This has probably been one of the most turbulent weeks of my life. Both in high flying to downright decimation.

For those who hate reading:

Topics:
Magic the Gathering AI project from last semester
3D modeling class
Math
Family troubles
Commission status
Dying Light
Less stress
Windows 8.1 phone
Patreon



First, I want to talk about that Magic the Gathering AI program that was several months ago. It was a disaster. We had the rules and the concepts down, but because I couldn't code, the program lacked in every fashion. In the end, my partner claimed it was a working program that he tested, well it wasn't tested enough. We were only allowed to lose two games before being kicked out of the rankings, and we lost both within minutes of starting each one. In both cases, a single line of code was misplaced into an area that was unreachable, so the program was stuck in a loop: either saying "place mountain" and "end turn", or just "end turn". No creatures were ever placed. What made it worse was we were not allowed to edit the code once the game started. Well, after my teammate left the room in pure anger and frustration, every team broke that rule, so we lost both games and did not get to edit our code to improve our AI. We got a good grade at the end, mostly due to not getting the chance to fix our code, but it was still incredibly frustrating. My teammate hasn't talked to me since either.
For those that helped on the project, and there were a few who helped a ton, I am planning on something for you. Ive just been too busy to get around to it. I have some names written down though.

So now for more recent events:

The game assets are actually going quite well. Building my own 3D models has been easier than trying to follow my class book though. The book, while easy to read, expects you to have some prior knowledge occasionally, so some steps seem skipped or out of place. The assets CD it comes with is horrible too. It has how-to videos on certain chapters, but I cant get any of them to play, they're all corrupt or something. Several functions didn't work at all, so none of the book assignments have been easy going due to errors or tools not acting as described.

But my assets for my game are actually going quite smoothly. One model I am very proud of is a telephone pole that has drooping wires. I also made it so its modular, meaning I can place one after another seamlessly and without special setup. Im a little worried about the polygon count on it. The pole itself is very low, but the wires alone have around 300 polygons each. Im still not sure what classifies as a high poly count for some items, but at the same time I feel I can remake those wires to be lower. I supposed to be learning Maya, but I have found Lightwave to be more friendly.

Math sucks, that's self explanatory.

My family's business caught fire and burned to the ground. That was the decimation part of my week. Everything is gone, the building collapsed in on itself. The good news is it happened late at night so no one was inside. The stress of this is ripping the family apart though as my uncle has not been the most cooperative with anyone during this. I don't want to go into detail with this. Im not yet sure what the future will hold.

I am working on finishing my commission list completely. I have had a small backup from commissions that I accepted almost a year ago, and I want to get those off my list. So the reason I haven't posted much is because Im working on some rather large commissions.

Dying Light is fun. I have not yet beaten it, so no spoilers.

I have been under less stress since dropping my coding class. I don't know what I would be like if I still had it in my current mess.

My windows 8 phone finally updated to 8.1. I was supposed to get that update months ago, but I fear most cell phone carriers, including mine, do not like or support the windows operating system. Since buying my windows 8 phone a few years ago, the number of available windows devices on my carrier dropped to 2. Plus there are still no wearable watches that are strictly built for windows. Not like I can get one of those insanely expensive watches, I just wish there were more windows stuff out there.

Remember to support me on Patreon ( https://www.patreon.com/PWRof3D ). I changed it to a 'per upload' subscription, meaning you'll only pay for animations, big comics, or other bigger stuff like that. Once I can get through this rough patch, I want to do some animating, and I'll be posting the animation there.

Rambled a little bit, but that's what's going on.