Friday, November 25, 2005

Fun & maths

I haven't updated for a while. Two main reasons: firstly, my PC has been broken for weeks with a fried motherboard (I should be receiving my new one soon, hopefully), and secondly, I've been at university, somewhat excitingly.

However, I have managed to find some time to look at QBSP3 and try to improve my understanding of how it works. For example, I now know how to compile the texture transformation provided by the Brush Primitives MAP format into something the Quake II engine can understand.

I'm gradually working through the QBSP3 source code working out why it does what it does and how it does it. The big problem is that there is no documentation. There are very few comments in the code (and what few comments there are are cryptic enough to be entirely opaque to me) and although I've been able to find out what it should generate at the end, I can't seem to find a good explanation of how it works anywhere. So I'm going to try my best to document the maths involved at some point.

Hopefully when I get my PC back I'll be able to get some code out there.

As far as university is concerned, it's been quite intense. The workload has been heavy (of course), and I can't believe how much I've learned! In between struggling through examples papers, I've made it onto the university small-bore rifle team (thanks to shooting 196 ex 200 against Edinburgh at the beginning of the month), as well as joining the Catholic chaplaincy's Schola Cantorum (the choir specializing in Gregorian chant and Renaissance music).