ZachTheRiah's Blog

Integrity

2010-04-08T10:57:00.000-06:00

It seems that every time Charlie Brown goes for a kick at the ball, Lucy always gets the last laugh. The classic "bait and switch" idea of getting someone to do something seems to always grab some gullible consumer's attention. It is sad to see people being swindled into investment in something that is really false. The Book of Mormon gives an example of Zeezrom trying to trick the Alma into denying his testimony for money, when the money would not be given to him in the first place. Seeing these instances cause people to be cautious and reserved, rather than openly trusting. Pulling the football out from under someone else is not nice and ultimately does not help. Don't do it.

You Be the Judge: Video Games

2010-03-30T11:11:00.000-06:00

Mormons and Technology

2010-03-23T10:57:00.000-06:00

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has come to embrace technology, for it has helped moved forward the purposes of the Lord. The Music and the Spoken Word broadcast, for instance, has used audio and video broadcasting technology since 1929 to deliver the message of the Gospel across the nation. The Internet technology of today has been used to give the words of the apostles and prophets to the world, through videos, blogging, and audio tracks, to name a few. This technology was not found by the Church, but the Lord saw a need to proclaim His message worldwide; as such, He gave us these things to help preach the Gospel to every nation. I see this technology as useful and hope the Church (and its members) will use it to convey the Gospel message through means the Lord has provided.

Councils and Productivity

2010-03-20T10:58:00.000-06:00

As a software developer, I have seen many problems that have taken hours, days, and even weeks to fix. I often get sidetracked, start daydreaming, or become ineffective working on bugs and issues for extended periods of time. But, my experience has shown that working with another to achieve an objective helps immensely. Just yesterday, I regained focus on a problem by going over the problem with another person; the explanation process helped me organize the situation in my own mind and then take necessary action. I have, therefore, found truth in the statement "many eyeballs tame complexity."

Building Zion

2010-03-18T11:00:00.000-06:00

Among the Latter-Day Saint community, Zion is defined as a place where the pure in heart dwell. The people that dwell in Zion are of "one heart" and "one mind". Building Zion requires that others are able to communicate sufficiently to understand one another, though individual likes and dislikes are still present.

Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat implicitly made it clear that his thesis of a flat world enhancing communication has helped build Zion. With the advent of of personal computing, and later, Internet technology, the barriers of communication began to break. People began to send E-mail, chat, and share pictures and experiences and anything else desired.

This expanded into developing television programs (like Higglytown Heroes) remotely (Friedman), as well as software packages like Linux and OpenOffice. Once the barriers of communication were gone, people could, as Friedman puts it, "upload" their content to share with others. This technology has evolved into things like Facebook, Flickr, and Blogger, allowing more people to share their ideas and their important moments with others.

It seems convincing, then, that if communication has increased, then this Zion-like community is more readily established.

The Positive Effects of Sharing

2010-03-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

Our society has become one where average people like to watch commercially-produced movies using YouTube. We also listen to music using the radio, and some might tape music from the broadcast for later listening. The law clearly states that such activities are illegal, but has that stopped anyone? Absolutely not. Orson Scott Card argues that sharing media has actually helped people earn more money. As he emphasizes, however, this needs to be controlled; limitless file-sharing is of no real value and does not give credit to the appropriate creator. But, a sampling of available works could give enough exposure to look into purchasing the real thing. Good judgment is required in order to say what is enough, and ultimately one's intent is the determining factor.

The Power of Facebook

2010-03-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

Congratulations Facebook—you have earned a patent. Potentially, you have great power: The now patent-protected idea of an updated list of friend's statuses can either be “open sourced” to the world, or used to strike fear into competitors, the clouds of lawsuit looming over their heads. One option would give you the fame and glory of “discovering” a news feed, while still maintaining healthy competition between a few other groups; the other option would potentially eliminate a major portion of fellow social media companies: you would earn a monopoly on News Feed Place and Social Mediawalk. And we all know what happens when a player gets a monopoly. If the monopoly is chosen by the general populous, it's a great thing; but, when forced upon by others, it leads to resentment. Indeed, legal muscle is a great power. But, with great power comes great responsibility. Use it wisely.

