a real company. Too bad its demos don’t even compile out of the box on my system.
• Yake sounds great. Wow, its build instructions for Linux both look complicated and possibly compromised. I don’t much like the idea of having to SSH into a random box with a guest account to acquire source code…

I’m getting rather annoyed, but I think I’m going to tough it out and try to just make Yake compile. With Yake, at least, if I can get it to work it comes with its own wrappers for physics, networking and all that other stuff.

If I can just make it work… gah.

Other news: I’ve switched to Opera. I’ve decided I don’t have enough RAM to run Firefox anymore – the memory sieves are just too large. This might be short-lived, we’ll see…