CoderJoe.net

As is always the case, when I’m not studying, I’m working on my own little projects.

Last summer I set up this blog, developed my resume website, and learned Ruby. This summer I have my eyes set on something a little bit loftier.

Near the end of last summer I broke down and purchased a Nintendo DS. Rumored to stand for “developers system” I purchased the console for five very distinct reasons.

1. New Super Mario Brothers (A new 2D side scrolling Mario game?! I’m in!)
2. Mario Kart DS. (Mario Kart in your pocket! Who could say no!)
3. Tetris DS. (Fit the blocks into rows… the 8bit music compels you!)
4. The prospect of a new Zelda game (Still waiting for this to come out.)
5. Homebrew Nintendo DS Development

That’s right, you read the last one correctly. Ever since I saw one of my friends complete his Computer Graphics 2 coursework on a Game Boy Advance I’ve wanted to write something for a Nintendo video game system. On one of my various expeditions onto the internet I stumbled across www.dev-scene.com which in turn pointed me to a whole host of homebrew Nintendo DS development resources. Well, 70 dollars of development hardware later I have a working homebrew Nintendo DS SDK.

Now it would be a shame to go through all that trouble to get my SDK working and not do anything with it, right?

Well as it would happen, I’ve had an idea for a console game which would work very nicely on a Nintendo DS! All I needed was the time, and the incentive. Now that I’m working full time again, I have quite a few weekday nights where I won’t be working on school projects! As for incentive, if I manage to complete this game maybe I’ll become famous! (Unlikely… but as good an incentive as any.)

As the weeks go on you should be able to find an ever growing number of posts about my progress in developing this game, as well as a chronicle of the things I’ll learn as I do my best to develop a Nintendo DS game.

Here goes nothing!

I knew this day would come, but I never would have guessed it would come so quickly. I guess the old saying is true. Time really flies when you’re having fun.

That’s right folks. I’ve finished my studies and passed my exams. I’m officially a college graduate! (Real world beware…)

You may hear yourself asking: “Wait a second, Joe graduated a month ago! Why is he posting now? He must be really lazy.”

Better Late than Never.

Well you’re wrong! I am lazy, but that’s not why I’m graduating now. As part of my final studies I was fortunate enough to be involved in multidisciplinary project run through the Information Technology department under a course named “Innovation and Invention“. Because I am a Computer Science graduate, and because my successful graduation hinged on completing a final computer science elective, I was forced to enroll in the aforementioned totally awesome class as a “computer science independent study”.

(more…)

Given that we’re team more bloom, we figured it might be a good idea to show off our raytracer’s bloom functionality.

Here’s an image with no bloom:

Here’s the same image with awesome bloom:

It really has been an amazing class.

So long from team More Bloom.

As part of our course work in CG2, we were asked to do some work with Pixar’s Renderman software.

We were given a set of basic shaders and were asked to modify them.
Here are the results:

As the second part of the assignment we were asked to use three different shaders we found online in our scene.
Here is our exploration into the unknown:

The shaders and meshes we used are credited to:
Enterprise Mesh - http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/StarTrek3D/StarTrek3D.html
Starfield Shader - http://renderman.org/RMR/Shaders/LCShaders/index.html
Venus Shader - http://renderman.org/RMR/Shaders/KMShaders/index.html#KMVenus
Saturn Shader - http://renderman.org/RMR/Shaders/TLShaders/index.html#TLSaturn

We’ve completed the final checkpoint for our raytracer and we couldn’t be happier!

First, please note that we have fixed the transmission problems that were evident before.

Ward Tone Reproduction:

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Reinhard Tone Reproduction:

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