See also this link and this one.

Where is the Love?

2010-02-23T10:54:00.008-07:00

In the cases presented in this news story, there was an apparent breach of three basic ideas critical in interpersonal relationships: trust, communication, and respect. A picture was seen of a student doing something inappropriate. The question of what was done on the computer is unimportant: there was an apparent breach of trust between a family and a school district, which caused a degree of anger and resentment (and now, a lawsuit). Now, the school might argue that all of the rules of monitoring student's computer use were not explicit, but that is a violation of principle number two: there needs to be clear communication between the two parties involved, or there will be a lack of understanding. The lack of understanding, in this case, led to legal action, which consequently costs money I could only dream of spending. If the rules are not spelled out completely, fine—change them! But becoming sue-happy does not solve the problem in the long run—communication does. And what of respect? The video mentions an incident with a student writing criticism about a school administrator on Facebook and being suspended. Respect requires that both parties, the student and the administrator, accept the fact that they may not like each other's views. Indeed, both ends are entitled to their differing opinions. (Although, any person with true respect would not hold any ill feelings against anyone.) Thus, suspension solves nothing; it simply removes the problem. Communication is the only way to truly overcome differences. The three principles violated comprise what a friend and I feel is the definition of love. If people were to love their neighbors as themselves, I think situations like these would not happen at all.

2TB = Lots of Family History

2010-02-04T10:59:00.001-07:00

While searching the Internet this morning, I found that one of the largest internal hard drives available (for home use) has capacity for 2 terabytes (TB). My laptop computer currently only has about 39 gigabytes (GB; three orders of magnitude less than a terabyte), of which approximately three are left. Considering I have very little use for this much space, I have thought about why we have so much space available for ordinary use at home. Obvious answers to this question include movie, music and picture storage. But a thought came to me about my own family history. I could be using that storage space for keeping my own genealogy and my own journal and history. What if I did that? What if I used that space to store what I have learned from others about my ancestors and kept it on my computer to help me remember not to make the same mistakes they did? What if I used it to write down my own ideas and experiences so others could benefit from them? I imagine most of the Book of Mormon prophets would have loved to have more “storage space” to write their prophecies and teachings, but because of their small plates they were not able to write as much as they would like. I doubt I could even personally keep up with the technology improvements in storage space, even if I wrote every day of my life. Therefore, I need to be that much more grateful since I have that greater ability.

Why video games are awesome and why I can't play piano like Jon Schmidt

2010-01-28T10:59:00.006-07:00

(Pictures courtesy of Jon Schmidt's Press Kit.)

This is Jon Schmidt. I went to one of his concerts a few years ago. I enjoyed his performance and have loved much of his music ever since. He is known to have played "Rootbeer Rag" faster than Mr. Joel himself.* He also played a difficult piece while positioned on his bench upside-down. But why is he able to do stunts while playing piano, and I cannot? A recent University of Illinois study likely has an answer that explains it scientifically. As the researchers put it, a portion of the brain called the striatum causes people to learn complicated tasks quickly. In other words, the larger the striatum is, the better chance I have at succeeding in playing piano like Jon Schmidt. This research was made possible because of a video game called Space Fortress—akin to Asteroids, but with a “frictionless” playing field and more simultaneous tasks to accomplish. The research team found that the size of parts in the striatum predicted people's ability to achieve higher scores in-game. Potentially, this knowledge could be applied to the education field**, giving students individual, specialized attention if their MRI comes back with a smaller striatum. And all thanks to a video game. This is a far-distant dream, but it seems possible. Until then, I guess there is no “royal road” to learning to playing piano. I've got to get back to practicing.

*During the concert I went to, one person timed him; he was literally faster!
**Paraphrased from the bottom of the page.

