I can't think of a title...

...because I don't have anything specific to write about. I just came back from the one-week long educational informatics camp. And now I am studying algorithms again. Hellenico (a greek edition of the usaco training site), usaco and many other sites have very intresting problems, worth reseatching and solving.


Informatics, algorithms, programing, networking and the computer in general, what a great thing to spend time with! Just wanted to say this.


-break-

Pah I better stop writing here, and start writing some code. :P

I'm still alive!

What did you think? The blogger hiding inside me needed some rest, he has his inactive periods too!

And as always I do not have a specific reason for posting. People don't change, not in a month anyway. So what was I doing during the last month?

• Game developing! Space Wars is progressing slowly, but *it is progressing*. I made my first steps into 3D programing, something I always wanted to do! I started with some basic 3D math, then a few lines of OpenGL.
• C#! I don't have much experience with it and the .NET framework yet, but I like focusing on the big picture. I have to admit though, I kinda miss messing with pointers. Nothing is as intresting as examining memory leaks and segmentation faults. (No, I'm not a mazochist)
• Assembly! Another great language, (Ok, I might be a mazochist) I would like to start my own OS sometime. (ok, I already have started my own OS, the only problem is it doesn't work. :P). I've been studying CPU architectures for the last 2 weeks.
• Game Engine Research, there are so many of them out there... Until now, I have tried UDK, Torque, irrlicht (yeah, it's not a game engine but a 3D rendering engine), C4, Ogre (kk, that's not a game engine either), and I decided to stick with irrlicht! Completly free and open source, object-oriented and well organized, simple and yet it has enought features for me. I still have to look for a sound and physics library
•  School exams. I did especially well on maths, physics and history. All my results are satisfying ;)
• More php and curl!
• Algorithms and programing techinques: Dynamic Programing, divide + conquer, dijkstra's algorithm etc. I love those, I am especially proud of my Graph Class implementation.

That's all I think. The summer is way too short for what I want to archieve, I'll post my TODO list here and hope not to drop tears over it after the summer:

• Website design, using the browser as a canvas to display content. Forget the terms header, container and footer.
• Game development, especially 3D!
• Assembly!
• Algorithms, more algorithms...

Flight Simming

Yes I am a simmer! I have around 80 logged hours on IVAO, around a thousand on FSX. To be exact I used to be a simmer who just started flying again. I did some VFR flights last week, and I will be logging in to IVAO again soon. I fly mostly boeing jets, 737-747-757-767. My favorites are the PMDG 747-400 and the Captain Sim 767. I started the Hellenic IFR tour: "Fly the heavies" 6 months ago, I did 3 legs and I'll be doing the next one soon.

I also started flying miltary helicopters, with the AMAZING DCS: Black Shark I bought lately. The Ka-50 is the only single-pilot attack helicopter and a truly spectacular aircraft! It wasn't easy to learn how to fly it, you have to play with the trimmer and the autopilot a lot, but finaly I did it! I can even shoot things now.

And now the joke of the day: I am a student in his exam period. Nope I haven't studied more than an hour till now!

Fasten your seatbells, Speedbird 255, over n' out.

Airline Mogul FTW!

Ever heared of Airline Mogul? It is a very addictive browser based tycoon game where you have to manage a virtual airline. You start with a small airplane, fly some routes with it to make money which will be used to buy bigger planes to fly more routes that will make more money and so on. (It is way more complicated, but I am not writing a game review) The game is very intresting, especially if you are intrested in managment games and aviation.
Last summer I used to play it a lot. But as I had around 50 routes, I found out how boring AM could be. At some point, the competition got so strong I had to reduce my ticket prices every day in order to keep my flights fully booked (and maximize the profit). So every morning I used to spend 45 minutes in finding the optimal fare for every route (If the game used AJAX all this would be much faster). A few days ago, I started playing again, but to avoid boredom I had the following choices:
1) Not to play at all.
2) Play, but only fly routes that had no competition (that goes with being a loser)
3) Write a script that optimizes the ticket prices for me!

And guess what I did...
The script is written in php and uses curl. It logs in, selects a world, finds out which routes need optimization, calculates the best fare and sends it to the server.

And I'm so proud of it!

Keyboards are bitches!

This short article helped me understand why keyboards act in such mysterious ways sometimes! Check it out, a must-read for game developers! :)

Today was a very productive day, I worked on 3 diffrent projects, mainly fixing bugs and making small improvements :)
I am flying to Athens tomorrow morning, I have been invited by the President of the Hellenic Republic as a member of the National Junior Informatics Team!

Have I told you I started drinking cofee? A lot of coffee! But I should get some rest, shutdown -P now;

Projects

Hello! Long time no post, I'm sure that many of my 1.252.321.691 readers have missed me.
Today I want to share with you some hot pictures of my projects. So, here we go:

Picture of my File Server Interface, codenamed ERMIS. It is a copypaste-n-play system for uploading/downloading files. You can register/manage users right from the interface, upload/download/delete files etc. From its .config file you can select whether you want to close the registrations, count the downloads, allow certain user group logins, change the logo, the boring signature and much more. It is written by hand, line-by-line, I'm really proud of it as you can see in the signature. My only wish is I had used more CSS to make it look better. I have no idea why, but I haven't released it (yet).

A game made by me, written in C++ using SDL and its extensions. I borrowed the spaceship texture from Rozebau, a pixel join+ user, I did everything else by myself. It is a space top-down shooter where you shoot the evil alien spaceships that try to do the same. What I am proud of are the .mission files, those are files that actually define a mission's graphics (from the background to the upper interface bar), the weapons the player uses, the weapons the aliens use, their AI and more! Also, by changing the mission events you can make enemies appear, print out a message on the comm console, even change the window title! That means you can transform my space shooter to a shoot-the-evil-zombies game without changing a single line of code!

 A home-made blogger, part of a website with TinyMCE installed.

My pacman game, here you see the menu.

Greek National Competiton in Informatics

Yep. I just came home yesterday very satisfied with the results. I'm 2nd/36 (if I remember correctly) and 1st in my age group. This was the last of the 3 competition phases :)

So now I have time to do whatever I want, and that is game and win32 application developing. I really have to show you some of the great games I've made. Yeah, playing as that yellow cheese-like guy and sneaking through 4 ghosts is so much fun :P

I'm making a 2D space shooter game right now (Right now I'm writing this but I think you got it) and I'm working on the combat system (I love calling simple snaps of code "systems", it makes them look much more complicated than "just a function"). I spent the day finding a way around of those linker errors I encoured today and I finally made it.


-End of Post-