Didn't have class Monday or Wednesday since my animation teacher was on a business trip in Halifax, and now he's on yet another business trip helping Zynga today so I didn't have class either.

Tuesday in AI we learned about state machines and started the second project. It sounded huge and complicated but after working on it for a bit, it's way simpler than I thought so I'm already almost done with it with a week to spare, but I'm stuck on something engine-related so I can use the extra time. Oh and by the way, I managed to fix that dang random bug after all. At first I thought Python wasn't compatible with C++11 so I tried with the old randoms but when that didn't work, I looked at a classmate's code and saw that we had almost the same thing so I figured I'd try at home but that still didn't work. At first I thought it was a compatibility issue with Windows 8 but ends up it's actually even worse. Python is simply not compatible with seeds. At this point, it's safe to say that language is completely obsolete and the only reason we're using it is because it's a really old game that never got technically updated.

Thursday's rendering class was surprisingly fun. I set an arm on fire, recreated a scene from Star Wars and practiced other neat special effects but the homework I got didn't go too well. The goal was to import an office room and add lights outside and inside to simulate a real environment, before then importing 3D meshes and the chessboard we made and adding special effects to them. Technically it's easy and shouldn't take more than 30 minutes (rendering excluded) but the scene the teacher gave us was so ridiculously huge it lagged just moving the camera around. The sheer size of it made it so even at maximum intensity, the lights barely lighted up anything at all so I compensated by adding a lot more of 'em and really did my best but in the end, all it created was a very poorly lit room with very conflicting and wonky shadows, but the thing is if my computer couldn't handle it, I highly doubt my classmates were luckier and those who rely on the college's computers are just screwed. I told the teacher about it in the lab report so hopefully he does better next time.

Friday was hilarious. The class artist is in my team and she's so precise in everything that the team we had to tell our demands for the first project had literally no questions afterwards, and then she corrected those who gave us their demands. The downside is that she's a huge perfectionist who wants everything pretty and she's a slave driver when it comes to team projects, so it's gonna be interesting working with her for the semester.

Also this week, I finished Game Dev Tycoon and it was awesome but I found it too easy so I looked around and found a real business simulator, GameBiz 3. Bought it, got addicted, kept going bankrupt and after like three days, I finally started understanding how things work so I managed to barely survive to the end. Really hard but extremely satisfying and I might give it another try someday. After that, I saw that Game Dev Tycoon supported Steam workshop so I downloaded some mods and started a new playthrough and it really made the game a lot better but compared to GameBiz 3, it was still pretty easy. I find it more enjoyable, though, since the UI is more user-friendly. GameBiz 3 is mostly text-based and pretty clunky; it feels like an old PC game from the 90s even though it was released in 2009 or 2010.

After that I had the simulator sting but nothing good was on sale so I figured I'd give XCOM a try and I've been playing it for the past few days. I usually don't like sci-fi games but since it takes places on Earth during an alien invasion, I'd say it's borderline enough and it's pretty good. Hard and unforgiving if you don't know what you're doing but if you like strategy games, I say give it a try.

Oh and guess what? I finally bought a PS3. After all these years of waiting for a price drop, a friend of mine linked someone that was selling hers' journal on FA so I looked at it and it was really cheap, in good condition after many years of use, came with the cords, a controller and a few games. I bought it for 200$, shipping included. Yup, really damn good offer; I'll finally be able to play Final Fantasy XIII and all the other games I bought on eBay ages ago!