Other cool links to the same study: Link 1, Link 2

And the study itself: Click here.

For those of you who have not ever heard his music before, here is my personal favorite song of his (see videos: "All of Me").

Title IX

2010-01-26T10:59:00.004-07:00

Title IX, among the Education Amendments of 1972, explains that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. . .”* All programs at any college receiving financial aid from the government are subject to allowing anyone to participate in any activity or degree program. Women, like men, are given their agency to choose what they will and will not do pertaining their career. Accordingly, whether computer science, or any other physical science field, will be their chosen path of study is their choice. Title IX explains in section B that “nothing contained in [the above statement] shall be interpreted to require any educational institution to grant preferential or disparate treatment to the members of one sex on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of that sex participating in or receiving the benefits of any federally supported program or activity...” To summarize and emphasize, there should be no preferential treatment to men or women in any program. Should colleges cater to Title IX and actively recruit women into the field? Absolutely—as long as they put forth the same effort in recruiting men. Remember, “no person...shall, on the basis of sex, shall be excluded from participation in...any education program or activity...” And also remember that no one should be required “to grant preferential...treatment to members of one sex...” So why try to "strongly encourage" women into computer science to appease Title IX? It just might be that women are not interested.

Note that there are exceptions to this rule that follow this statement; they will not be considered here. See http://www.dol.gov/oasam/regs/statutes/titleIX.htm

Objectives and Visitors

2010-01-22T20:16:00.012-07:00

What I assume you understand before you read this post:
Grammars
Object-Oriented Programming
UML diagrams (at least, what they are)

A design pattern is a way of solving a commonly occurring problem that occurs in programming. Many design patterns exist to solve a wide variety of problems. One of the first books written on the topic was written by the famous “Gang of Four” who took several of these common solutions and published them in one source. Their book can be a difficult read, especially when lots of UML diagrams complicate what should be a relatively straightforward solution. One of these patterns found its way into this game project.

In this sidescroller game, each level has a series of objectives or tasks that have to be completed in order for the level to be considered completely done. I contemplated for a long time how to solve this problem. The core design question was this: How do I allow for multiple objectives? Traditional sidescrollers simply cared about crossing the exit. (i.e. The old-school Super Mario Bros. or Kirby's Dream Land) How could I allow for quests like Super Mario 64, where one of the objectives was to “collect the eight red coins?”

I first listed a few of the objectives I wanted to program for:

Allowing for someone to collect a certain number of items
Touching/crossing/passing by a particular object
Completing a level/room in a given amount of time.

I then considered how I could generalize all of these into something I could model using C#. I came up with a grammar to describe each of these actions. For instance, if I wanted to have a player collect five coins in a level with seven, I created a string “collect 5 from (c1, c2, c3, c4, c5, c6, c7)” with c1...c7 being the identifiers of each of the coins in the map file. Similar grammars were made for the other items (or they are being created now).

I then realized that this problem became easier to solve if I combined this grammar with an adapted version the Visitor design pattern from the Gang of Four. Essentially, the Visitor pattern allows for me to take all of a certain set of objects and “visit” them: Look at their properties, run an algorithm on them, and then take the summarized data the class gathered and do something useful with it. This helps with the complexity of the program, putting algorithms on similar sets of data in their own class, with a common interface.

I implemented this idea by creating a concrete implementation of the following interface for each type of objective:

public interface IObjectiveVisitor {

   // At the end of running the visitor, has the objective

   // condition been met?

   // (e.g. Have we collected 5 coins out of 7?)

   bool IsObjectiveMet();

   // Reset the internal variables

   void Reset();

   // Set the condition we are checking for.

   void SetCondition(string condition);

   // Visit each of the objects and analyze things pertaining

   // to the condition

   void Visit(GameObject obj);

}

In the traditional “textbook” implementation of a Visitor, this would also include an “accept” method on each subclass of GameObject, telling the game object which objective is being checked for. In this project, I chose to have an "Objective Manager" that handles all of the objectives and which are completed, eliminating this need. Thus, this is an adapted version of the Visitor pattern.

