It’s almost 2AM. Yesterday night I couldn’t sleep until around 5 ! It was dreadful, I had to call in sick, although only for the first half of the day. I went in at 1PM instead of 10AM.
Once I got in the office however, I was for most part, adrenalinic. I wrote quit a bit of code without dangling too much. Clearly productive, mostly due to the fact that I didn’t have to wake up at 9, shower, run, eat one large meal, etc.
M4D has finally gotten a decent shape. I added hooks to the model, material and texture classes. The hooks are a user-data pointer and a user-data-delete callback. Those hooks allow me to attach rendering related structures. A texture class will normally have just the name of the texture file, the attached user-data will provide a pointer to a structure/class used by the rendering subsystem.. which will contain whatever data is necessary to feed to OpenGL or Direct3D for actual rendering. Same goes for the model class, which, when is a mesh (a model that contains geometry) will have an hook to vertex and triangle data that can be fed directly to OpenGL (or, again, eventually, Direct3D).
I’m so far pretty happy with this, because it allows me to have a pretty solid and generic underlying engine which can be a starting point for actual hardware and API-dependent engines. Generality always comes to a price, but thinking optimized for a specific hardware and API from the start is comes to a bigger price. Generality was also the key-point for me, as the main goal was really to have a framework for 3D geometry storage and processing.
I should be in bed after this, but I need to add more 8)
A couple of days ago, on the movie channel on cable, I saw again Equilibrium (ohh, I see why they showed it again, it’s with the protagonist of Batman Begins 8). The movie is about a society where emotions are repressed with a "medicine" and fascist-style policing, as to avoid wars, which are touted as side-effect of people being influnced by emotions.
The topic is too big to be analyzed at 2:21AM.. but I think that the question is very big even at a personal level. In life I look back an see how the things that I could achieve were achieved thanks to focus and commitment, avoiding emotions, which normally would make one derail.
The movie shows that emotions are the essence of human life and shouldn’t be avoided. However, it’s also true that the human being’s main strength is the ability to override instincts for a greater goal. The movie (probably by design) doesn’t go deep enough to reveal that while emotions are generally good, they are also a lot more valuable than instincts. Instincts can bring some emotions, but not as refined as those that are brought by actions which are done while containing instincts ! (did I write that right ? ummm)
Basically, instinctively, people could fack around and crack each other’s skulls over some edible or some fuckable. Emotionally, it makes more sense to think twice before acting and use more logic.
The problem really, is that many let themselves go for instincts and forget about the more refined emotions. It’s something that everyone should think about. It’s something that can make a great difference in life.. the difference between being a sheep and a human.
And now it’s my time to go count the sheep !
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized