It's just the 2nd week of the quarter here at RIT and already I'm feeling the heat. However, just because it's Spring quarter doesn't mean the heat has anything to do with the weather, as this nice picture taken this afternoon from the front yard proves.

3D Games programming using DirectX is soaking up much of my time through trial and error. In fact, error is all I seem to be able to accomplish as I am still unable to get anything to draw in our game framework window. Of vertex buffers and triangle lists and draw indexed primitive calls, this course is the holy grail of 3D game programming concepts, and I intend to master it whatever it takes.

Multi-User Media Spaces, affectionately referred to as MUMS, is another deep-sea dive into the depths of 3D, though using Director instead of DirectX (hmm, interesting similarities there, though the environments are completely unrelated). Macromedia just released their 10th version of Director and it now supports Javascript for writing scripts in addition to Lingo. In MUMS, the decision has been made to write all our code in Javascript taking yet another plunge into uncharted waters. For our first project we are modeling a fish to be used in a schooling behavior simulation, as discussed by Craig Reynolds in his paper Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model.