This solution runs quite well. Once an action is performed on a given object, all of the objective visitors are run on all of the game objects to see if any new objectives have been completed. I may give more details in a later post.

The Media

2010-01-21T10:59:00.001-07:00

I am a computer science major. It would then naturally follow that my life revolves around a finite state machine that processes zeros and ones: My homework, personal goals, journal, pictures, work projects and music are all stored on this remarkable device. I also use this device for gaming. I like to see the occasional funny blog post, news story, or Facebook comment, as does anyone else. But I also grow tired of it. I recall going to a Mario Kart tournament that went for upwards of three hours. After the first hour or so, I kept wanting to go back to my apartment, knowing that I had homework to do. But, I stayed so I could be around other people. It appears that some American kids also feel the same way. While it is indeed alarming to notice that youth are spending increasingly more time on the Internet, and watching television, it is comforting to note that the same study reported an (admittedly, small) increase of physical fitness.* It is simply important to keep balance. As Elder Russell M. Ballard explained: “It is not watching television, but watching television hour after hour, night after night. Does not that qualify as idling away your time?”**

* See http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/8010.pdf for the complete study
** Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, “Be Strong in the Lord,” Ensign, July 2004, 13–14. (Quoted in Charles D. Knutson and Kyle K. Oswald, “Just a Game?,” Ensign, Aug 2009, 46–51)

On Priorities

2010-01-14T10:58:00.002-07:00

Experience has taught me priorities need focus. I had a recent experience where I wanted to try out for a ballroom dance class at my university. I remember debating it over the course of the last semester with mixed feelings on what I should do. I finally decided to pray about the situation. Initially, I got an answer of “Yes, go ahead.” Later, I felt the impression to “let it go.”* I wrestled with it more during the Christmas break and finally decided to try out and “let the consequence follow”**. I practiced the Saturday I got back from the break and felt fine. The night before the try out, I discussed my thoughts with a friend. After our discussion, I came to the conclusion that not taking the class was better. (My father confirmed this decision when I talked to him the following day.) Over the past two weeks I have found that this decision, although it did not alter my life completely, has allowed me to do many other worthwhile things with my time. Have I given up ballroom dancing completely? Of course not. But my focuses and priorities have been put into things that allow me to expand my other talents and opportunities.

See this page for more information on priorities from Dallin H. Oaks, an Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

* I was actually listening to a song entitled “Let it Go” (John Batdorf, “The Other Side of Sorrow”) as this happened. As Master Oogway once said: "There are no accidents."
** "Do What is Right", Hymns #237, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Technorati Recognition

2010-01-09T15:56:00.000-07:00

For Technorati recognition: DGP2UJ7FD6KY

States

2010-01-09T13:26:00.007-07:00

(As a side note: Some of these tutorials may seem very basic to some, and that is intentional. All of these blog posts on how I am constructing the game are intended for those that have never programmed, or are very new to programming. So be patient if some of the initial topics, or even later topics, are things you already know.)

What I assume you understand before you read this post:
Object-Oriented Programming
How a barbershop works
How to play Tic-Tac-Toe

Most games (and computer programs in general) can be considered “state machines”. As the name implies, a state machine is a machine, or processor, that handles states. Think of a barbershop; there are a few different “states” you could be in while there. You could be:

Waiting for the next available barber.
Getting your hair cut
Paying at the register

All of these states could be represented in a computer program if you wanted to simulate a hair salon.* (For example, each state could be represented by a class if you are working with an object-oriented program.)

A game like “Tic Tac Toe” could also be put into a state machine. Some states might include player one taking a turn, player two taking a turn, a winning state, and a tie game state (“cats game”).

This game is no different: There are different states represented in the program as shown in the flowchart below.

Each state is represented by a box. I personally have represented a state as a class in the game. I have a game object that creates an instance of each of these states and will transition between states when necessary. For instance, there is an “exit” event that is fired when a person wins (“victory”) and a “loss” event that happens when the player loses (“fail”). When those happen, a state transition happens:

In the “victory” case, I display the victory screen, and then switch the screen back to the level selection
In the “fail” case, I display the retry screen, which changes the state based on whether the player would like to retry or not.

The cycle happens again and again, until the player decides to exit the game.

* Thanks to my internet programming class for inspiration for this one! Go Dr. Snell! :)

Week #1 - Screenshots

2010-01-02T00:07:00.001-07:00

Here is what I have thus far (from demo levels 4 and 5; the other ones are more boring than these). I particularly like our hero, "P" and our enemy "N". One of my hopes when I do open source this is that someone is able to do better graphics than these. :)

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T23:47:00.000-07:00

Happy new year everyone! I'm a computer science student in college. I, like the majority of aspiring developers, want to create something great. Much of my interest has been in graphics, gaming, and the like. As such, I decided to start with a game I've been thinking about for quite some time. I'm still working out the details, but within the next few days, I'll hopefully have a demo of what I am thinking finished. (It is almost there! My goal was to finish it tonight, but I think I am going to fall a little short.)

I have found it difficult to start this project. The Korean proverb “작심삼일” always came to my mind (Korean proverbs just come to mind, you know—serving as a missionary in Korea does that I guess.) Every time I thought about actually creating something from the ground up led to this classic “resolve lasts three days” mentality: You get an idea, work on it for a short period of time and then give it up because you lose interest. This has been the pattern of most of my personal development. My college and part-time work environment has taught me, however, not to give up so quickly and to work in smaller pieces to accomplish something larger.

(Countless forum posts could be dedicated to the idea of working from the ground up, gradually building your skills, and not creating the next “blockbuster game” overnight. Here is just one example on the XNA forums for Microsoft. I have personally found this to be a true statement. As I have taken the advice to do design and planning beforehand, break everything into small pieces, and take everything one step at a time, I have progressed much quicker.)

I have seen how difficult it was for me to understand how to think about computer games and how to develop them, especially during the early stages of development. As such, I have started this blog with the intent of writing about computer software development, with an emphasis on computer gaming. I hope that a newcomer (or even those who are experienced) can design maybe a little bit better because of this information in this blog, using my own project as an example (granted, it may not be the best example, but it is an example). Eventually, I will likely open source the project so I can get perhaps a few others to help me out with it and it will give me a chance to allow others to see how I implemented the ideas I talk about here.

Thus, my goals for this blog/project are the following:

Give back to the programming community by helping those that may be starting out in game (or other) programming. I plan to do this by writing weekly on a topic relating to software design, or introduce terminology that may not be known to the beginner. I have found that learning through practical experience is necessary in order to fully comprehend what the concept entails. I, for instance, was taught the importance of having good variable names in programming classes during my early college years, but did not really understand why they were important until I had to be a group lead for a project that I have now seen to about 95% completion. I had to be thrown into a situation that required me to learn that working as a team was important and that naming consistency was key. Having a variable named “stuff” did not quite cut it.
I've seen a lot of games out there that are mediocre or have not been done as well as I think they could have been done. On the flip side, I've seen some games that have done very well and that have even inspired me to do what I plan on doing (the recent New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a good example). I've wanted to create a game that is excellent and that many people could enjoy. This is another part of the reason why I have decided to open source the project when I get a solid demo finished: I have seen the abilities of others and want to benefit from what can happen with peer review of code and ideas. Right now, I guarantee you it is not where I want it to be; it is far from it. But, I have hopes for the project to be something that will eventually be enjoyable for many.
Help motivate me to finish the things that I start. (This is a big one personally, as I mentioned earlier)

I hope that you will enjoy reading this blog, enjoy watching this game progress, and that you will have a happy new year!